Loving God

             Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. (Deuteronomy 6:4-5)

 

            “If you love me, keep my commands. (John 14:15)

 

            This is the Old Testament version of the first half of Matthew 22:37-39, and of Mark 12:30, and Luke 10:27. Years ago, when I was struggling with discerning my mission statement and had basically given up, I came across the verses in Matthew. Somewhere along the line, I discovered that Jesus was  paraphrasing the Shema, which is what the Jews called the passage above. This is the first and greatest commandment. I’m convinced that these verses are our true mission statements. This is what we were created to do. But there are two problems.

            The first is sin. We want to be God, not love Him. The second, and our focus today, is the problem of method. How do we love God? Gary Chapman would say we love Him in our love language: words of affirmation, gift giving, physical touch, service, or quality time – or in whatever combination of those we can. In John 14, Jesus says that if we love Him we’ll keep His commandments. I Corinthians 13 provides a description of love.  Hebrews 11:6 tells us that without faith (trust, belief) it is impossible to please God.

            Today’s passage and its parallels in the New Testament  give us a different answer to the question. We are to love Him with all our hearts, all our souls, all our strengths, and all our minds. Is there any reason we shouldn’t shorten this to the idea that we are to love Him with everything in us? Granted, it’s not as poetic.

            But let’s cut to the issue. What does it mean to love anyone with all our hearts? Does it mean there’s no room to love anyone else? That doesn’t work because we’re told to love our neighbor as ourselves. For the ancients, the heart was the seat of the will, not the emotions, so one possibility is that loving someone with all our heart means that when it comes to choices between loving that someone or loving someone else, we choose to love that person. It would also mean that when it comes to a choice between loving (doing what is in their best interest) and hating (doing what is not in their best interest), we choose to love.

            What about “all your soul”? According to Dallas Willard, that basically brings us back to all of our everything. The soul coordinates the activities of the rest of us and causes us to function as integrated beings. One thing this would quash is the gnostic notion that one’s body is evil and one’s spirit is good, and therefore we can let our bodies do whatever evil they want because what our bodies do doesn’t matter. The body is part of the soul. We can’t exempt it.

The passage in Deuteronomy doesn’t include loving God with all our minds, but the gnostic notion about the body and the spirit comes into play here because our minds are the things that seem able to go with us when we die. But our minds are made up of our thoughts and feelings, so getting them to love whole-mindedly can be a challenge.

Lastly, there is all our strength. Quite honestly, this one is the hardest for me. Let’s think of it for a moment as physical strength. I’m a wimp. I used to be stronger than I am, but let’s say I can lift thirty pounds today. Tomorrow, I might be able to lift thirty-five… or fifteen. On a day that I an only lift fifteen, I’m lifting with all my strength, but it’s not as much strength as on the other day. And that person over there is lifting fifty pounds. How do I love with all my strength when all my strength is so pitifully small? How can I love with all my strength when yesterday or tomorrow I’ll be able to love with more strength.

I am so pathetic – that’s the only conclusion to reach, right? Well, not exactly. If I only love at a “fifteen-pound” level today, and tomorrow, and the next day, perhaps by the following week, I’ll be able to love at a sixteen-pound level. And in each case, I’m loving with all my strength. Now, if I can love at a fifteen-pound level and only love at a six-pound level, then I’m not loving with all my strength. Realizing this has helped me with the others. The point isn’t some magical number.  It’s an honest effort. It’s loving with as much of our all as we can.