Loving God With Everything You’ve Got
Devotion to God in the Integral Christian Community
Part Three
Jesus on what’s important
An expert in Jewish religious law asked Jesus an often-debated question, “Which commandment is the first of all?” Jesus responded with the part of the Shema that he recited every morning and evening from childhood on. He then brought it to a new level of importance and application.
He said, “You shall 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, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these” (Mark 12:28-31).
Jesus not only echoed the words written by Moses, but he added the last part from Leviticus 19:18, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Then to top it all off, he declared that everything, all the law and the prophets, relied upon these two commands. Loving God and each other are equal dimensions as our highest calling.
The Shema (Deut 6: 4-9)
The Shema was a twice-daily prayer within Judaism. Traditionally, it includes:
“Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates” (Deut 6:4-9).
These words are inscribed on small scrolls contained in a box called a mezuzah fastened to the doorpost of Jewish homes. The wearing of a small mezuzah around the neck on a chain is a modern adaptation of the ancient custom. Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff, the first Jewish spouse of a president, recently achieved another first in their historic roles when they affixed a white mezuzah to the right-hand side of the doorway of the vice-presidential residence.
This prayer so widely practiced in Jesus’ day that he would have grown up praying it. It was formative for Jesus, and he drew upon it in his teachings. Every morning and evening for thousands of years, the Jewish people have promised to love God wholly when they’ve said the Shema. They were committed to loving God with everything they had.
Loving God with everything you’ve got
How can we love God with everything we’ve got? How can we move toward the Psalmist declaration, “My soul longs, indeed it faints for the courts of the Lord; my heart and my flesh sing for joy to the living God” (Ps. 84:2). But do it not in the style of a king and his court.
What does it look like to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength? Does it mean to try harder? In my experience, many Christians feel defeated by these kinds of commands to love because performance-based Christianity drives their perception of love. Many feel their outward attempts to love God are “never enough.”
Knowing from the Inside
Richard Rohr says,
“Except for the experience of many saints and mystics, religion has greatly underemphasized any internal, natural resonance between humans and God. This gives us clergy an almost impossible job! First, we must remind everyone that they are “intrinsically disordered” or sinful—which then allows us to just happen to have the perfect solution. It is like a vacuum cleaner seller first pouring dirt on the floor to show how well this model works. As if the meaning of this beautiful universe could start with a foundational problem!
Christianity rarely emphasized the plausibility or power of inner spiritual experience. Catholics were told to believe the pope, the bishops, and the priests. Protestants were told to believe the Bible. The Catholic version has fallen apart with the pedophilia crisis worldwide; Protestantism’s total reliance on preaching the Bible has been undone by postmodern worldviews. But both Catholics and Protestants made the same initial mistake, I’m sorry to say. It’s all about trusting something outside of ourselves. We gave people answers that were extrinsic to the soul and dismissed anything known from the inside out.”
In part one, I said love does not respond well to external commands. Although Jesus answered a Jewish question with a Jewish answer in “commandment language,” his life and teaching gave us much more. This gigantic “more” moved us from ought to want to. Jesus constantly pointed to the interior experience and internal motivations of our actions. He demonstrated how God loved him, and therefore, as God’s voice, heart, feet, and hands-on earth, he passed that love on to us.
The Secret to Loving God — Let God Love you first!
We can begin to love God with everything we’ve got when we realize with our mind, heart, soul, and strength that God loves us with everything God has got!
“This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us” (1 John 3:16).
Then John pointed out that applies to God, too:
“We love God because God first loved us” (1 John 4:19).
The entire Gospel story is the narrative of how much Jesus loved us and continues to love us today.
This love is not something to seek or to earn. It always and already resides within us. We are already filled with the knowing that God loves us. We just don’t know that we know it! We are distracted from this wondrous reality by our ordinary thinking and mental activity.
We are already filled with the love of God by virtue of being made in the image and likeness of God. This divine love has always resided deep in our mind, heart, womb-soul, and body strength. As it emerges and manifests itself, we find ourselves drawn to respond with devotion to and love for God in return.
Most Christians know that God loves them. The crucial question is how to experience that love.
How to release that love into our mind, heart, gut, and body.
Devotion to God is expressed in four different dimensions as Jesus outlined them in “all your heart, mind, soul, and strength.” These correspond to ICN’s four centers of spiritual knowing – heart, mind, gut, and feet. What does God’s devotion to and love for us look like in each of the four centers and how does that awaken us to love and devotion ourselves?
We can discover that God loves us in our heart
We’ve all heard the word “love” a million times throughout our lives. There are so many different kinds of love, each evoking a different emotion in each of us. You can love your partner, your parents, your job, your morning coffee. You can love a TV show, a dog, a walk in the park, the stars in the sky. Ancient Greek had several words for love. There was eros or sexual passion. Philia or deep friendship. Storge was family love.
The word used most in the New Testament is agape, unconditional love for others that’s inclusive of love for God, nature, strangers, and the less fortunate. This word, pronounced ah-gah-pay, was the one Jesus used in saying we should love God and others. It is a love of choice, not out of attraction or obligation. This type of love is a steady intention of the will to another’s highest good. Without it, and without intentionality over time, all relationships eventually succumb to entropy and mediocrity. This is the kind of love God has for us.
