Love is a _____.

Love, such a short little word—but let’s face it, we have such a tremendously difficult time understanding it.  Doing some studying recently I went to the dictionary, as I am often prone to do, and discovered that my dictionary of choice had twenty-eight different definitions for love.  I found all of them to be sorely inadequate.  I want to spend the next few days looking at this wonderful little word.

Rather than just diving straight off into the grandiose theological implications inferred by the word love, let’s just think about a few examples of what our society considers love.  We have holidays based on loving things, relationships, family members, and hobbies.  There are huge corporations designed around the promise of connecting people to love.  In America we tailor our lifestyle, including routines, possessions, wardrobe, religion, and friends to the thing(s) we love.

Waylon Jennings summed it up pretty good, “I’ve been looking for love in all the wrong places.”

Too Much To Lose

A couple of years ago I had the pleasure of attending a lecture on Christian leadership given by one of my heroes. The schedule had intentionally called for a long session to allow for question and answer feedback and I was attentively listening, absorbing, and writing throughout.  Then somewhere near the end something happened.

Someone in the crowd asked something akin to, “How do you handle a situation that might place you alone with a woman who is not your wife?”  I was pretty certain how the speaker would respond.  It is common practice among ministers not to be alone with another woman, but then the lecturer elaborated on a personal story.

One cold day he was driving in the rain and came across a woman walking in the downpour without an umbrella.  Immediately his heart was provoked into offering this sodden pedestrian a place in his warm, dry vehicle; but he did not.  The reasoning he gave I still remember word for word, “I could not afford to put myself in that situation.”  While I am an avid practitioner of not allowing myself to be compromised through unnecessary situations, this was something altogether different. 

What I see in this scenario is a conflict of differing natures: not the rain versus the driver or the woman.  I’m talking about the desire of the driver to assist the pedestrian as prompted by God versus his hesitance as a result of what someone might think about him by having a strange woman in his car.

It boils down to this.  He would not pick her up because he had too much to lose.  Job, reputation, whatever you want to call it… the potential opinions of men trumped his willingness to do the right thing.

James wrote that when we know the right thing to do and we don’t do it we have sinned.  (James 4:17) Protecting the opinions of men will never be the right thing to do when compared to showing the love of God.

Even when doing the right thing means that you must lose everything you have, be it relationships, reputation, or riches, it is what we are called to do.  We won’t always succeed, but we must always try.

For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it. Matthew 16:25

Neighbor =/ Me

"Love your neighbor as yourself."  Mark 12:31 is not a suggestion.  It is a command straight from the King of Kings.  In fact this premise is so important when asked what the greatest commandment is; Jesus replied with the previously discussed command and added this one as the second.

We live in a society of self-worship.  A huge portion of what we do in our day-to-day lives revolves around being, making, looking, feeling, or knowing better.  There’s not really anything wrong with those things when kept in check, but many make an idol of themselves by taking one or more too far.

What if we who proclaim to carry the name Christian upon our lives were to actually love people as we love ourselves?  Jesus spoke numerous tidbits along these lines, but it all boils down to the practice of placing others first.  Let’s be honest, living selflessly is not at the top of anyone’s to-do list these days.  Shouldn’t it be?

Strength

The final piece of the greatest commandment as passed down from Christ to His listeners in Mark 12:30 was to love God “with all your strength.”

In this era strength is a word full of vibrate meaning and weighty connotations.  Chiefly when we think of strength we more often than not begin to think of a type of physical prowess or the ability to perform some feat of significance.  This is not an incorrect idea of strength, although I do believe it to be an incomplete one.

Loving God with all of your strength means to sacrifice your every effort to Him.  It means to perform to the best of your ability in all areas, not because your relationship with Him hinders on your performance; but rather, because your love for Him compels you to honor Him throughout your every waking moment.

The measure of our strength in light of His is pitifully meager and almost unworthy of even mentioning and yet still the God of all creation yearns for it.  Not because He in any way or capacity needs our meager offering to fulfill His sovereign purposes.  He sees the effort we spend as a collective act of willful adoration.

