Jesus said in Mark 12:30, “...and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength…” In short, Christ was saying that we are to love our God with our whole being. Love the Lord with our hearts and souls, the spirit, the will, and the emotion. Love Him with our minds, the intellect. And love Him with all our strength, the physical.
In the Greek language, the word for "love" that's used in this passage is agapao, which means: to wish well to; take pleasure in; long for. So this verse is telling us that we should long for God with all that we are. A good example would be the writer of Psalm 42, which started with, "As the deer pants for the water brooks, so my soul pants for You, O God." This person felt that he couldn't live without God and is desperate for Him.
Before anything else, our love must come from our hearts. The Lord wants to commune with our spirits, abiding in us as we abide in Him. That's what He wants most: our hearts, the essence of our being. That is why longing for God with all our hearts and souls is very important.
In the Greek language, the word for "love" that's used in this passage is agapao, which means: to wish well to; take pleasure in; long for. So this verse is telling us that we should long for God with all that we are. A good example would be the writer of Psalm 42, which started with, "As the deer pants for the water brooks, so my soul pants for You, O God." This person felt that he couldn't live without God and is desperate for Him.
Before anything else, our love must come from our hearts. The Lord wants to commune with our spirits, abiding in us as we abide in Him. That's what He wants most: our hearts, the essence of our being. That is why longing for God with all our hearts and souls is very important.
It is interesting to note that Jesus included our minds. Many people in the world, especially secularists, think that the Christian faith should not, and does not, involve the use of the intellect and reasoning, but merely blind faith. However, that is not so, because we see that Christ requires us to love Him with our minds as well. In the same way, the Apostle Paul wrote in Romans 12:2, “And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.” Again, the Bible mentions the mind. In referring to this passage, Stuart McAllister commented, “We are to be transformed by the renewing of our mind, not the removal of it.”
When we love God wholly with all that we are, it naturally follows to love God with all that we have. Loving Him with our strength, we serve Him in the places He has called us to. And God asks that we serve Him faithfully, as a physical outflow of the love we have for Him.
It is very important to love God with our inner being first before we serve Him on the outside. If we do it the other way around, we may easily fall into the trap of doing God’s work when the effort doesn’t come from the heart, or we could do the work with the wrong motives. The physical works we do for God should be an outward expression of our will to love God with our whole being.
Blessings,
Nathanael Chong
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