Love Your God: Conclusive Thoughts

Over the last week or so, I have been slowly taking a look at some of the deeper meaning behind what is called the "greatest command" in Mark 12. In the first installation, I talked about loving God with our hearts and making sure that we knew what the divine will and affections are so that we can bring ours in line with it. In the next post, I talked about loving God with our soul and gave some practical resources to start to get in touch with your non-physical body so as to be able to devote it to God. In the third piece, I talked about loving God with our minds and wrote on what the mind does and how to exercise it for God's Kingdom cause. In the last post, I discussed loving God with our strength and how this encompasses our physical bodies, our areas of influence in the world and our practical capabilities. In this conclusive post, I would like to draw these four together to demonstrate that what Jesus is really getting at -- and what the law was meant to portray -- is that we belong to God and he is ours in graceful union.

To me, these four specific areas seem to fall into a set of two couplets that encompass all of the relational facets of the human.

Couplet One
I see mind and heart making up the first couplet; here we find that Jesus is saying to love God with our intellectual and reasoning faculties, but to also love God with our feeling and wanting faculties. This seems pretty straight forward, but let's look at why this important. If a person were to compartmentalize their relationship with God (as most people are prone to do from time to time), there is a privation of total experience. For the intellectual person, we lose out on that deep-seated feeling of love; for me, this happens while working on my master's degree. I'll get so wrapped up in evaluating thing in a sterile, laboratory-type mental state that I forget that theology is inherently organic; it is natural, mystical and real as it is simply our thoughts and beliefs about God. It would be absurd to view my relationship with my wife as purely analytical and legal -- it would just be unhealthy -- so why should my relationship with my Creator be any less messy and intimate? it shouldn't. However, the pendulum can swing the opposite direction.

It is true that at times, people can compartmentalize in the other direction: with the heart. We get wrapped up in what it feels like to try to commune with the divine but in placing all of our focus here, we necessarily cut off the ways that we try and meet God via our minds. As one who has been in music ministry for more than half of my life, I can identify with this as well. It's easy to find "that song" or "that passage of Scripture" that just speaks to your heart and dwell so long on it that we lose out of the richness of fully engaging the couplet of heart and mind. Where this becomes detrimental to one's relationship with God is when our theology suffers because of our emotional longings. Sound theology, proper, demands careful thoughtfulness and passionate energy. Passion alone is like my two-year-old dancing and playing air guitar to the end music of his Scooby Doo movie; it's cute and beautiful in its own way, but it lacks grace, coordination and accuracy (he seems to switch from left handed to right handed guitar a lot). The better way -- the more holistic way -- is to love God with the entirety of this first couplet: heart and mind -- passion and intelligence.

Couplet Two
The second couplet, then, is clearly the two remaining ways of loving God: the soul and strength. Here we also see opposing facets of human relational capacities. Simply put, we are to love God with all of our physical parts as well as all of our non-physical parts. Just like the first couplet, we tend to compartmentalize or over-emphasize one of the two. When that happens on the soul side, we end up with people who are very "spiritual" without actually doing much. This can look like a number of things, but it is most apparent in one who is willing to say they're Christian, maybe post a lot of Christian memes on Facebook, maybe listen to "Christian music" (whatever that is) or maybe simply study and believe all the right things about God, but when it comes down to it, this person is not communing with the marginalized in their community; they aren't reaching out to the hurt and lost or (and this one is going to hurt, so please believe my intentions are good) perhaps this person is simply destroying their body with how they live their life. I don't mean substance abuse, but the just-as-deadly killers of the western diet and lack of exercise; there are far too many in ministry who don't talk about health and fitness because it indicts themselves and their lack of effort. Remember that it is a measure of love to care for our bodies and it is a measure of love to do good works for the Kingdom. Let us not be simply speakers, but also doers.

The other extreme, however, is the person who is willing to volunteer, is faithful to be in the pew on Sunday, bakes the casserole and writes the check, but does little to deepen their experience of the divine. This person may see the value in doing, but rarely feels that intimate connection to the divine except in emotional starts and bursts. There is no consistent awareness of the presence of God and there is little exploration away from their little island of theological awareness and experience. Just as it would be awful in my marriage to be content to take care the kids, do the chores, pay the bills and never connect with my wife on a deeper level than the transactional, never learn more about her and only grow closer in starts and bursts, so to is it with our relationship with God. Truly, humans are designed to need both sides of this couplet in order to have the fullest relationship with God.

Last Things
I think that if we really think about it these two couplets, when used to their fullest potential, not only yield the greatest expression of love to God, but also are a blue print of sorts to the best way to yield a vibrant relationship with God. Spanning the width of our minds and hearts while simultaneously reaching ever deeper into the fathoms of our soul and strength; this is the greatest command: that you should love God with absolutely every part of who you are. This is our design given by the divine.

peace,
C.M.

p.s. If you liked this series, let me know! Also, share it with someone you care about :)

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.