What is the Point?: Discovering Life's Deeper Meaning and Purpose (7 page)

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“Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?” Jesus said to him, “‘You shall love the L
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your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”

—M
ATTHEW
22:36–39

This commandment reflects God’s ultimate purpose for Creation, His eternal purpose. Here He is standing in front of them, the Creator, and He is answering the question that was meant to trick Him. He knows their hearts and gives them the most profound answer. He wraps all of the law and the prophets into one glorious answer. So much is in these simple few sentences. It would take a thousand books to unpack it and an eternity to unleash the truths that are layered here. From before the foundation of the world God had a plan in His heart. Before the world was created He had a why behind the what. We know what happened: He created the heavens and the earth. But this commandment tells us why He created. We know what He did on the cross: He accomplished redemption. But this verse tells us why He went to the cross. It gives us the why behind the what of Creation and redemption.

The Father promised His Son an inheritance. That inheritance is a people whom He would totally possess. But Jesus’s inheritance involves more than real estate. It is more than the reality that He owns the land in every nation. It is more than government. It is more than the fact that He controls the nations and leads them. Jesus’s inheritance does involve the mandatory obedience of all of creation, but there is more to His inheritance than only this.

In Philippians 2 Paul gives us insight into this global obedience. He is quoting Isaiah 45:23 where the Father promised the Son in the Old Testament that “every knee should bow . . . every tongue should confess” (Phil. 2:10– 11). Every knee, every tongue, and every demon in hell will bow their knee in obedience. Every unbeliever, when assigned to eternal judgment, will go there in obedience to the word of Jesus. The obedience of all of creation is mandatory. But there is more.

God wants more than mandatory obedience. He wants voluntary love. The inheritance of a king is the obedience of all the nations, but the inheritance of a bridegroom is the voluntary love of all the people in all the nations. The very core of the Bridegroom’s inheritance is the fact that the people would be equally yoked to Him in love. The Father promises an inheritance for Jesus, and it is clear that it will be a bride, prepared in love for Him (Rev. 19:7). She will be equally yoked in love—not automated, forced, or programmed, but voluntary love. He said to the Son, “They will choose You and want You in the same way You choose them and want them.” This is the purpose of Creation, the Father preparing an eternal companion for the Son and the Son preparing a family for the Father. The Father prepares us as a bride for His Son, and then, after Jesus brings all the nations under His authority at the end of the millennium, He gives everything to the Father. (See 1 Corinthians 15:27–28.)
We
are the gift they exchange. This blows my mind!

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In Matthew 22:36–39 Jesus is giving us His own commentary on Deuteronomy 6:5. Of course He is the One who gave it to Moses, but He is adding something that Moses did not receive. He said, “This is the first and great commandment” (Matt. 22:38). This commentary from Jesus has been greatly overlooked and dismissed throughout history. Jesus the great teacher, the great prophet, the great philosopher, the great psychologist, and God Himself is explaining both God and humans to those who have ears to hear. It is the Creator talking, and He is not commanding us to do something that is beyond what we were designed to do. It is love that He is after. He is after our heart. The mystery of our life is found in this truth.

Jesus is saying that loving Him is the first commandment. It is first in priority to Him and to His Father. It is the preeminent command and the pinnacle of all that He has spoken. It is also the greatest commandment, because it has the greatest impact on us, on Him, and literally on the earth. When we love Him with this kind of wholeness, we are what we were created to be. It is just, right, and good. This is righteousness in action. We fulfill our primary purpose in this love. It is the great commandment, and it is the greatest calling.

Some who seek to know God’s will for their life focus on knowing what they are supposed to do instead of who they are supposed to become. When they speak of wanting the greatest calling, they refer to the size of their ministry instead of the size of their heart. The greatest grace we can receive is the anointing to feel God’s love and to express it. It brings the greatest freedom and has the greatest reward.

I read this and thought, “What? The first and the greatest?” It was perplexing because on the surface it seemed too simple to be the first and the greatest. Yet as I started trying to do it, I found it was the trigger that caused a chain reaction in my heart that led to many life-altering decisions, both internally and externally. These sentences from the lips of Jesus started a fire in my soul and radically changed the course of my life. My purpose in life was to please Jesus, and here He is telling me what pleases Him. So my purpose was to live for love, but what was love?

I drank from the words of Jesus and struggled with their application. When I decided to “live for love,” I liked the feeling of it but didn’t know what it meant. “Love? OK . . . and then what?” I looked up at Him and said, “OK, let’s do it. I’m going to love You with all of my heart, soul, mind, and strength . . . OK, now what? I love You. You love Me.” I sang a few songs, danced, and cried during the Sunday morning worship time. “OK . . . ” I lit a candle and sat in a room for a while talking to the Invisible. “I love You. You love me. Is this what You wanted? Is this what You were saying was the pinnacle and purpose of my life? Surely there’s more to it than this.”

Then I started trying to love Him with “all.” It was more than an emotion because of a good worship song and more than an hour of devotional time in the morning. I read this verse and thought, “He wants all of me.” He wanted to be involved in every part of my day, right down to the thoughts I think and the emotions I feel. I was overwhelmed with such a demand but excited to have an aim. It was more than a list of dos and don’ts. This was up close and personal. This was intimate and invasive.

Three of the four ways He lists for us to love Him are primarily internal. Only He can see it working. This command had nothing to do with impressing people or getting the applause of man. This commandment brought me right before the Audience of One and turned my primary mode of living internal, because that is where He was and that is where He was watching and measuring me.

