HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, October 17, 2024 – What does it mean to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength?

As born-again believers, we need to know exactly what it means, because Jesus said it’s the first and greatest Commandment. As such, it should be our lived experience, day in and day out. If we don’t know what it means to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength – if we can’t articulate what it means if someone asks us – we won’t be able to do it because we won’t really know what it looks like. We’ll know the expression, but not the meaning.

I went to a church service yesterday. I’ve been to the same service for the past few weeks, and each time I’ve attended, the minister reminds the parishioners that they’re to love God with all their heart, soul, and mind. It’s a recitation that he reads, not something that he says off the cuff. It’s baked into The Book of Common Prayer, so I’m guessing it’s recited during all the services in that church, or at least during most of them. Yet I wonder, for all the recitations, how many of the parishioners who hear this Commandment actually put it into practice.

But back to us born-again believers – how are we to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength? Because love him we must, and precisely in that way. If we know that we should love God with everything we have and everything we are and yet choose not to, we could lose our grace, and there’s no getting that back. Without grace, we can’t get into God’s Kingdom on Earth or God’s Kingdom in Heaven, which means that whatever time we have left here will be more or less Hell on Earth and our only possible final destination the lake of fire.

Considering how critically important the first and greatest of all Commandments is, maybe we should take a moment to think about what it means for us in our own lives. Holy scripture is deeply one-on-one and personalized, not “one size fits all”. What the first Commandment means to you may not be what it means to me or even what it meant to Jesus during his time on Earth.

So, what does is mean to you to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength? How does your obedience to that Commandment play out in real time in your life?

Please think about these questions, and we’ll continue our discussion tomorrow.