So often Christianity is seen as a set of rules, regulations or practices that define our lives. It is about performance and believing certain things. But what if all those definitions were wrong? What if being a Christian or Christ follower means that we choose to love God and out of that love seek to please Him? 

There were religious types in Jesus’s day who saw their faith as a set of regulations and they asked Jesus, “‘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.” (Mark 12:28-31).

To follow God is to love Him. But notice how that love is defined. This is an active love that chooses to put Him first in our lives by loving Him with all our heart and with all our soul which indicates our inner being. But that is not all. To love him with all our minds is to choose to bring our thinking and world view in line with His. We often forget that how we think, what we think on, and how we view all of life should be informed by His teaching and His world view. This is what it means to love Him with our whole mind. We are what we think and loving Him means that we seek to think like He thinks and to view life as He views life. 

He continues by saying that we should love God with all of our strength. This is where we put our transformed mind into practice and we make His priorities our priorities and His ways our ways. That is not always easy and certainly requires the help of the Holy Spirit. That is why He says that we are to love Him with all of our strength. We deliberately bring our practices into line with His will even when it is hard. This is an active, rather than passive love that chooses to live like Him to the best of our ability. This moves our love for God from ritual or regulations to one of active love that manifests itself by following him in all of our lives. That is what it means to love Him.

That this is a choice we make is found in his next statement where he says, The second most important command is that we love our neighbor as we love ourselves. What we want for our lives, we are also to want for our neighbors. How we treat ourselves is how we are to treat others. Just as we show kindness and compassion to ourselves, we are to do so for those around us. This changes our relationships with others as we seek the best for them as we do for ourselves. 

Loving God is to submit our heart, soul, mind and practices to Him and to do so in the power of His Holy Spirit who lives within us. Loving our neighbor is to want the very best for them and to actively seek their welfare. All we do for God and all we do for one another comes out of a place of love. Active love. 

Father, help me to love you with all my heart, soul, mind and strength today. And help me to love my neighbor in tangible ways where they see God’s love through me. I want to love you and my neighbor well. Amen.