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 Heart

For the first time, I will be writing a blog series. This series is called "Love Your God" and will be evaluating Jesus' conclusion that "the most important commandment is...you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind and all your strength (Mark 12:29-30, NLT)." So, in keeping a good handle on organization, we'll systematically work through each of these "ways to love" and then I'll likely have a conclusive post, tying it all together; that's the plan anyway. Lets begin.

The first way that Jesus tells us we need to love God is with our heart. I feel like it should be pointed out that Jesus is referencing Deuteronomy here when he makes this claim. This is important because it tied his teaching to the Jewish tradition and made it less refutable to those who were trying to get him to slip up. If he had been presenting completely novel doctrine, it would have been much easier to brand him a heretic and undermine his popularity if not also his authority in the people's eyes. So what does it mean to love with your heart?

Traditionally (both in Scripture and in most, if not all, cultures) the heart is used to describe the will and affections. While it might make sense for the will to be located in the mind, it seems that willfulness - free will - is a much deeper seeded quality in humanity. It is the drive that pushes us beyond assumed capacities as seen in extreme conditions of survival and sport. It is the thing that accomplishes more than thought possible as seen in numerous entrepreneurs and successful people (with other factors in play, of course). The will is much more than a psychological capacity; it is something rooted deeply and thus is best associated with the heart. The affections are located here for a similar reason. Try describing the messiness of affections towards people or things. For example, I cannot for the life of me explain why I love collecting guitars so much! In all seriousness, the passion we feel for our family, lovers, hobbies, careers and beliefs is a hard thing to describe. Humans feel, not just think and as such, we know one thing with certainty: affection is a deeply rooted quality as well.

So why the heart? As the blood-pumping and thus life-sustaining organ of the body, it is a fitting symbol for the things that drive us more powerfully than intellectual evaluation or any other source of motivation. Even before modern medicine illuminated all of the vitality of the heart, it was well known that this electrified, auto-rhythmic powerhouse is what keeps us moving, both physically and abstractly.

So how do we love God with our heart? The answer must be one that is tied to submission. This only makes sense as love is, at its base, about prizing one thing over another; in a relationship, this means prizing the other person over ourselves. In the case of loving the divine, we prize God over everything, ourselves included. So, in the context of submission, we willingly bow our affections to the Creator. Did you catch that? We utilize our will to freely long for the things that God longs for. This is no coercive action on God's part, but an actualization of our potential to choose the things of God. We do this by rehearsing the art of wanting what God wants.

So how do we accomplish this? Practice, practice, practice. Like any other movement of the will, it often must be intentional, if not forced, in the beginning. When you learn that highly processed sugar at the volume of normal, western consumption is not good for you, you have to force yourself to moderate your intake at first. It is a force of will. The same is true for quitting any vice like smoking, alcohol abuse, being quick to anger or habitually lying. We learn intellectually that there is a better way, so we force the practice until that better way becomes habit.

So, in applying this idea to our goal of loving with our heart, we see that first we need to know the God whom we want to love. This seems like it should be common sense, but far too often believers set out to become Christians without knowing the will and affections of the Christ they wish to emulate. This is how you end up with "Christian" leaders calling out for war and violence against a people whom they don't understand. So, step one, learn the heart of the one we're submitting to; what is the divine will, what does the divine long after?

Second, we must not try and "quit cold turkey". It is often a self-defeating approach to try and be perfect outright. Instead, pick one area of your heart that is unlike God's and begin there. Perhaps you struggle with anger or being short tempered; perhaps you struggle with wishing ill of people; whatever the case, it's easier and more productive to choose one thing to work on at a time and progressively improve thus.

Finally, we must not quit improving. Until we are finally united with God in fullness, we have to embrace the fact that we'll never meet perfection. So, we should never come to the conclusion that "we've arrived"; there is always room for improvement.

Concluding Thoughts
 There is more to be said about loving God with your heart; I could never say it all here. Hopefully, however, this will be a spring board for some introspection in which you, the reader, can identify some areas in your heart in which you can begin to better love God. Our heart is the summation of our deep-seeded longings and the drive which moves us. Let yours be of the Father.

Next time, I'll be evaluating how we love God with our souls. I sincerely hope you join me.

Peace,
C.M.