God wants the sum total of our parts to align in a fervent love for Him alone; heart, soul, mind, and strength.

Mind

Loving God “with all your mind,” is not nearly as hard a concept to grasp as the previous two sections from Mark 12:30 I have discussed.  Of course, as is so often the case in life, it is perhaps easier said than done.  It is my belief that this kind of mental devotion to God can be boiled down to three basic areas; thought-life, attitude, and intellect.

As fallen beings our thoughts often betray us.  Paul wrote that he had to consciously make his every thought captive to Christ.  He also wrote that he had to renew his mind daily.  In this sense loving God with your entire mind would mean that you seek purity in your thoughts.  With obedience we can control the things we allow our minds to dwell on, however it takes a measure of steadfastness, devotion, and discipline.

Our attitudes are another area where we all-too-often fail to love God with our whole mind.  This point was made so very real to me during my trip to Ecuador this past summer.  In a part of the country that was extremely poor and by all our culture’s indicators should have been depressing and destitute, I met some of the most jovial and upbeat personalities I’ve ever crossed paths with.  Why?  Because their attitudes are rooted in a righteous perspective of who God is, what He has done for them, and a healthy faith in His power and willingness to be sovereign in their day-to-day lives.  In stark contrast I’ve known many people within our borders who would claim Christian status and yet do not at all display the upbeat contentment that I found among my Ecuadorian brethren.

Intellect is the last part of our mind that I believe we should turn over fully to the King.  To be blunt, many Christians are dumb.  There are probably numerous reasons for this but the most glaring reasons I have encountered for this are laziness and apathy.  Many believers today have an extremely poor knowledge of the basic principles of their faith and many more are just too apathetic to think that they should honor God by furthering their intellect.

In loving God with our entire mind I believe that we will develop a better sense of how to serve Him through a healthy thought-life, a contagious attitude, and a robust intellect.  This is perhaps one of the most neglected aspects of the Christian faith.

Soul

“With all your soul,” could probably be one of the most confusing phrases ever spoken and if not for the great wealth of insight Scripture gives us concerning the personhood of Christ it would be hard to grasp the nature of what He meant.

We can look to John 4:24 for further illumination on this phrase as during his discourse with the woman at the well Jesus uses another phrase, “worship in spirit and in truth.”  You’ll need to (and should) visit that passage for the full context of what is being discussed there.  Essentially Jesus is speaking to the theological principal that your inner self is the true self.  If you could peal back the physiological composition that contrives your physical essence and see the soul inside, you would be able to look on the real you.

Loving God “with all your soul” means that you love Him with a deep authenticity that is rooted in the very nature of who/what you are as His created being.  Authentic-soul-level-love surpasses the wishy-washy nature of a cultural religious phenomenon or ritual and surpasses even a lifestyle to alter the fabric of one’s very identity itself.

Heart

“With all your heart,” those words carry a great depth of meaning, but as concerns the passage from Mark 12:30 it is easy enough to grasp the nature of what Jesus was speaking of—even if the actual living it out part is not so easy.  It is my belief that when Jesus told his listeners to love God with all their heart he was essentially speaking of their desires, desires for God and Godliness.

He was instructing them that to truly love God with every aspect of their heart it must come from a place of willingness.  And from the willingness and desire for God they would see a resulting change in character and compassion, passions and discipline.

I heard it said once that salvation was the process of changing our “want to”.  It seems to me that loving God with all your heart has to come from that place inside us all.  It is neither something that will happen by accident, nor can it be forced upon us.  Rather it is the willing act of changing our desires.

Basically Jesus was saying, “want God.”

Most Important

One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”

“The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.” - Mark 12:28-31

This is an awesome excerpt from the Gospel of Mark.  After all the intellectual and theological poking and prodding from the religious leaders of his day Jesus set the record straight (true to character) with such a profoundly poignant answer that they are basically left speechless.  Tune in over the next few days as I discuss this great portion of scripture in a little more detail.