Love the Lord Your God

What does it look like to actually follow our Creator’s first command, reiterated by our Savior?

Love the Lord your God

What does it mean to love God? Loving God is not like loving a human. When we love a human, we desire their good, ultimately that they rest with God in Heaven, and we will do what we can to help them get there. What we do, how we help, that changes based on relationship. But God is all good. He doesn’t need our help. We love God instead, because He is the ultimate good, He is love itself, and therefore our wills, in their desire for the good, move us toward communion with God, which is the true final goal of love: the lover desires communion with the beloved. We love God, because He loved us first and created us so we could freely choose to love Him, who is the deepest longing and desire of our humanity.

With all your heart

Our Lord reminds us that we are often driven by our passions (aka emotions). When we express our love through bodily action, we love with our heart. To love with our whole heart means we strive to only allow Godly and virtuous things move us to action and to always avoid evil.

With all your mind

Our thoughts should find their source in Godly things and lead us to Godly things. We should strive to know God ever more fully, and should reject all which is impure or evil and protect our mind from it.

With all your soul

We must love God with the breath of life within us, not afraid to entrust our mortality to His will.

To follow this command, we must learn to seek the will of our Father at all times, and then to follow it merely because it is pleasing to Him. That is what we do for those we love. And it takes a whole life to learn it. But I can’t think of something more worth learning.