You can imagine the older son there, how he lived in resentment that the father would so bless this younger son when he didn't deserve it. Now that's the interesting thing about extravagance, it's giving you something you don't deserve, giving you something you're not entitled to but going beyond what you would expect. What a wonderful thing. What a wonderful thing. I just love it. I love that God is like that, I love that God is so open and so caring about us. That's God. That's what He's like. Aren't you glad? [Yes.] Aren't you really glad? [Yes.] Amen.
Why don't we just lift our hands to the Lord and just begin to pray in tongues and let's just express our gratitude to Him, express our thanks giving to Him and just honour Him. What a great God we serve, what a great God that we serve, halleluiah. Lord, we thank You, You're extravagant. You're extravagant. You go what's beyond reasonable or what's deserved and You love us and we want to thank You for that. Thank You for loving me Lord, thank You for forgiving me, thank You for giving me a purpose and destiny. Thank You for surrounding me with wonderful people, thank You Lord. What a wonderful thing. So we love Him because He first loved us. Now notice what Matthew 22 says. They were asking what's the great command, and He said love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your strength, and then there's a second commandment, love your neighbour as yourself and this sums up the whole of the Bible, Matthew 22. Isn't that amazing?
So God is saying that the whole of all He requires for us can be summed up very simply, in a whole-hearted loving of God, and then an overflowing fervent love for people. They are deeply connected to one another. You can't have one without the other, you know? It's great to have talent, but if you don't create anything with it then it's pretty well useless. It's dead talent. It's very good to have a love for God, but if you don't do something with it, it's not really an active love, it's a dead love. Great to say you have faith, but if you don't do something with your faith it's not an active faith - so we can say I love God, but He calls us to do something with that, to express it in various ways, and so we want to talk about whole-hearted loving God. Now notice He says love the Lord with ALL your heart, that's all your spirit, all your inner man, your desires and affections, all your soul, your emotions, all your mind, your thoughts. So God doesn't want a half-hearted kind of thing. Half-hearted means I'm indifferent, I don't really care. Half-hearted means there's no passion in it. Half-hearted means I'm someone passive and shut down.
Now God is not looking for a people like that. God is wanting you to respond to Him. You know when Jesus came into town and everyone was shouting and praising and the Pharisees, the religious people said tell them to be quiet, it's not respectful. He said if I shut them down, even the stones will yell out. All creation yells out praise to our God, so God is looking for a whole-hearted response to His generous extravagant giving to us. He wants us to respond and we want to look at what that will mean, and what that would look like see, so I want to be whole-hearted. I don't want to be half-hearted, nothing half-hearted pleases me. You ever had someone do a job for you that's half-hearted? Never a good job and you're never happy with it. Had a tradesman do something for you? It's half-hearted, it doesn't please you at all. It never quite makes it, but it costs you, and you have someone in a relationship and they're boyfriend got a half-hearted response to you? Well I don't think you'd be too interested. See, think about that.