What is the Point?: Discovering Life's Deeper Meaning and Purpose (8 page)

Thirdly, you have to believe that it is not only possible to love Him with all of your mind, but also that you will be most happy and fully alive as you pursue this.

Fourthly, you must not give up. You will not love Him with “all” the moment you set your intentions to do it. It is a lifelong journey He wants you to go on. Trust me, this loving Him with all of your mind will cause you to make many life decisions that will alter the course of your life. It is stunning to me how well He knows us. He knew if He started in the center of man, it would affect the whole man and all that is around that man. Jesus starts in the center, confidently knowing it will shape the entire man into an image of love He could have never attained if He started on the outside. Again we are transformed by the renewing of our minds (Rom. 12:2).

Loving God with your mind includes what you believe about God, His personality, His essence, everything about Him. It includes the pursuit of truth and ideas. It is what you come into agreement with concerning the truth about God, yourself, life, your worldview, your philosophy, and your theology. The mind is the intellect, but it is not only the intellectual, it is also theatrical. It is a movie screen with continual images and a perpetual conversation.

The mind is designed for meditation. It is the doorway to the spirit of man, where God dwells. God gave you an imagination, and the goal is not to overcome it but use it. You will never overcome it, because it is part of your human design, and He created you with the capacity to visualize the Scripture. I will talk more about this in the coming chapters.

I want to love Him with all of my mind, where He becomes my favorite thought. I want Him to be the place I naturally go when I am driving in my car or when I am quietly “just thinking.” I want Him to become my daydream, my natural thought, my first thought and my last. I want Him to be my resting place, and I want to be His. In all honesty, thinking about God is often an effort. He is not a natural thought. I say, “Lord, help me to love You with all of my mind.” The mind has to be renewed, and it is a seedbed where what we sow, we reap; but it is a continual sowing and reaping. He will help us, though, if we ask. He will help us, and He sees the reaching even before we attain the fullness.

H
EART

The mind is where it starts, and the heart is like the undercurrent. Now let me say, it is difficult to try and perfectly distinguish between the mind, heart, and soul. In the Scripture sometimes these terms are used for the same thing with subtle distinctions. I don’t want to spend too much time trying to define each of them and their differences, but with broad strokes I will continue.

We are to engage our emotions in our love for God. God wants more than dutiful service. Our love for God touches our emotions without succumbing to emotionalism. We have a significant role in determining how our emotions develop over time. We can cultivate greater affections for God by setting our hearts to grow in this sphere. We can “set” our love or affections on anything we choose. Our emotions eventually follow whatever we set ourselves to pursue. This involves determining that the primary dream of our hearts is to walk in the first commandment.

As we change our minds, the Spirit changes our hearts and our emotions. We set our hearts first on loving Jesus and causing others to love Him. “Because he has set his love [heart] upon Me, therefore I will deliver him” (Ps. 91:14). David made a choice to set his heart to love God. He determined to love God: “I will love You, O L
ORD
, my strength” (Ps. 18:1).

Our emotions are a very important and powerful part of our life. Thus, God wants to be loved from this part of our life. The heart must be kept focused and clean with diligence. We keep our hearts by refusing to allow our emotions to be inappropriately connected to money, positions of honor, wrong relationships, sinful addictions, bitterness, offenses, and so on. Proverbs 4:23 says, “Keep your heart with all diligence, for out of it spring the issues of life.”

Christianity is an ongoing encounter of love with a Person. Possessing fierce dedication will not keep us steady unless we encounter love at the heart level. We resist being entrenched in vain imaginations that cause our emotions to be progressively stirred by various lusts. We express our love to God by resisting emotions contrary to His will. To love Him with all of our hearts is to have undivided affection, giving Him exclusive possession of our hearts. It is from the heart of man that passion rises, and it is the passion of man that drives him. We want to be obsessed with Jesus, preoccupied with passionate pursuit of Him. This takes a supernatural working of the Holy Spirit. We cannot do this on our own, but we can set our hearts on the journey.

I want to actually feel affection for Jesus when I close my eyes and talk to Him. Even the desire to love Him is evidence of love, not the absence. Our desire for Him is a supernatural gift, and even though our hearts often feel dull or preoccupied with other loves, if we set our love on Him and set Him on our hearts, over time our hearts will be filled with the fire of love. It takes time, though, and it is a battle. If it were automatic, it would not be love. The continual choices we make to daily pull our hearts away from other loves and untangle our affections is love itself. The actual choices, even though they are sometimes painful, are an expression of love and will position us to feel the fire of God over time. Our hearts will actually change.

S
OUL

The soul is your personality. It is what makes you, you. The soul is what makes people different. It’s the angle from which you see life. It is your identity and your unique personality. We realign our identity to be based on our relationship with God instead of on our accomplishments and the recognition we receive from people. Our identity is determined by the way we define our success and value, thus, by how we see ourselves. When we get our identity from our accomplishments and recognition, we end up in an emotional storm of preoccupation with vanity. We most naturally see our accomplishments as very small and unimportant, causing us to feel rejected and neglected by people.

We must define our primary success in life as being ones who are loved by Jesus and who love Him in return. This is what determines our personal worth. We are to be anchored in this truth as the basis of our success and worth rather than in our accomplishments, recognition, or possessions. Our identity must be established on being loved by God and in loving Him in response. Our confession is, “I am loved by God, and I am a lover of God; therefore I am successful.”

We will love Jesus much better with less “emotional traffic” inside our soul. We have to regularly refocus our soul and anchor our identity in our ultimate purpose, letting the secondary things take second place so that we are not tossed on the sea of vanity.

