Deuteronomy 6:4-5 " 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.” Today's episode talks about what it means to love God with your whole heart, soul and strength and how to tell if we are doing it. Music:"Adding the Sun" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Love God with Your Whole Heart, Soul & Strength
Deuteronomy 6:4-5 " 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.”
That is a pretty tall order. First of all, it’s hard because many of us don’t even know what love is. We only know the love we have been shown, and in a lot of cases, that was not love. I started writing this episode for Thursday morning and then I realized before writing about how we are called to love God with our whole heart, soul and strength, I should explain what love is. If you have not listened to yesterday’s episode go listen to that one as it goes together with this one. Yesterday’s episode titled “What is Love?” talks about how love is defined in 1 Corinthians 13:4-7. Today the Lord is asking us to love Him with all of our heart, soul and strength. That sounds great in theory, but how do we actually do that?
Let’s start with our heart. How do we give our whole heart to God? This makes me think of a scene I saw last night on the Chosen season 2 episode 6. Mary Magdalen left the camp where Jesus was and she went to the bar to gamble and drink. She knew she didn’t want to be doing what she was doing and yet it seemed as if she couldn’t help it. After she was finally able to walk away she couldn’t go home to Jesus. She was too ashamed. Matthew and Simon found her and brought her back. When Mary talked with Jesus He said He just needed Mary to give her heart to God, which she had. That was all. Then He ask her a question, “Did you really never expect to sin again?” From this scene I think Jesus was telling us, He doesn’t need us to be perfect. He is not setting these super high standards that he needs us to live up to at all times. We just need to give Him our hearts.
I found an article titled, “20 Ways to Love God with All Your Heart, Soul, Mind & Strength.” (Click Here) In this article it talked about 20 different ways we could love God. One of these ways was to love God with our whole heart. This is what it said, “We can think of the heart as the place of our spiritual life, thoughts, feelings, motivations, reason, and understanding. Our decisions, our morals, and our will come from it. So, loving God with all our heart is to have a strong desire and will towards Him.” This seems to line up with what Jesus said to Mary. Do we desire to be with God. Is our will pointed towards God or away from God? What does our spiritual life look like? Are we spending time with God every single day? What do we think about all the time? Are we thinking about God more than anything else throughout the day? Is God behind all of our motivations, reasons and understanding? Think about these things. Take some time to ponder if you are loving the Lord our God with your whole heart.
Next it says to love the Lord your God with all your soul. This is what I found in that article. “The Hebrew word for “soul” gives the idea of the breath of life. The Greek word gives a more global idea of the inner self, the individual, the mind (in the sense of our deep thoughts). We can say that it is the non-physical part of the human being (Psalm 16:10; Ezekiel 18:4). It is what defines our personhood, who we are. So, loving God with our whole soul is to love Him with everything we are, is to find our inner self inclined to Him, seeking Him, having Him at the center of our affections. What comes to mind after reading that is the question, Are we seeking Him? Is he at the center of our affections? When we are sitting around thinking about what we want to do, does God come to our minds? Do we want to spend time with Him? Do we want to be near Him? If we could pick someone to spend our time with, who would that be? Would it be God?
Finally, the verse tells us to love God with our whole strength. Love God with our whole Strength, what does that mean? The article said, “We find the word “strength” in the Bible a lot of times, and most of them refer to the power of God. Strength refers to the physical aspect of loving God. It is how we show that we love Him and do everything we can to put our love for God into action. If our inner motivation and desire are to love God, our actions (the strength of our bodies) will show it. What I think this is saying is that if we want to love God with our whole strength then our actions have to be towards God. Are we doing things God wants us to do? When we get to the end of the day would God be proud of our actions? Did we do things He has asked us to do? Did we treat people nicely? Did we share His love and His peace with all the various people we interacted with today? Did our actions reflect our love for God?
I told you at the beginning of this episode the verse was a pretty tall order. God is calling us to love Him with our whole heart, soul and strength and yet He is not expecting us to do it perfectly. He knows we are going to mess up, He knows we are going to get it wrong. Honestly, we will probably get it wrong a lot more than we will get it right. He is calling us to it anyway. God wants us to enter this relationship with Him. A relationship where we do our best to love Him with our thoughts, with our desires and our will. We love Him with our actions and the motivation behind our actions. Basically God wants us to give our whole self to Him as He gave everything to us. Again, He knows we won’t do it perfectly and that is ok. He just wants us to try.
Dear Heavenly Father, I ask you to bless all those listening to this episode today. Lord, we want to love you with our whole heart, soul and strength, please show us how. Lord, help us to know where we are falling short so we can do better. We want to love you as you love us Lord. Give us the strength and the wisdom we need to love you more fully. You are truly amazing Lord. You love us fully and completely even though we keep messing up time and time again. We are so grateful you never give up on us Lord. We love you Lord and we ask all of this in accordance with your will and in Jesus’ holy name, Amen
Thank you so much for joining me on this journey to walk boldly with Jesus. I look forward to spending time with you again on Monday. Remember Jesus loves you, and so do I! Have a blessed weekend.