“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 NIV
In this chapter of Mark, Jesus is with crowds as He usually was and a teacher of the law asks Jesus which commandment Jesus believed to be the most important one. Jesus told the teacher which one is the most important of all and that is to love the Lord your God. Jesus doesn’t say that the commandment stops there but instead explains what that means.
So, what does it mean to love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. We could break each one of these down and we would be here for a while, instead let’s look at them as a whole. Loving God is a wonderful commandment but without adding some specific directions, it could become a superficial kind of love.
When we say to a friend “I love you” there is a certain level that your love goes to. For example, a friend might not know the same intimate details about you or your life that a spouse might know or that your parent might know. The level of the love for a friend typically goes deeper than your love for a co-worker with whom you do not hold a friendship, remembering that we are to love everyone.
For us to make sure that we don’t limit the level of our love for God, Jesus further explains what “love the Lord your God” means. When you love someone with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength, you are putting your whole self into this love. Again, this isn’t your surface love that we have for all mankind. This love is different.
When you let yourself feel love with all of your being, you are involving all of you. You think about the person all the time, you want to do things with that person, you want to do things to make that person happy, you become very connected to that person, and you put that person in a place of importance in your life. Some of these aspects are connected to the emotional part of love, feeling connected, but some of these aspects of love are choices.
So love is not just an emotion? No, it is also a choice. The feeling of love, that warm feeling you get in your stomach, that is an emotion but our emotions change. When you love someone with every part of your being, your emotions do not rule how you feel. There are going to be times when the person you love upsets you, hurts your feelings or pulls away from you and if your love for that person is only based on emotion, then you may decide that you do not love them anymore.
When you think of love as a choice or an action that you take, love becomes more. When the person does not do what you want, hurts your feelings or pulls away from you, you have a choice to do the same or to continue to show your love for them by continuing to love them.
So when we apply that to this verse, we can see that loving God is great especially when we are in worship and things are going the way that we want them to go, but what about when they don’t. What about when God has answered your prayer with ‘wait’ or ‘no’? Then we have a choice, are we going to continue to love God or are we going to follow our emotion and give up? Choosing to act on love and continue to show love for someone when you are hurt or disappointed can be hard but that is what is being called for in this verse. Putting God above all else, whether He has answered our prayers the way we want or not, whether He is moving as fast as we want and whether we feel like it or not.
Remember that God loves us that way. We have sinned against Him and He still sent Jesus to die for our sins. He could have given up and walked away so many times, but He didn’t. So, as you go about your day, think about what kind of love you show to others and to God.