Love the Lord your God!
Deuteronomy 6: 1 – 9; Mark 12: 28 – 34
I love ice cream. I love sailing. I love my wife. I love chocolate, especially dark chocolate with a hint of chili. I love my children and grandchildren. I love my MX5. I love the church I serve. I love Rohini’s Turkish delight. I love F1 and MotoGP. I love God. I love the sea. I love quietness. I love romance. I love reading. I love Donald Trump.
Love is a strange word, isn’t it? The common usage of love describes ‘a strong feeling of affection’. Love means for most of us ‘a strong affection or sexual love for someone’. Yet we use the word for a range of things, which do not have equal value. To say I love my grandchildren and I love chocolate clearly each means something quite different. I would give up chocolate if necessary, but never my grandchildren. Then again we use ‘love’ in games like tennis and squash to denote the score as in ‘love fifteen’. It is all a bit quirky isn’t it, this word love? The Bible talks a lot about love. It talks about loving God, one another, our neighbour – who in fact is not our neighbour – and to cap it all, loving our enemy. At least the Greeks had it right by having four different words for describing the love for our partner, philanthropic love, erotic love and sacrificial love. If we were Greeks we would at least understand love better. We English speakers are left confused with this one word applied to a range of things. And we usually get it all wrong because we generally confuse love with like. We use like in a dual sense as appreciating someone or thing, or as being similar to or of the same kind as another.
I want to focus on the two great commandments in the Bible and in particular the first – loving God. We first get the command to love God in Deuteronomy 6. This command encourages the people of Israel to remember who they follow. Hear, O Israel: The LORD is our God, the LORD alone. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. [Deut 6:4,5] This command appears again in the Gospel accounts with an addition of loving with your mind. ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’[Mk 12:35; Luke 10: 27; Mt 22:37] The addition of mind in the Aramaic and Greek speaking world may have to do with the fact that in the ancient Hebrew world ‘heart’ also included the mind. So our love for God should include loving with the heart, the soul, the mind and our strength. Now the immediate meaning of these ways of loving is simply to love God with all we are. However I wish to unpack each aspect in a way I hope may be helpful to us.
To love with the heart is to embrace God with our emotions. Our culture sees the ‘heart’ as the seat of our emotions. We speak of loving with all our heart. Valentine’s day is about hearts and red roses. To love God is to love with feeling and emotion. And there is no better feeling when the emotion of love and fondness is reciprocated. Love wells up within us with a desire to embrace and welcome.
But it seems that when we come to love God it must be done with decorum and restraint. To show emotion is seen as inappropriate or emotionalism. However emotionalism and emotion are different. Emotionalism occurs when our emotions lead us and reason flies out the window. Emotion describes the moving moments of life that express something deep and meaningful. Emotions lead us closer to each other. I think emotionalism alienates us. The psalmists speak of a broken and contrite heart or the burst of thankfulness [Psalms 51 & 100]. Our worship and devotional life should be accompanied by feelings of sorrow for sin, compassion for others in need, joy in thankfulness, awe in praise and a thirst for more. As the hymn writer reminds us there is a time when we pant for truth and love like deer pants for water.
There is a lovely story in the Bible of David returning with the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem. It was such a great moment of joy that David, the king, danced in a loin cloth. His wife, Michal, did not approve of the king showing such emotion. [2 Sam 6: 14ff] David gives us some of our most feeling-full psalms such as Psalm 23 and 51. Emotions accompanied by Biblical truth and gentle reason help us experience the wonder of God more fully. Thank God for the music that stirs us and the joy or tears that remind us of deep personal encounters with life and with God. Beware of the decorum that prevents you embracing God and others more fully in your life.
To love God with the soul is to express the true character of our faith. The term soul is difficult to define. The ancient Greek philosophers who believed we have an immortal soul have influenced us. I use the term soul as the Bible does. It is a metaphor for the inner person and our character. The soul represents the person we are and the life giving force in our being. We can equally speak of our spirit. Our souls express our compassion, guide our doing and advise our judgements. The soul is the very essence of who we are. Our enthusiasm, inspiration, energy and vivacity spring from our soul. But the soul is not independent of who we are. So the soul should be nurtured and allowed to develop through our emotions and our reason – that is, our love of truth.
To love God with the mind is possibly the easiest to understand. The mind is the seat of reason and wisdom. However the mind is not independent of our emotions and our soul. Loving God is not only an emotion, but also the rational response to God and life. We love God with our minds when we reflect carefully on Scripture and discern what we should do. Loving God with our mind involves our listening to the Holy Spirit’s teaching and guidance. Our love and our soul are developed and nurtured through exercising the mind in learning and reflection.
Finally we are to love God with all our strength. This may be quite puzzling. How does our physical strength enter the equation of loving God? Actually it is more important than we realise. To be a person is to have a body, mind and soul. The three make up the one being. They work together to create wellness within us.
When we are physically sick and are in pain our spirits and our minds are affected. Great pain can depress our spirits and cloud our thinking. When our thinking is poor, that too affects our spirits and our bodies. Humans are a composite of body, mind and spirit. The well-being of the body is crucial to the well-being of our mind and spirit.
Now our marvellous body is fed and cleansed, renewed and strengthened, through the blood. Let me give you a simple explanation of how it works. There are 100,000 kilometres of arteries, veins and blood vessels in the body. That’s right. If you laid out all our arteries, veins and blood vessels that would amount to something like 100,000 kilometres in length. The blood flows through these passages feeding the body and cleansing the body. A low flow rate of the blood will mean that the body will not be properly fed or cleansed. One of the key ways of increasing the blood flow to the whole body is vigorous exercise. The body, mind and soul and sends more oxygen into the body feeding and cleansing it. The exercise ensures that the blood moves through all of the body. There is ample evidence that regular exercise will improve health, increase brain function and energise the body. A sedentary life with low levels of exercise will mean the body will be de-energised. Of course attention to diet is essential, but good diet without vigorous exercise is not sufficient. Our exercise is crucial to our general health. It is quite amazing what happens when we are exercising and strengthening the body. Of course I am not suggesting you go home today and vigorously exercises to the point of exhaustion. I am saying if you want to honour God, you need to take seriously your physical exercise and your diet. And we may need to be very thoughtful and seek professional help when going about our exercise. But the message I want you to hear is that your body needs to be cared for. Therefore if you can walk, walk more. If you can strengthen muscles, strengthen more. If you can stretch your muscles and ligaments, stretch more. Push yourself, and then the exercise will benefit you. In looking after your body you honour God and in turn demonstrate love to yourself and others.
I am absolutely confident that to love God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength involves not simply exercising the emotions, the mind, the soul but also the body. Remember God has given us our total being, to neglect one part is to neglect all and vice versa.
A well-rounded person, a well-rounded Christian, is one who pays attention to all aspects of their being. To love God is to love with all of our being.
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Peter C Whitaker, Leighmoor UC: 10/06/2018
/ www.leighmoorunitingchurch.org
