Love Your God: with Your Strength

Part 4 of what (I just now decided) will be a 5 part series. Thus far, in examining the greatest commandment, we have evaluated loving God with your heart, soul and mind. Here we begin the fourth way and next after this, I'll draw some broader conclusions and pull these ideas all together into a unified message. Let's begin.

Now, at a brush, "love God with your strength" kind of seems like an odd phrase. We usually associate love with feelings and so we don't typically think about using our physical modes in non-physical ways; it's just absurd. I remember as a kid asking a youth group leader what this meant and he more or less said "love God real hard". While this is something of an exaggeration (that is, he did try at something but this is about all that came across), it does point out a blind spot in our understanding of this Mark 12 passage. So now we have to ask the seemingly silly question:

What is my strength?

The easy, undeveloped answer is simply that the Greek word used for strength in this passage is transliterated as ischus (is-khoos') which means ability, force and strength. On first appearance, this definition doesn't seem to bring much clarity, but when you start looking closer at each of these areas, you will find that to love God with our ischus means a lot more than you'd have thought.

• To love God with your ability means to submit in loving humility and servitude to God with all that you are able to accomplish. Entrepreneurship, speech, networking, raising kids, cleaning house, making dinner, calling friends, writing a letter (yes, people still do that); the list goes on and on. This inherently puts submission and prizing the will of God in the active category, not just the emotional. Love is not a feeling, but a verb -- a movement. So, in all of your activities -- every single one -- demonstrate the sacrificial love of Christ (without getting into it here, I'd just like to add that this is harder than it seems on first examination).

• Loving God with our force means to love God with our power of influence. Whether you are a CEO of an enormous company or a stay at home mom, you have a measure of influence (I would add that the latter has the greater amount) and it is to be used to the glory of God by the furthering of his Kingdom. This places love of God as the central responsibility for the believer; not correct theology, not perfect reputation in the eyes of others, but divine love. So, take time to take stock of your force and think critically of where you might utilize your power for Jesus' cause.

• Loving God with your strength (more colloquially here) means submitting your physical body to him in its care and purpose. This is not the same teaching as "don't tattoo yourself because your body is the temple of God" or "don't smoke or drink because you dishonor your God-given body". Instead, this is the stronger (and better exegetic) argument and command that not only what comes out of the body is either dirty or clean and so make sure that is fit for a Kingdom-person (Matt. 15:11) but also how you care for and know your body indicates your love for God. For clarity, let's put this argument in a simpler form: which is more convincing and right? to say to someone "take care of your body as best you can because God lives there and it dishonors him not to" or "take care of your body as best you can because it demonstrates love to God". The latter is consistent with our definition of love while the former functions on warped premises (i.e. Does God need a body to live in? no; is his honor of primary concern? no, Jesus says that love is of primary concern). So, get to know your body, feed it good things, move it how it should be moved and do no evil with it.

So how is all of this accomplished?

While I gave points of direction at the end of each of the above bullets, the simplest answer is this: intentionality. Just as I covered in the "love God with your soul" piece, it is not by any accident that we love God with our physical applications. You must block out time in your day to sit down and write out which areas of your life you have "force"; you must carve out of, what seems to be a stone-hard schedule, time exercise and eat right; you must purposefully behave in a way that reflects love, especially when people don't deserve it. Loving God with all of your ischus is nearly as difficult as loving him with all of your psuche. Nevertheless, this (along with the other installations in this series) is the command of God.

Thank you for reading this and the other posts; join me next time as I (attempt to) tie these four modes of loving God into a single theory of loving God.

peace,
C.M.