S
TRENGTH

Our strength is expressed through the way we use our resources. We are to love God with our strength, which means instead of our usual way of using our resources to increase our personal comfort and honor. We should also use them to invest directly in building the kingdom. God cares about the love we show Him when we invest our strength into our relationship with Him and in helping others to love Him. We show our strength in five activities, as seen in the center section of the Sermon on the Mount.

1. Blessing our adversaries (Matt. 5:43–48; 6:14–15)

2. Serving (Matt. 6:1–4)

3. Praying (Matt. 6:5–13)

4. Fasting from food (Matt. 6:16–18)

5. Giving (Matt. 6:19–21)

God multiplies and then returns our strengths back to us. However, He does it in His own timing and way. This takes faith that God is watching and that He esteems this as an expression of love. I will develop this more in the next chapter.

Loving God with our strength involves our money, time, physical strength, and abilities. He wants us to love Him in this way, not because He needs our money or contribution, but because when we offer it to Him in love, there are many human dynamics that happen. When we transfer our confidence from our money to God, by giving extravagantly, we are loving Him. When we transfer our rights to use our time the way we want by spending time in prayer and in serving others to show Him love, He sees it.

When we obey the Lord in these arenas of our strength, we press to love Him by giving above and beyond what most would think to give. This is so important to understand because some just think of loving God in a worship service and in a general way of emotion, but we want to love Him with our strength. Our love is tangible and has action in it. We know that even though we are weak, this will take us into a deeper level of love.

I have sought to love Him, and I have found the pressure points in money, time, words, and physical strength. When I surrender these to Him, I feel the pain in my flesh (or natural self) and say, “Ouch, Lord. I didn’t know about that fear I had in money. I guess I didn’t trust You as much as I thought. I want to love You here.” Or, “That was humiliating to not defend myself when I had smart answers to give,” yet I choose to love Him by giving up the strength of my words. I fast and feel the physical weakness but find His strength. He says, “Love Me with all of your strength by fasting in these arenas.” That is what is meant by loving Him with all your strength. I will develop this further in the next chapter.

A
LL

The reason Jesus asks us to love Him with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength is because that is how He loves us. Paul wrote that God’s love is beyond our ability to fully comprehend without the Holy Spirit’s help and the time span of eternity to discover more and more of it (Eph. 3:18–19). We cannot comprehend the vast ocean of God’s love, but when we see His high demand for “all,” we see He is not asking anything from us He Himself does not give. We are equally yoked to Jesus not by the size of our love but by the all of our love. Though our all is small, is it still our all. The Lord values our commitment to continually grow in love. The reach of our heart to love Him moves Him. If we do not quit, then we win.

We come to the place where we no longer find our identity in our failure but in the fact that God loves us, in the gift of righteousness (2 Cor. 5:17), and in the cry of our spirit to love God. Our weak attempts move Him, and this is when life becomes meaningful and dynamic. The purpose of life is to love Him with our all and to be loved by Him. As we are seeing, this is no small task, but it is a life-consuming journey that affects everything about us. We have been given this dignity called the free will. This free will enables us to choose, and when we choose to give Jesus what He wants, it moves Him deeply. The fact that we can move God gives our lives more meaning and more purpose than anything.

T
HE
S
ECOND
I
S
L
IKE
I
T

The second commandment cannot be separated from the first. Jesus Himself said that you cannot say you love Him and hate your brother. Love is a progression:

1. We have to see that Jesus loves us. The Holy Spirit reveals this to us. We only love because we are first loved (1 John 4:19). We cannot love Him until we first see that He loves us. This is why the primary way that we grow in affection for Him is by meditating on His affections for us.

2. We love Jesus in response to His great love for us.

3. We love ourselves. Whenever we see ourselves caught up in the bigger story of Jesus and we see His great love for us, we begin to love Him in return, and our view of ourselves changes. We no longer live in self-hatred, wishing we were someone else or had been given a better lot in life. The reason many do not love their neighbor is because they do not love themselves, and they have envy or annoyance for others. You will never love your neighbor in greater quality than you love yourself in the grace of God.

4. We love others.

This is all supernatural. It takes the operation of the gift of the Holy Spirit. The greatest gift and work of the Holy Spirit in a believer’s life is to pour love into the heart in these four ways. You cannot come into contact with the fire of love and not love others. It is impossible. Jesus loves humans so much He died for them. He is the great evangelist and greatly desires humanity. When we come into contact with Him, we will love others. We will also be formed into His image, and as bearers of His name we will love others as He loves them.

There is a lifestyle of love that enables us to love Him and to love others, but at first glance it seems upside down and backward. Jesus made the way to please Him so simple that anyone can do it, yet few will. It is not too mysterious or far away. He has not been silent as to how He measures us. The challenge is walking it out and staying steady for decades.

5
THE INSIDE-OUT, UPSIDE-
DOWN KINGDOM

J
ESUS DEFINED LOVING
Him as being deeply rooted in a spirit of obedience. There is no such thing as loving God without seeking to obey Him—not because He is a tyrant, but because He knows us best and He knows the best way to bring us forth in love. His commandments are the pathway to love and life. He said, “If you love Me, keep My commandments. . . . He who has My commandments and keeps them, it is he who loves Me. . . . If anyone loves Me, he will keep my word” (John 14:15–23).

“If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word.” What could be confusing about that statement? Three times, within several verses, Jesus makes it clear how He defines loving Him. From Genesis to Revelation He makes it clear. Yet it is strange how nebulous and how blurred many are on this definition. There is no such thing as loving Jesus without seeking to obey His words. It is a deception. It is a religious figment of someone’s imagination and nothing more than religious sentiment. The Holy Spirit will not bare witness to it on the last day, and Jesus will not buy it at the judgment seat. God requires more than singing to Him about love or writing poems about love. He requires more than sentimental feelings.