Head Over Heels in Love with God

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

~Mark 12:30 (NIV).

With all that we are and all that we have, we are to love God. Being head-over-heels in love, however, is not about the type of girlfriend-boyfriend love of the romance set. It’s effused agape-styled love of the deepest commitment.

This is a love that is to love with every ounce of its being.

It continually thinks of the other ‘Person’ in the relationship and lives continually for ‘Them.’

The First Commandment

Jesus in this passage, of course, boils down 613 laws to just two—the concept is one: love.

The first of these would always lead us securely to the second, of course, for to truly love God would necessitate us truly loving his creation, including his created ones; God so loved the world he gave the world his Son (John 3:16). His Son died to redeem the very last person... that last sheep, though the ninety-nine are safely penned (Luke 15:7). This is God’s love; a love that could never be more committed.

But, first, notwithstanding the second, it is to love God with everything in us.

The First Love

John in Revelation 2 reminds us—via the message of Jesus to the church at Ephesus—not to lose our first love. And yet, I’ve heard more than a few times ‘young’ Christians derided for their fervour and enthusiasm for God; how unfortunate is this? Talk about quenching the work of the Holy Spirit!

Equally, there are many so-called mature Christians who find themselves stuck in a rut, still committed though having lost the passion and intimacy of their first love, implicitly somehow off the growth track. How unfortunate that is too?

And commitment alone—such as above—doesn’t always know the way back. We can see many in their crises of faith in this.

An Appropriate, Timely and Eternal Challenge

Where is our first love right now?

This is an indelible question for every single one of us—every time we ask it. It should echo and reverberate through us continually, together with a safe-held fear of the Lord, lest we forget how important God truly is.

Once we know we daren’t let go of this. Let us meditate on this single verse of Mark 12:30 and then see what God will do!

© 2010 S. J. Wickham.