Earlier in the week, I posted and posted a beautiful inspirational quote;
‘Through your life, may God be displayed as the most beautiful reality in the world.’
But how do we do this? What will our life look like?
The religious leaders in Jesus time also wanted to know how they could live their lives best for God. ‘What is the greatest commandment?’ they asked.
And this was Jesus reply;
Mark 12:29-30 New Living Translation (NLT)
“The most important commandment is this: ‘Listen, O Israel! The Lord our God is the one and only Lord. 30 And you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength.’[a]
Love is totally universal and totally challenging!
Love for God is the very most important thing!
Love is the command that is above all other commands. In fact it has been tagged the ‘Supreme Command’ or the the “all-command,” because it encompasses everything
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength” (or might).
That means leaving no room for divided affections or compromises.
Jesus said,
Matthew 6:24 New Living Translation (NLT)
24 “No one can serve two masters. For you will hate one and love the other; you will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and be enslaved to money.
Loving God with All Our Heart
This has been Gods desire from day One and we can see this truth scattered throughout the old testament. A spiritual relationship with God begins from within.
Proverbs 4:23 says
‘Guard your heart more than anything else, because the source of your life flows from it.’
That means your will, your desires, your passions, your affections, your perceptions, and your thoughts all flow from your heart.
Deuteronomy 4:39-40 says
39 “So today you must remember and accept that the Lord is God. He is God in heaven above and on the earth below. There is no other god!40 And you must obey his laws and commands that I give you today. Then everything will go well with you and your children who live after you. And you will live a long time in the land the Lord your God is giving you—it will be yours forever.”
Loving God with All Our Soul
Over and above our hearts, we are called to love God with all our soul.
What is the soul and how do we love with all our soul?
In the first five books of the Old Testament the “soul” refers to our whole being as a living person. This includes our “heart,” and so much more.
Genesis 2:7 says
7 And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
So if we agree that our soul means our ‘whole body’, then we are called to love God from our heart which is from within us – and then we take a step outward and we are to love God out of the entirety of who we are. Everything about us a person should declare Jesus as Lord of our lives.
We are to love God with our passions, and perceptions, and thoughts and also with how we talk, and what we do with our hands, and how we utilize our talents, and how we react to challenges — our entire being is to display that we love God.
Loving God with All Our Might
How can we love God more than with our ‘whole being’?
We are also called to love God with all our might. What does that actually mean?
In the Old Testament, the word translated ‘might’ has been used 298 times as the adverb ‘very’. It has only been used only twice as a noun, one being in the scripture below;
2 Kings 23:25 New International Version (NIV)
25 Neither before nor after Josiah was there a king like him who turned to the Lord as he did—with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his strength, in accordance with all the Law of Moses.
So if the word usually means “very,” then we are called to love the Lord with all our “very-ness”. But what does this actually mean?
Digging a little deeper, we discover that the Greek translation of this word is “power” and the Aramaic translation is “wealth.”
Both of these translations are pointing in the same direction.
The strength of a person is not just about who he is, but also about what he has at his disposal.
So our call to love God starts with our heart (our inner self) and then moves out to our being (our whole self) and then moves a step bigger to include all our resources – our might.
It feels as if the light has suddenly been turned on.
In essence, this scripture, that we all know so well, is calling us to love God not only with our physical muscle, but with everything we have available for honoring God — which includes our husbands, our children, our house or dorm room, our pets, our wardrobe, our tools, our cell phones and movies and music and computers and time!
Everything, everything, everything!
Whole-hearted, Life-encompassing Allegiance to God
This means that the covenant love that we are called to must be a wholehearted, life-encompassing, community-impacting, exclusive commitment to our God.
We need to display an authentic love for God which starts with our affections, desires, and thoughts and from there, permeates our speaking and behavior, and influences the way we spend our money and how we dress, and drive, and even our forms of entertainment.