“And you shall 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 12:30
May 5, 2025
Do you love God with all your heart? If you are thinking of Cupid shooting an arrow through the heart, you would be off the mark. “In the biblical world. . .the heart is not the seat of the emotions; the lower organs are. Bob might tell Sue, ‘I love you with all my kidneys.’ The heart is the seat of the entire personality and is very close to what we mean today by ‘mind.’” (D.A. Carson, Love in Hard Places)
The heart is the home of our willing and longing (Mk. 7:19). God is to be loved with a determined will and compelling emotions. Are you running hard after God? This means making decisions which acknowledge His supremacy over all things. The effect of a heart that desires God ardently is the avoidance of a hardened heart, pushing God out of my life. Am I aware of and sensitive to what it means to obey God’s commandments? What do I think about God? Does His holiness awe me? Do I believe He is powerful enough to enable me to break sinful habits and replace them with purity of thought? Loving God is asking all of me, all the time.
H
“We love Him because He first loved us. Love is like an echo, it returns what it has received.”
Thomas Manson