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.