Pastor John, you have for years stressed an approach to reform theology that is both

hard thinking and deep feeling. Each of us will tend to fall on one side or the

other here either into an anti-intellectual feeling or an anti-feeling

intellectualism. Both are to be avoided. In today's question, a listener wants to

know this. Dear Pastor John, in your 30 plus years of ministry, what have you

practically done to avoid mere intellectualism, a cold academic study in your

Bible reading and in your exposition? Would you say? The first thing I would say is

that I need to be, we need to be deeply persuaded that this really, really matters.

This non-cold, non-intellectualistic, warm, practical affectionate relation to the

living Christ, we need to be persuaded. This really matters because there are a lot of

people out there. I keep bumping into them. There are a lot of people out there who

either for personality reasons or sometimes theological reasons think it doesn't

matter what your emotions do. That is, they think emotions are the

caboose at the end of the train. They're just not essential at all. It sounds like

the person who wrote this question is persuaded that they matter and it might

be good to ask why. Here's my reason. The first and greatest commandment is not

to know the Lord our God, which is of course assumed, but to love the Lord your

God. And that includes with all your heart. And Paul says at the end of first

Corinthians, if you don't love the Lord, you're a cursed. Love the Lord. And Jesus

says, whoever loves father and mother more than me is not worthy of me. And whoever

loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. In other words, the love

that we must have isn't just a kind of beautiful commandment keeping love. That's

...