“Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:36–39).
If you really want to know the will of God for your life and find out what is of supreme importance to Him, the best way to do that is listen to what Jesus, the Son of God has to say. He tells us that the greatest commandment is to love God. And Jesus says to do this with all of our heart, soul, and mind. What does this mean to love God this way?
I am very excited to try to help you really learn and understand what this means. When Jesus says, “Love God will all your heart, soul, and mind,” He means that our thinking and feeling and desiring should be wholly engaged to do all they can to awaken and express the heartfelt fullness of treasuring God above all things.
There are two key things that will help us to understand this sweet demand from Jesus. First, “loving God” means more than anything else to treasure God. The other is that thinking (the mind), feeling (the heart), and inclining our desires (our souls) are the means to that end. In other words, loving God is an experience of cherishing, delighting, admiring, enjoying, and valuing Him. It’s not a thought, feeling, or desire about God or a work for God. It’s the sort of thing Paul meant when he said, “I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (Philippians 3:8). It’s about treasuring the supreme worth of God. So, love for God is an affair of the affections. Ideas, feelings, desires, thoughts and thinking are crucial but they are not what love is. Thinking, feeling, and desiring is for the sake of loving God but it is not in itself loving God. It’s a means to loving. It’s not what love is.
Now what this means is that love is not a mere decision any more than your enjoying the beauty of a sunset is a mere decision. Could you imagine looking at a sunset feeling nothing than telling yourself to decide to enjoy it even though you don't. That is why I have said that where feelings for God are dead, worship is dead. You don’t decide to find beauty compelling to you. It happens to you. Decision based love breeds performance and hypocrisy and a duty based way of looking at love. Loving God means that God is of supreme value and worth to you; your supreme treasure and pleasure. We prefer above everything else to know Him and see Him and be with Him and be like Him.
Perhaps for some of you, you have never thought of loving God in these terms. May I suggest that because many don't understand what loving God means they end up focusing on means and ends and not love itself. So much I have read and been taught over the years focuses on means and ends and not on the love itself. Some focus little on the means and wonder why they struggle loving God. Others focus on the ends and struggle with loving people and obedience to God. So what I mean is how we come to love Him and the beautiful things that come out of our lives from this love for Him.
Loving God in the Great Commandment means most essentially treasuring God—valuing him, cherishing him, admiring him, desiring him. Therefore, loving him with all our heart, soul, and mind means that our thinking, our feeling, and our desires are not what does the loving, but what fuels the loving. Loving God with the heart, desires, and mind do all they can to awaken and express our treasuring God above all things.
Paul says in 1 Timothy 1:7 that "the object and purpose of our instruction and charge is love".(Amplified bible). Jonathan Edwards has charged me as a pastor to "raise the affections of my hearers as much as i can" when I preach the word. I wish every pastor would make that their goal when they speak, otherwise they have failed.
If we equate loving God with thinking and feeling rightly about God, we jeopardize the very reality of love. Let me use the analogy of fire. in order to have fire you need wood and kindling. but you would never call the kindling fire. When the fire burns you are not thinking about the kindling anymore, you enjoy the fire. So God has given us His word and the Christ exalting illumination of the Holy Spirit to be kindling picked up and engaged by our mind, heart, and desires in order to light a fire of love. I have often times said that the most important thing in our lives is to see Jesus for all that He is(that is the kindling) and to savor Him for all He is worth (that's loving and treasuring Him).
In the same light, fire produces two effects, light and heat. But we know that light and heat will not happen without the fire. When Jesus said, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (John 14:15), He emphatically did not say that keeping His commandments is what love is. He distinguished the two and made commandment-keeping the evidence of loving Him, not the definition of loving Him.
And when Jesus says the second commandment (keeping God’s commandment to love our neighbor as ourselves), He emphatically did not say that the second commandment was interchangeable with the first one. It is like it. It is not it. Loving God is not defined by loving neighbor. It is demonstrated by loving neighbor. “He who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen” (1 John 4:20).
Or consider the way Jesus talks about the heart worshiping Him. “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me’” (Mark 7:6–7). In other words, external actions—even religious ones directed toward God—are not the essence of worship. They are not the essence of love. What happens in the heart is essential. The external behaviors will be pleasing to God when they flow from a heart that freely treasures God above all things.
In other words, just as a fire produces light and heat, love for God, will produce love in our lives. The fire of the Father's love will burn within our hearts producing love. Is it no wonder that John says, "This is love for God: to obey his commands. And his commands are not burdensome" (1 John 5:3). There is a kind of commandment keeping that is exceedingly burdensome (without love for God out of duty or self effort) and there is a kind of commandment keeping that is easy (produced and released out of love). there is such a joyful freedom when love produces your behavior. No more decision, no more duty, and no more performance just a natural/supernatural outflow of what is in your heart.
So we cannot truly love God without knowing God; and the way we know God is by the Spirit-enabled use of our minds and hearts. So to “love God with all your mind and heart and soul” means engaging all your powers to know God as fully as possible in order to treasure him for all He is worth.
May you be free to know Him and enjoy Him forever. "Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy" (2 Peter 1:8)
THIS IS LOVE!
Pastor Bill
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