Monday, February 1, 2016

February 2, 2016

"He answered, 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind; and 'love your neighbor as yourself.'" Luke 10:27

Maybe you gave yourself a bit of a pass when you came to this “love God with all your strength” part of this command thinking, “I’m not very strong so that gives me a break”.

Read it again! It doesn’t say you have to be strong it says you must express your love with all the strength you have!

Pastor and author, John Piper gives this helpful insight into this part of the Great Commandment:

“What then is the meaning of loving God with our “might”? The word translated “might/strength” in Deuteronomy 6:5 usually functions as the adverb “very” in the Old Testament (298x). The noun version occurs in Deuteronomy and in only one other place, which itself is just an echo of our passage. In 2 Kings 23:25 we are told that King Josiah “turned to Yahweh with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his might.” So if the word usually means “very,” what would it mean to love the Lord with all our “very-ness”? Interestingly, the Greek translation of this word is “power.” The Aramaic translation is “wealth.” Both of these may actually be pointing in the same direction, for the strength of a person is not simply who he is but what he has at his disposal.”

“Think with me: If Moses’s call to love Yahweh starts with our heart and then moves out to our being, could not our “very-ness” be one step bigger and include all our resources (see Block, Deuteronomy, 183–84)?”

“This means that the call to love God is not only with our physical muscle but with everything we have available for honoring God — which includes our spouse, our children, our house or dorm room, our pets and wardrobe and tools and cell phones and movies and music and computers and time.”

So, God requires you to love Him with everything you have at your disposal!

You could rightly phrase it this way, “Love God for all you are worth!”

Does this describe how you love God?

Honestly, if you withhold anything that you have at your disposal how can you say you truly love God? God will not compete for love, He demands complete love.