THE FIRST AND GREATEST by Debbie Wood

“Love the LORD your God with all your heart and all your soul and with all your strength.”    Deuteronomy. 6:5 (NIV)

They were hoping to trap Jesus with their question, cleverly designed to promote the kind of debate that keeps lawyers occupied full-time.  “Which of the commandments is the greatest?” the religious leaders asked.  With an authority that transcended any judicial court Jesus immediately replied, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and all your soul, and all your mind, and all your strength.”  Jesus is proclaiming with a clarity that takes my breath away that what is commanded of us is not that we accomplish some difficult task to prove our loyalty to God, but rather that we enter into a grand and glorious relationship with God.  Our relationship with God is to be our highest purpose in life, a purpose that summons and inspires us to exercise all our emotions (heart), intelligence (mind), energy (strength) and will (soul). 

Jesus’ answer presents me with both a great challenge and an even greater promise.  The great challenge for me is this — I have never been able to consistently summon all of my feelings, intelligence, strength, and willpower in the sustained pursuit of anyone or anything — ever.  I start out with good intentions, but sooner or later, my strength leaves me, my feelings distract me, my intelligence limits me, and my willpower deserts me.  Is God setting me up for failure by directing me to pursue Him so completely, knowing that I will fall woefully short of the loving response that His holiness and goodness deserves?  In His infinite wisdom God has led me to see that this is the exact purpose of the command.  It is only when we pursue God with all of ourselves that we come to the end of ourselves and realize the extent of our brokenness and sinfulness, desperately in need of God’s saving grace.  And when we come to the end of ourselves we are finally at the beginning of God, ready to receive all of His heart, His mind, His soul, and His strength in a glorious reward of faith for having pursued Him, no matter how flawed our efforts, with all of our own heart and soul and mind and strength.

And God’s wonderful promise to me (and to everyone else) is this:  He will receive us when we pursue Him with a single-minded purpose and devotion, no matter how broken, scarred, and damaged our lives may be.  Thank God that He is a God who sees the truth about our hearts, and souls, and minds, and strength, and loves us anyway.  He calls us to bring all that we are, in love, to Him; ready to receive all this He is, through love, in return.                          

D.W.

 Think about it:   What needs to change in your life in order to enter into the kind of relationship with God that He longs to enter into with you?