You shall love God with all your
heart, soul, mind and strength.
Mark 12
Love God with all my heart, soul, mind and strength? You
mean I am supposed to put God in the very center and make
God the most important consideration in my life? Most of us,
to be honest, can’t say that God is that important to us.
I would love to be able to say that God is always at the center my life, but sadly, I put myself and other things ahead of
God sometimes. Some days I do better than others, but thankfully, God is very patient with me and loves me anyway. I have
always taken comfort in knowing that my best is good enough
for God.
Today, I want to say a few more words about taking God seriously. None of us will ever measure up completely to the
Great Commandment – the one that summarizes all other commandments – but this is the brass ring for which we all reach.
To take God seriously, to seek to love him with all we have,
there are things we must do.
• We must want what God wants. To want what God wants
means we have to understand the Scriptures, listen to the Spirit
within us and stay consciously connected to God through prayer.
• We must remember who we are. We are holy. We are holy
not because of what we have done, but because we are “created
in the image and likeness of God,” and, through our baptism,
we are adopted children of God. We must accept our holiness,
neither exaggerating nor denying who we really are.
• We must want to live by the same values Jesus lived by:
having a loving kindness toward all, especially the most weak
and vulnerable, even our enemies; striving to do God’s will no
matter the consequences; using Jesus’ own life as a pattern for
our own.
• We must be in command of ourselves, have a handle on our
addictions and our passions, so that we can go in the way that
God wants us to go. We must constantly question our own motives, making sure that we not only do the right thing, but also
do it for the right reason.
• We must never give in to hopelessness, whether it is about
the future or about other people. We know the war against evil
has already been won, even though we may continue to lose
many painful battles. God’s kingdom will come, and nothing
we do, not even the gates of hell, can stop it.
• Regardless of our failures, loving God with our whole heart,
soul, mind and strength is something we should strive for, even
though it is something we will never accomplish completely. God
wants a relationship with us, even if it is rocky and imperfect.
We are challenged to get serious about God, not in some
loud, noisy and superficial way, but in a long haul and to the
core-of-one’s-being kind of way.
A reprint from my For the Record column
May 24, 2007
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