All your Heart, Soul, and Strength

"Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength."  Deuteronomy 6:5

Have you ever heard it said that "To love God is to enjoy God’s sustained favor"? In order to enjoy God's sustained favor, it is said that to love God with all your heart means "without one’s will, desires, passions, affections, perceptions, and thoughts rightly aligned, the life of love is impossible." When it comes to loving God with all our soul, "we are to love God with our passions, hungers, perceptions, and thoughts. But we are also to love him 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." But, it doesn't stop there. We are also to love God with all our strength as well. "This means that the call to love God is not only with our physical muscle, but with everything we have available for honoring God — which includes our spouse, our children, our house or dorm room, our pets and wardrobe and tools and cell phones and movies and music and computers and time." To sum it all up, we are told "that every closet of our lives needs to be opened for cleaning, and every relationship in our lives must be influenced. This call to love God this way destroys any option of being one person at church and another person on a date. What you do on the internet needs to be just as pure as what you do in Bible-reading. The way we talk to our parents needs to be as wholesome as the way we talk to our pastors." Deuteronomy 6:5 has been deemed the "Supreme Command" or the "all-command" because of the threefold "all" to love God with all your heart, soul, and strength. Often times when a verse like this is read, the reaction by those hearing it is usually to respond with a hearty, "Amen!" From my experience when verses like this and others that command us to love God and live a certain way are proclaimed, everybody seems to assume that they are loving God and living in the way in which He is commanding them to do. However, if you were able to pull them aside and ask them individually if they are loving God with all their heart, soul, and strength, they would probably reply with something like, "I do my best." In other words, what they are really saying is, "No, I am not loving God with all my heart, soul, and strength." This is, actually, a good thing that they recognize this, but based on their belief that God expects them to live up to His command, they either continue to recommit to trying to live this way, or they live in quiet shame; afraid the God they so dearly want to love is disgusted and ashamed with them. All they have to do is keep reading in Deuteronomy 6 to gain more insight into the so-called "Supreme Command."

The first thing to realize is that God gave this command to the nation of Israel. But, that never seems to stop Christians from trying to obey commands that were never given to us in the first place. But, I digress. How do you love God with all your heart, soul, and strength? It is by "keeping all his decrees and commands (Deuteronomy 6:2)." Otherwise, you will face His wrath for your disobedience. Neither Israel before or a Christian now can love God like this. All of God's decrees and commands were designed to focus on the individual's fleshly behavior. It is up to the individual, in the energy of their own strength, to find ways to obey all of these commands with the promise of physical blessings for obedience or terrible punishments, including death, when you fail. Furthermore, God never promised that He would love you if you somehow found a way to obey all his decrees and commands. Neither did He promise you eternal life for your obedience. The appeal in trying to love God with all your heart, soul, and strength, is the physical rewards and the ability to boast about your accomplishment. There is not a person alive who wouldn't want all the physical blessings God promises for obedience or the ego boost for telling others about what they did. Unfortunately, there is one problem; us. "For if there had been nothing wrong with that first covenant, no place would have been sought for another. But God found fault with the people and said: “The days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and with the people of Judah (Hebrews 8:7-8)." God found fault with the people. There is nothing wrong with the law, but everything wrong with our ability to obey it. God designed the law to lead us to faith in Christ by revealing to us that the only way we could enter His Kingdom was through His grace and mercy. In Matthew 19, a rich man asked Jesus what he must do to get eternal life. After Jesus finished His reply to him with the famous verse, "Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God (Matthew 19:24),” the disciples asked Him, "Who then can be saved (Matthew 19:25)?" Jesus replied, "With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible (Matthew 19:26).” This question to, and response of, Jesus is the key to all the discussion about loving God with all your heart, soul, and strength. It is impossible for us to do so. God wants us to understand that He told us to do this so we would realize that we cannot. Therefore, when we reach that point, we are ready to accept His grace and mercy through faith in Jesus Christ. He is the one who did for us what we cannot do. God loved us with all His heart, soul, and strength, in Christ. That is why it says, "We love because he first loved us (1 John 4:19)" and that "love is the fulfillment of the law (Romans 13:10)." It is not about our futile effort to obey God's decrees and commands to show our love for Him. Our love for God is shown in our resting in the finished work of Jesus Christ on our behalf, receiving God's love for us, and bearing the fruit of His love to the world.