The inner world of the human is one of the most intriguing realities in all of creation. We spend the majority of our lives inside of ourselves. We are sleeping, thinking quietly, processing images, and having a continual conversation in our heads. I could be in a stadium filled with eighty thousand people, and we are all thinking eighty thousand different things, having eighty thousand conversations in our own heads, living in a world of our own, like a universe of worlds inhabiting a larger one. The internal world is vast and limitless. It is where the Spirit lives and it is where Jesus’s eyes of fire are looking (Rev. 2:18). He measures us by what we do in our follow-through, as well as by what we do in our hearts. It is both internal and external, but I fear most of us neglect the inside, and the inside is what shapes the outside. I will develop this further in the coming chapters.

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Have you ever tried to love God with all of your mind? The mind is so sacred, yet we severely and criminally waste it. The human mind is of great value, and it is at the mercy of the free will of the man or woman who possesses it. What we choose to put in our minds shapes our hearts and our emotions, and this shapes our decisions and our entire life experience. The mind is one of the crucial, defining things about humans. I am not just talking about the intellect, in the sense of our IQ, but the things we behold with our minds, we become. This means that the things we fill our minds with, we become like.

It is incomprehensible to me the amount of time we spend watching TV, movies, searching the web, watching YouTube videos, and just marinating our brains in sitcom humor and raw stupidity in the name of “rest” or “entertainment.” We do not understand that hours and hours of this plants seeds into the soil of our minds that are not immediately reaped, but over time the fruit of this kind of waste will be seen as our minds grow dull, causing our spirits to grow dull. (See Galatians 6:8.) A dullness in spirit causes our connection with the Lord to grow dull, leading to despair and meaninglessness, which leads to sin.

It all starts in the mind. The amount of time spent on meaningless things is so devastating. I believe when we get to heaven, one of our primary regrets will be the amount of worthless things we gave our minds to. One day all will be clear, and we will see the gift that God gave us in giving the sacred space of the mind. We will take a few steps back and see how we squandered it and the potential we had to encounter God that we did not take, and we will feel regret.

I don’t want to have regret on that day. I don’t want to have regret tonight as I go to bed and close my eyes, only to see the video games I played the previous four hours before the light went out, or worse, the immorality I was watching or the coarse jesting I was hearing. You cannot get these things out of your mind once you put them in, and yet we just walk through the wet cement of our minds leaving a mess that will dry and take the mercy of God and a shocking sledgehammer to break up and renew. I want to feel the dignity that has been given to me, that I am not at the mercy of vain imagination and worthless things.

It is not easy. I am prone to laziness and ease. I want to “check out” and just “hang out” for a while. I cannot tell you how many young people who started out fiery for God who I have seen lose their way in pursuing God with wholeheartedness, because they lost the reins of their minds through entertainment or hours spent in vain debate. It is hard to get someone who chooses to go down this path to turn around because they lose their vision for depth in God and lose their vision for purpose. It is hard to get them out of their aimless state. I have fear about this because of my own propensity to idleness and to foolishness. Loving God with all of your mind is not a small thing. In your mind is a perpetual conversation you cannot turn off. It is a perpetual movie screen that you cannot escape. You cannot go to “nothing” and empty your mind. You cannot turn it off, even when you sleep.

It is the theater where God wants to be seen by you, but very few people will ever look at Him here. I have such compulsive, addictive tendencies that I will literally spend hours in Google searches only to realize I have wasted that sacred space of my mind. I will get lost in the social networking world, where I am in a constant conversation with other people. Some people are texting all day long.

If you are in a perpetual conversation with other people, that conversation is getting in the space where you were created to talk to God. It is like the Lord cannot get a word in edgewise, and then we look up and accuse Him of silence. Yet we don’t stop talking long enough to listen to Him, and we don’t actually talk to Him. Even in our quiet times when we are alone, we are tweeting, texting, Facebooking, e-mailing, and searching the Internet. Obviously some of this is good, but if you are like me and have a tendency to be compulsive or addictive, beware, because days will go by, and they will turn into weeks and then months and years, and you will rarely talk to God or even think about Him in a direct way. That most holy place of your mind will be full of junk piles that will take great effort to clean out.

I have the fear of the Lord concerning being held accountable for my mind. All too often we think that we are at the mercy of our imagination or at the mercy of our thoughts, but we must learn to take the reins of our mind, renew it with the Word, and be transformed because of it.

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that . . . perfect will of God.

—R
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12:2

The mind is the seedbed for life. Both righteousness and wickedness start in the mind. Jesus said adultery starts in the mind. All manner of sin starts here, and so does righteousness. We set our mind on things above (Col. 3:2), and we become what we behold in our minds (2 Cor. 3:18). This means that what we look at, what we mediate on, and what we fill the sacred space of our mind with we become. This is a scary idea and one that most do not take very seriously. It is also a powerful idea when applied to righteousness.

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First, you must see that He loves you with all of His mind. What He is asking from you is not what He Himself doesn’t already do (1 John 4:19). Imagine, how vast is God’s mind? Look at the universe and all of its intricacies; from the galaxies to the dandelion, creation is stunning. Yet He loves us with His mind.

Secondly, you must believe that He sees your mind, and what goes on in your head matters to Him. He is looking at the thoughts and intentions of man, not just their actions. He actually has capacity to see your mind. No human can do this. I cannot see what is going on, on the other side of your face, even when I am sitting directly in front of you. I do not know what you are thinking until you tell me, but Jesus sees it all (Heb. 4:13).