How do you show love to the One who invented love?
How do you offer soul? heart? mind? strength?
When the expert challenged Jesus on how to gain eternity, Jesus reinforced this idea that one must "love the Lord your God with all of your heart, soul, mind and strength and..." Before we get to the last part of Jesus' statement, it would be fitting for us all to first stop and ask, "How do we love the Lord our God?"
In the JDP Torah Commentary's reflections on Deuteronomy 6:5's command to "love the Lord you God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength", offer,
"The idea of commanding a feeling is not foreign to the Torah, which assumes that people can cultivate proper attitudes...Love of God in Deuteronomy is not only an emotional attachment to Him, but something that expresses itself in action...the command to love God may accordingly be understood as requiring one to act lovingly and loyally toward God."
In other words, love for someOne can be cultivated AND evidenced through action. In this case, the action that aligns one's thoughts, actions and passions (heart, soul, strength). Any "feeling" that may emerge is secondary. That is not suggesting that feelings don't matter but that they are only one aspect of our response to God. It reminds me of Bonhoeffer's words in his Sermon to the German-Speaking Congregation in Barcelona (quoted in Meditations on Psalms) on Psalm 62.
"We wait until the mood comes over us. Then we wait and we wait, often for years, perhaps all our life, until we are in the mood and become religious. Behind that way of thinking lies a great deception. Very well, let us allow that religion is the stuff of mood, but God is not dependent upon mood. God is there when we are not in the mood, driving us into closeness with Him." (30).
So permit me to ask:
-How has/does your mood or your emotion affect your ability to love God?
-What actions are present in your life that display your loyalty to God?
The second part of this passage that jumps out to me is a short word, "All."
"Love the Lord your God with ALL your..."
ALL your heart
ALL your soul
ALL your mind
ALL your strength
For most of my life I assumed "all" meant a conscious decision to give God the best of me. But as I grow I wonder if my "all" means the best AND worst of me. Because if I'm honest, some of my heart is yielded to God and some of my heart gets bent toward the temporal. All of my soul includes things that give life AND things that lead to death. All of my mind includes some bizarre memories that I'd rather not expose to God (Oh please God may I one day forget all the lyrics stored in my brain from boy bands and N.W.A.). What would it look like to love God with ALL of these areas of my life?
It's important because what we tend to hide from God are the very things that cause us much shame...they become things that make us believe we cannot be loved.
So somehow, loving God (action and intellect) with ALL of our selves becomes a way for us to experience God's love in return.
This conversation reminds me of the honest line in Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing. It says, "prone to wander Lord I feel it. Prone to leave the God I love. Here's my heart, Lord. Take and seal it. Seal it for the courts above." The writer loves God with his doubt, with his fear.
How might you love God with the "prone to wanders" from your life?
How have you experienced God's affirmation when you've uncovered the 'all'?
