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You may have some kind of bad behavior in your life and you keep focusing on trying to break these bad habits.

If you just focus on loving God and loving people, it won't be long and you won't even know where those bad habits went to.

Jesus regularly talked about this principle of loving God with all your hearts, all mine and strength and loving your neighbor as you love yourself.

Matter of fact, in Matthew, it's recorded that he said it is the greatest and the most important commandment in the Bible.

Matthew 22, 36, teacher, which kind of commandment is great and important? The principle kind and the law.

Some commandments are light, which ones are heavy? This guy wanted to get deeply theological.

And he replied to him, you shall love the Lord, your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and your intellect.

This is the greatest, the most important and the principle commandment. And a second one is like it. You shall love your neighbor as you love yourself.

And then in James 2, James said, if indeed you really fulfill the royal law, now this is the law of the new covenant in accordance with the Scripture, you shall love your neighbor as you love yourself, you do well.

So you know what I've come to in my life. And one of the reasons why I'm so glad I'm preaching this again today is because we all need to hear this over and over and over again.

Because really what I'm talking about today, it's not natural to your flesh to want to do it.

Even if we give, we're not too big on getting into the sacrificial part. Once it starts to hurt a little bit, rather that's time or money or whatever it is, we would much prefer to do something for somebody that deserves it.

And especially we'd prefer to do something for somebody that we're pretty sure can do something back for us.

So we've got to be really careful when we do give if we're going to do the Jesus kind of giving that we don't have any ulterior motive.

No wonder the Bible says in Matthew that when you give, don't let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.

In other words, don't sit and meditate on all your own goodness. Just do what you do because you love God and let God take care of your reward.

It's easy to do things for people that we think deserve it, but it's another whole story to do this.

But if you can go out of here today, how many of you know that there's Christianity with all of our teaching?

There's a lot of stuff to keep up with.

I mean a lot of different teachings. We need to pray. We need to study the Bible.

We need to know all these things. We get into all these things that we think that we need to do.

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