HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, October 18, 2024 – Yesterday, we considered the question of what loving God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength looks like in the life of a born-again believer.  I asked you to think about it, given how important the “first and greatest” Commandment was to Jesus and therefore how important it should be to us as his followers. Today, I’m going to talk about what it means to me to love God with everything I have and everything I am, and how that works in my life. My understanding of this Commandment may not be your understanding of it, but it’s always useful to consider a fellow believer’s insights, even if we don’t share them.

First of all, in loving God with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength, I look to Jesus as my example. I don’t mimic him; I follow his lead. I always look to Jesus because he “always did that which pleased the Father”. Jesus didn’t just sometimes do the right thing or mostly do the right thing – he always did the right thing: Every. Single. Time. We have no better example of how to please God than Jesus, so I look to Jesus first and foremost.

What do I mean by looking to Jesus? I mean looking at how Jesus lived his life during his ministry years, as recorded in the Gospels, because how he lived his life day by day is our best example of how to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength in the here and now.

And how did Jesus live his life? Entirely in service to God. He didn’t attend to worldly matters and then schedule “church things” or “God things” when he had time for them. No – he went full scorched-earth on his pre-ministry life and then sat down in the middle of desert with nothing but the clothes on his back, waiting for God to further direct him. Too often, even we born-again believers are seduced into continuing our self-directed pre-born-again lives if only for practical purposes (gotta put that roof over our head and food in our mouth!), forgetting that if we work for God, God will take care of all our needs in his way and in his time – that is, miraculously and behind the scenes. We know God will take care of our needs, because Jesus told us he would. From a personal perspective, I know that God will take care of my needs because I experience it every day.

So, first and foremost, I follow Jesus’ lead to better understand how I should love God with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength. But I’m not Jesus (any more than you are), and my relationship with the Father is different than Jesus’ relationship with him, so I can’t just mimic everything Jesus did and consider my mimicry as obedience to the first and greatest Commandment.

However, in following Jesus’ lead, I find out that I can go directly to God, like Jesus did. I don’t need to pray to Jesus and then ask him to hand on my message or request (or complaint lol) to God; I can go directly to God myself. This is one of the promises given to us by Jesus in John’s Gospel, but this promise also appears elsewhere in the Bible, wherever God, through his Spirit, states that he’ll be a Father to us.

So, I follow Jesus’ lead, as exemplified in the Gospels, while at the same time going directly to God for everything. He’s my heavenly Dad and I talk to him all the time, just like I would my earthly Dad if he could tolerate me talking his ear off night and day. Yet God has invited us to do just that – to “pray without ceasing”. Also unlike our earthly Dad, God knows everything that’s going on in our lives, down to the minutest detail, including what we’re going to say before we even say it. That’s because he’s always with us through his Spirit, and always waiting for us to ask for his help and guidance.

Having such a close and constant connection with God will just naturally result in your loving him with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. You constantly crave his voice and the feel of his presence. You constantly want to be with God like you used to want to be with someone you were in love with, and you constantly and sincerely – on a gut level – want to do what’s right in God’s eyes, as you don’t want to do anything that might break the intimate one-on-one connection you have with him. So if your mind starts to wander in a direction you know it shouldn’t (TEMPTATION WARNING!), you can easily haul it back on track simply by telling God you don’t want to think about whatever it is you’re being tempted to think about.

In fact, for us born-again believers, every temptation known to man (and woman!) can immediately and completely be overcome simply by sincerely telling God that we don’t want it in our life. You don’t have to formulate a fancy prayer with “thee’s” and “thou’s” and get down on your knees and put your hands up in the prayer pose, you just have to tell God you want nothing to do with whatever it is you’re being tempted with, and God will remove the temptation.

That’s not to say that that same temptation won’t return at some point in the future (the devil knows your weaknesses as well as God knows them and will from time to time press God for permission to test you on them), but God will again and again remove the temptation if you sincerely ask him to.

And so, loving God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength is really just as simple as following Jesus’ lead in everything you do (summed up as always doing that which pleases the Father) and maintaining a constant, close, and loving relationship with God as your heavenly Dad. If you do those two things, you can’t help but want to be in God’s presence night and day and to do what’s right in God’s eyes. And being in God’s presence, his Way becomes your way through a type of spiritual osmosis, or transference, from God to you.

When that happens, you don’t have to remind yourself anymore to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength; you just do, and you can’t imagine not loving him. You also don’t have to remind yourself to do God’s will or to do only those things that please the Father because, again, you can’t imagine not doing them. The first and greatest Commandment becomes your constant state of being, like it was for Jesus, and the only thing you want is for God to take you over completely and to fill up every nook and cranny of your life. Everything you have and everything you are you give to God, willingly and joyfully, and you let him direct you in everything, holding nothing back.

This, to me, is what it means to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.

What does it mean to you?