← How to Love God
Contents · 7 / 57
  1. Opening Scripture
  2. Preface
  3. How to Use This Book
  4. Study Features and Diagrams
  5. The Greatest Commandment
  6. What Does It Mean to Love God?
  7. With All Your Heart, Soul, Mind, and Strength
  8. Why God Is Worthy of Our Love
  9. We Love Because He First Loved Us
  10. The Gospel and the Transformation of Love
  11. Why We Do Not Naturally Love God
  12. A New Heart That Loves God
  13. Seeing the Glory of God in Christ
  14. Justification, Assurance, and Love
  15. Love, Emotion, and Obedience
  16. Is Love for God an Emotion?
  17. If You Love Me, Keep My Commandments
  18. Loving God When You Do Not Feel Love
  19. Duty, Delight, and the Formation of Holy Affections
  20. The Practices Through Which Love Grows
  21. Knowing God Through Scripture
  22. Loving God Through Prayer
  23. Worship, Praise, and the Lord's Day
  24. Repentance and the Restoration of Fellowship
  25. Obedience in Ordinary Life
  26. Loving God by Loving People
  27. Evangelism, Mission, and Love for God
  28. Loving God Through Suffering
  29. Obstacles, Counterfeits, and Spiritual Warfare
  30. Idolatry and Rival Loves
  31. Legalism, Moralism, and Religious Performance
  32. Emotionalism and the Search for Spiritual Experiences
  33. Distraction, Busyness, and Digital Formation
  34. Temptation, Spiritual Warfare, and Perseverance
  35. Growing in Mature Love
  36. Love and the Fear of God
  37. Loving God With the Mind
  38. Loving God in Community
  39. A Lifetime of Loving God
  40. The Eternal Enjoyment of God
  41. Study and Practice Resources
  42. Key Bible Passages About Loving God
  43. Frequently Asked Questions
  44. Thirty Days: Growing in Love for God
  45. Seven Days for Spiritual Coldness
  46. Why Does God Feel Distant? A Diagnostic Guide
  47. A Flexible Rule of Life
  48. Prayers for Growing in Love
  49. Small-Group Study Guide
  50. Personal Spiritual Assessment
  51. Pastoral Case Studies
  52. Glossary
  53. Recommended Resources
  54. Endnotes, Source Notes, and Bibliography
  55. Scripture Index
  56. Subject Index
  57. Final Exhortation

The Greatest Commandment

With All Your Heart, Soul, Mind, and Strength

~4 min read

Does Jesus divide love into four separate faculties, or does he demand the total person?

Key passages

Deuteronomy 6:4–9; Deuteronomy 10:12–22; Mark 12:28–34; Matthew 22:34–40.

Chapter thesis

Heart, soul, mind, and strength describe comprehensive devotion: every desire, thought, capacity, possession, relationship, and action is to be ordered toward the one true God.

The Shema and the one true God

The command begins with hearing: “Hear, O Israel.” Before Israel is told what to do, Israel is confronted with who God is. The Lord is Israel’s God; the Lord alone is God. Love is therefore a response to revelation. We do not invent an object worthy of total devotion. The Creator identifies himself and claims the loyalty of his covenant people.

The monotheistic setting matters. Total love is rational only if God truly is the incomparable Lord. If he were merely one spiritual option, the command would be excessive. Because all life comes from him, exists through him, and answers to him, whole-person devotion is not fanaticism but creaturely truth.

Heart

In Scripture the heart is not merely the seat of emotion. It includes desire, intention, reasoning, memory, and moral direction. To love God with the heart is to have the inner control center increasingly turned toward him. This includes emotions, but also plans, interpretations, motives, and decisions.

A divided heart may speak orthodox words while secretly living for approval, comfort, or control. The biblical remedy is not self-hatred but prayer for an undivided heart, truthful confession, and renewed attention to God’s character. The goal is integrity: the public and private person increasingly agree.

Soul

The Hebrew term often translated soul can refer to the living person or life itself. Loving God with the soul means that devotion is not a compartment added to an otherwise autonomous life. Identity, mortality, vulnerability, and the whole living self belong to God. Jesus’ call to take up the cross makes this explicit. Discipleship may cost comfort, reputation, relationships, or life, yet the one who loses life for Christ finds it.

This does not authorize reckless behavior or contempt for bodily life. The body is God’s creation and should be stewarded. It does mean that preservation of comfort cannot become the highest command.

Mind

Mark’s formulation includes the mind. Loving God requires truth. Christians are not called to suppress questions, abandon evidence, or celebrate ignorance. They are to think God’s thoughts after him, test teaching, remember his works, meditate on Scripture, and bring every claim under Christ’s lordship.

Yet knowledge can become a rival love. Theology may be used to dominate conversations, avoid repentance, or construct an identity of superiority. The mind loves God when knowledge produces wonder, humility, discernment, obedience, and service.

Strength

The term translated might or strength points to capacity and resources. Love uses time, energy, body, money, skills, opportunities, and influence for God. It appears in calendars and budgets, not merely in private intention. The student loves God through honest study; the worker through integrity; the parent through patient care; the church through generous mission and service.

SOUL life, identity, self

HEART desires, motives, affections

LOVE THE LORD YOUR GOD

MIND truth, memory, understanding

STRENGTH body, resources, action

Important distinction

The terms overlap. Scripture is not offering a precise four-part anatomy of human nature. Jesus piles up language of totality so that no faculty or sphere can be withheld from God’s lordship.

Whole-person devotion in ordinary life

Deuteronomy immediately moves from command to habit: God’s words are remembered, taught, spoken at home and on the road, at waking and sleeping. Love is formed through repeated attention. The point is not decorative religious objects but a life saturated with God’s truth.

Modern application includes deliberate rhythms. What enters the mind repeatedly shapes desire. What is rehearsed in conversation becomes more available in temptation. What is practiced bodily becomes easier to repeat. Christian formation therefore takes habits seriously without imagining that habits regenerate the heart.

Voice from the church: John Calvin

Calvin begins his Institutes by connecting knowledge of God and knowledge of ourselves. That is useful here: whole-person love grows as the creature sees both God’s majesty and human dependence. Calvin’s strength is reverent God-centeredness. His categories should still be tested by the actual biblical contexts rather than treated as an alternative authority.

Chapter summary

The greatest commandment claims the integrated person. Heart, soul, mind, and strength are not competing percentages but overlapping ways of saying: nothing in human life lies outside loving allegiance to God.

Reflect and discuss

  1. Which sphere - inner motives, identity, thinking, or resources - is least consciously submitted to God?

  2. What repeated habit is currently forming your loves most strongly?

  3. How can your ordinary work or study become an expression of love rather than a rival to God?

Practice for this week

Audit one ordinary day. Mark how you use attention, time, money, physical energy, and speech. Choose one small change that makes love for God more concrete.

Prayer

One God and Father, receive every part of me. Direct my heart, renew my mind, claim my life, and employ my strength. Keep me from dividing devotion into a private religious corner. Through your Spirit, make my ordinary life an answer to your grace. Amen.