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| “Love the Lord your God with all your heart…” |
| —Mark 12:30a |
Over the years of blogging, I’ve written several times about the all-inclusiveness of Jesus answer recorded in Mark 12:28-31:
One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”
“The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.
“‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’
“The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”
Jesus points out the depth of devotion expected of His disciples in the four all-inclusive domains of life: spiritual, emotional, intellectual, and physical. Or, to use Jesus' quotation from Deuteronomy 6:4-5: heart, soul, mind, and strength.
Left to our own human abilities, we cannot achieve this level of obedient devotion. We must rely on the power of the in-dwelling Holy Spirit to enable us.
And, all the more so, when it comes to loving our neighbors with the same intensity and commitment that we live ourselves, we need that same enabling of the Holy Spirit.
Today, let us kneel before God and surrender our stubborn human wills to Him. Let us allow the Holy Spirit to flood all four domains of our being with God-breathed love, so that we will be able to love God and love our neighbor.
This kind of obedient surrender is truly the pathway that leads to everlasting joy.
