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May 2008
“and
you shall love the Lord, your God with all your heart and with all your soul
and with all your mind and with all your strength.” (Mark 12:30)
In case
you haven’t heard, we’ve been talking a lot about learning to love
God around hear. Why? Well, as the passage above states, it is the greatest
Commandment. Therefore, it is to be the foundation of our lives and the focus
of our journey in faith.
In this
passage from Mark, one of the religious officials in a crowd asks Jesus to go
way out on a limb. He wants to know what Jesus believes is the most important
commandment out of all commandments in the Jewish law. It was a kind of set up.
There was no way Jesus could answer the question without offending someone. To
say one commandment was more important than another would leave him open to a
charge of heresy.
His
answer, however, silences his critics and provides an absolutely essential
foundation for living. The religious teacher asks, "Which commandment is the first of all?"
Translated for our own time, this question would amount to something like, "What is the most important thing in all of
life?"
Jesus
quotes an ancient text from the book of Deuteronomy. This verse became
Hear, O
When
Jesus was asked what the most important thing in all of life is, he repeated
this text. If Jesus spoke to us today, he might put the words something like
this:
"Listen up people! here is the most
important thing in all of life. Here is the one thing that will make all the
difference in your living. Here is the one key to becoming a fully alive, whole
person. You shall love God with all your heart and all your soul and all your
mind and all your strength. In other words, the most important thing in all of
life is to put God at the absolute center of your living!"
Some of
us are raised with wonderful nourishing, affirming care. Others are not as
fortunate. In either case the journey toward wholeness means becoming
everything God designed us to be. We can never really know who we were meant
to be without a relationship with the one who made us. This relationship is one
in which God becomes the central reality in every dimension of our living.
We are
to love God with all of our heart
or emotional being. This is not just our "feeling" life, but the
seat of our identity. Strength of identity and sense of wholeness comes with
the affirmation that, "God made me. God loves me, I am a child of God.
God's love and love of God flows in every fiber of who I am."
We are
to love God with all our soul or
spiritual being. It is important to realize that we are, at the heart of it
all, spiritual beings. We were designed to live and function in partnership
with God. To love God with all of my soul is to live with a sense of constant,
conscious contact with God.
We are to love God with
all our mind or intellectual
being. Our thoughts, attitudes and thinking patterns are shaped by love of God and love for God.
We are to love God with all our strength or physical being. We are physical
beings. The Christian faith rejoices in this. We are not "anti-body"
as though the body was a bad thing. The earliest church struggled with people
who believed that the physical world and physical things are bad, but the
Psalmist wrote, "We are fearfully and
wonderfully made." [Ps. 139:14] To love God with all of our strength
is to love God even with our physical selves. One way we can do that is to be there for God. You know what it means
to say you will be there for
someone. When they struggle you actually become physically present for the
person. To be there for God is
to be God's person in the world around you.
Simply put, Jesus was the first whole person physician. He taught that
the integration we seek that makes for the sense of being a whole person is
grounded in centering ourselves in God. This one verse is the rock solid
foundation for living.
"...you shall
love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with
all your mind, and with all your strength."
See you in church, Pastor
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