"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.