All of Me

A verse that has been popping up in chapel services, passion groups, online posts, and my own personal reading lately is Mark 12:30.

"Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength."

This is the greatest commandment according to Jesus. This verse has always seemed to say the same thing four times. Basically, I was convinced that Jesus could have saved His breath and just said 'Love God with all of yourself'. While this is what Jesus is saying, if you don't look at each part He tells you to love God with, you miss the difference in each.

Jesus tells us to love with all our hearts. Now, this is one area that I have not personally had trouble loving God with. My heart and emotions are vast and, especially in the past few years, my love for Jesus has grown in my heart. Now, sometimes I let other things into my heart that I shouldn't, but as of yet, I have not kicked Jesus out of His place as first in my heart.

Next, the soul. This is one's spirituality. Jesus wants us to be spiritually-minded and to love God through our souls--the very core of ourselves. This has also been something that God has blessed me with: Jesus has always been first in my soul. I trust Him to the care of my soul and I know that He is to be gloried and loved above all.

And now we hit the hardest part for me: the mind. Thoughts roam about in my head, and I have not been in the practice of keeping them under control. I have control over them to an extent, yet the other night I was crying out to God because I could not sleep due to the thoughts which were running rampant through my mind.
Something my mother has always said with regard to thoughts is: "You can't stop the birds from flying overhead, but you can keep them from building nests in your hair." As silly as this saying is, I have found a lot of truth in it. Thoughts entering a person's mind are like birds flying overhead, you can't really stop a thought from entering your mind. However, it is my decision what I do with those thoughts: do I kick them out or do I indulge them? I'm not even talking about sinful thoughts necessarily, but I maybe thoughts which are not constructive at the present. Whatever the case may be, I feel that God has placed a call on my heart to start taking control of my thoughts and to learn how to turn them into thoughts of Him. My prayer is that He will teach me how to love Him with my whole mind.

The last thing Jesus lists is strength. I believe that once a person loves God with all their heart, soul, and mind that they will love Him with all their strength--that is their actions. For our actions will flow naturally in the direction of what we are loving with the other three parts of ourselves.






God is faithful, I know that, if I am willing, He will teach me how to love Him with all of me.