A. Christ teaches us this in summary in Matthew 22 –
Love the Lord your God with all your heart,
And with all your soul
And with all you mind
And with all your strength.
This is the first and greatest commandment.
And the second is like it:
Love your neighbor as yourself.
All the Law and the Prophets hand on these two commandments.
Monday
Loving God with all your heart is big request. We are fickle people with hearts prone to evil. In fact, Jesus tells us that all sorts of evil come out of the heart of men and women. Read Matthew 15:19. If these evil things come out of our hearts, how are we to love God with all our hearts? The only solution is for God to give us a new heart, a heart that rejoices in his Law, loves his ways and desires more than anything to be conformed to his will. In fact, God promises that he will give us just such a heart. Read Ezekiel 36:26-29a. God promises to give us undivided hearts so that we can love him and his ways. Pray for God to continue to conform your heart to his, and to give you a love for him that exceeds anything else that you love in this world.
Tuesday
I will not attempt to differentiate between loving God with your heart and loving God with your soul. The point of today’s reading is to reiterate that God wants us to love God completely and totally, every possible part that could be included in a human person is to be active in loving God. Emotions, will, desire, intellect and strength. They are all to be a part of our love for God and to be included in our worship of God. How can we express our love for God? Read John 8:42.
Wednesday
Loving God intellectually means believing his word and accepting his statues. Loving God with the mind calls for believers who soak in the Scriptures and reflect on their teachings. Loving God with the mind calls for men and women, boys and girls who see the Bible as God’s revelation of Jesus Christ. All of Scripture points to Jesus. Read John 5:39-40. To study the scriptures with any other focus is to miss the point of God’s Word for humanity. The Bible is not a manual for living life, although it has good instruction. Rather, it is primarily a testimony pointing to Jesus and Jesus alone. Loving God with the mind involves training the mind to see Christ in the Bible. Read Luke 24:13-27.
Thursday
Our strength involves our physical body. God desires people who love and worship him not only in the interior person but in the exterior as well. Enoch walked with God, Genesis tells us. So too did the other great men and women of faith. Their lives in the world, along with their hands and feet matched or conformed to their interior love of God. So too, we as believers are called to use our bodies to love God. Read Romans 12:1-2 and James 2:14-26.
Friday
Read 1John 4:20-21 and 5:3. Loving our neighbor is an integral part of loving God. While it is the second great commandment, the Love of God cannot exist without the love of others. For God is love. To love our neighbors will require every bit of our person, just loving God does. It will take a fervent desire from God, a mind trained in serving others as Christ served the church and a body willing to be used to care for someone else’s needs. None of this will happen without God’s grace and mercy in our lives.
Saturday
Do all the law and the prophets truly hang on these two great commandments? Would there be a need for a law against stealing if we loved others property like we love our own? Would we need a law against murder if another’s life was as important as our own? Would we need instruction about avoiding idolatry, if we loved God completely and fully, with every part of our person? The answer to all of these is “No.” We wouldn’t need any of these laws if we carried out the two great commandments. While we can’t fulfill them fully, Jesus can and did. Read Galatians 6:2 and Matthew 5:17-18.
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