Yet God says love is the most important concept we need to comprehend. Every commandment in the Bible, Jesus said, is summed up in this short phrase: Love God and love others. We're to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. And we're to love others as we love ourselves. This means that we need to know what God has in mind when he uses the word.
Join me in exploring the use of this concept in Scripture. Discover what God means when he says that we're to love him with our heart, soul, mind, and strength—and find out why he makes it a four-part command.
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Parts of Above All, Love are published separately as booklets.
When Jewish religious leaders asked Jesus, "What is the most important commandment?" he answered by quoting Moses:The most important one 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. —Mark 12:29-30In The Art of Loving God, Julie Ackerman Link explores what it means to love God with all aspects of our being: heart, soul, mind, and strength.
By learning how God loves us, we find out how to love him. When we discover God's feelings about us, his desires for us, his thoughts about us, and his actions toward us, the only imaginable response is overwhelming love toward him.
The Art of Loving God is not about creating something beautiful for a demanding God; it's about submitting ourselves to a loving God who wants to re-create in us the beauty he had in mind even before he formed us.
Julie Ackerman Link is a founding partner of Blue Water Ink, a company that provides writing, editing, designing, typesetting, and consulting services for publishers and authors. Julie started her career at Zondervan, where she served as managing editor of devotional and self-help books. She is also a contributor to the popular devotional Our Daily Bread. Julie and her husband, Jay, live near Grand Rapids, Michigan.
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We try hard to satisfy it. Some find relief in relationships. Some find satisfaction in work. But even the best friend or job is temporary, and when we sense loss, the old feelings of emptiness return, and along with them come temptations that suggest compromising ways to avoid this feeling, temptations that we thought we had outgrown long ago.
We can't believe that what we long for could possibly be bad for us. In the back of our minds, the question lurks, "How can it be wrong when it feels so right?"
Clearly, our desires are at war within us. Even when we want to do what is right, temptation gets the best of us time after time. After a while we think, why bother to try to resist?
The apostle Paul summarized the situation well when he wrote, "I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do" (Romans 7:15).
In Loving God with All My Heart, Julie Ackerman Link explores the relationship between desire and behavior.
One of the most amazing things to discover about God is that his highest desire is our highest good. This realization stirs within us a desire to know God better, to find out what he desires, and to get our desires to match his. For when we want what God wants, we'll find everything we need and long for.
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But God has more in mind for us than mindless conformity to others. He wants us to be transformed into the image of his perfect Son and thus have God's own image restored in us.
The word soul in Scripture is translated from words that mean "breath." Our souls are the breath of God in us, and God's breath turns each of us from a clump of clay into a piece of original artwork.
All art reflects some aspect of its creator. Artists, writers, and composers have a style, a voice, that is unique to them and that comes through in every creation. The same is true of God's artwork.
Scripture proclaims that each of us is unique, so if we settle for being like someone else, we rob the world of what God intended that we would contribute to it.
Consider this: Each of us starts as a thought in the mind of God, and the great adventure of life is to discover what God was thinking when he formed us.
Do you know what God was thinking when he formed you? Don't miss the adventure of finding out. Loving God with All My Soul points to the place where every journey must begin.
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What is more soothing after a trouble-filled day than stepping outside on a star-studded evening and gazing heavenward? Who can peer into the night sky and not forget, at least for a moment, the cares of life on earth? Ancient Israel's prolific songwriter wrote a poem thousands of years ago that still rings true:When I consider your heavens,When we try to imagine the immensity of God's heavens, our problems do indeed seem trivial. Yet God doesn't think so! With all of the galaxies he has to attend to, God is mindful of us! And not only are we on his mind, but he cares for us.
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,
what is man that you are mindful of him,
the son of man that you care for him? (Psalm 8:3-4)
No wonder the apostle Paul advised new believers to set their minds on things above. For in doing so we raise our thoughts above the level of earthly disputes and focus instead on a loving heavenly Father who wants us to know him, to know how to live peacefully with one another, and to know that we can live eternally with him in a place even more beautiful than this planet.
To best enjoy our brief time on earth and to prepare for life in heaven, we must bring our thoughts into agreement with God. When we learn all the good that God has in mind for us, we will love him with all our minds.
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Truly strong people have the courage to admit they are dependent on God, that they are imperfect, and that they need other people. Because of this, true strength often looks a lot like weakness. When the apostle Paul prayed that an affliction would be taken away from him, God answered, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness" (2 Corinthians 12:9). Paul responded in a way that set the example for us: "Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ's sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong" (12:9-10).
This takes us to the heart of the matter—it is God's strength, not ours, that is at issue. Patriarchs, kings, and prophets all declared: "The Lord is my strength." The hard lesson to learn is that none of us has any strength apart from God. It is only fitting then that we love and worship him with the strength that he has given us.
Strength is not stoicism, stubbornness, or rigidity in the face of difficulty. Loving God with all our strength means that we willingly, humbly, and intentionally allow God to re-form us into his image through pressure and adversity.
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