The Bible and Jesus, using the images and language of friendship, family, and eros, demonstrate God’s love is also the deeply emotional heart love of a caring friend, a tender father/mother, and a passionate lover.
A .H. Almaas is a spiritual teacher who writes about an approach to spiritual development informed by modern psychology and therapy which he calls the Diamond Approach. In Love Unveiled, he explores three dimensions of love: appreciative love--the true liking of somebody or something; merging or connecting love--a force that melts away separateness; and passionate, ecstatic love--capable of consuming us from inside. In their own way, each reveals the beauty and exquisiteness of our spiritual heart. This is the loving heart of God living in and as us. God begins by liking us, then melts away our separateness, and, finally, consumes us from the inside.
This is often first communicated to our hearts by learning about it in the heart-sourced stories, metaphors, and symbols of the Bible and Christian tradition that enhance, connect with and address the intimate face of God-Beside-Us. The story of Jesus tells us a new story of God as a powerful testimony to devoted love. Then, there are stories of the saints and mystics down through the centuries. Finally, there are our stories about how we experience God’s love.
God wants to be a friend who spends time with us — and even parties with us!
Did you ever have a best friend? If you are fortunate, you still have one — or married them!
Friends like being around one another. Jesus told stories about this kind of spiritual love that involved banquets and wedding feasts. We have an image of Jesus as all business. But Jesus was a great partygoer, too. He said life with God is like a party that everyone is invited to (Luke 14:15-24).
Jesus is accused by the religious elite of being a glutton and a drunkard (Mat 11:19; Luke 7:34). How did he gain that reputation? Evidently, by regularly attending banquets and dinner parties!
According to the Gospel of John, his ministry begins at a wedding banquet. The prodigal son’s dad welcomed him home with a party. Later Jesus was to say, in effect, that the kingdom of God is a wedding feast, one gigantic party.
Out of divine longing to connect with us, God desires us, humanity, into existence for the sake of companionship and friendship. In my friendship, God, She/He is much, much better than traditionally made out to be.
Therefore, we must move beyond our feelings of fear of God. The teaching that most older Christians received about God induced fear of God rather than the feelings invoked by the term “friend.” Human friendship may be one of the best analogies for what God wants with us.
Let God love you as your best friend.
God is like a loving father and mother who tenderly care for us.
It is striking Jesus called God his daddy, Abba, the term of endearment used by both children and adults for their father. The Bible is full of metaphors, “friends,” “disciples,” and “followers.” But the use of terms referring to family relationships far outnumber the rest.
These are loving relationships, not business or economic ones. We are God’s children, not God’s employees or customers.
Let God love you with tender, strong, motherly-fatherly love.
God is a Lover
As I pointed out in my last article, within the Christian tradition, metaphors of bride and bridegroom, also referred to as mystical marriage, are prominent New Testament portrayals of intimacy with Jesus. God’s reign is like a wedding banquet, not a coronation. This tradition, in turn, traces back to the Hebrew Bible, predominantly allegorical interpretations of the erotic Song of Songs.
We are called Jesus’ bride, betrothed, and beloved (Matt 9:15, Mark 2:19, Luke 5:34, John 3:29, Rev 21:2,9-10). Jesus is a lover, bridegroom, and husband. The saints have also weighed in on this topic. St. John of the Cross wrote beautiful poetry that paints God and the soul as Lover and Beloved, respectively. The Book of Revelation repeatedly mentions the appearance of the Bride.
“And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.”
“I belong to my lover, and my lover belongs to me” (Song of Songs 6:3).
We experience this in our hearts but also in the eros energy our wombs, which we’ll explore more next week.
Let God love you passionately.
Let your heart feel close to Jesus. Get to know him. Feel his love radiating toward you. Feel his devotion to you. Yes, that’s right. Jesus is devoted to YOU. Why do you think he lived his life the way he did? Why do you think he spoke up for the oppressed, leading to his death on the cross? Why was he dedicated to teaching liberating ways and training others to spread his message? Jesus revealed that God loves us as friend, family, and lover. Why do you think he came back from the dead to be present with you in his spirit body, to love and care for you?
As you absorb God’s love in your heart, you’ll find your own love and devotion being further awakened in return — in your heart and whole being. And you’ll find yourself awakened to loving God with everything you’ve got.
Practice: God in Three Dimensions
WORDS FOR INDIVIDUAL USE:
Infinite God beyond me, in whom I live and move and have my being.
Intimate God beside me; you are always with me.
Inner God being me: I am the light of the world.
Infinite God beyond me, in whom I live and move and have my being.
Intimate God beside me; you are always with me.
Inner God being me: I am the light of the world.
WORDS FOR GROUP USE:
Infinite God beyond us, in whom we live and move and have our being.
Intimate God beside us; you are always with us.
Inner God being us; we are the light of the world.
Infinite God beyond us, in whom we live and move and have our being.
Intimate God beside us; you are always with us.
Inner God being us; we are the light of the world.
Here is a link to God in Three Dimensions video
Sing along with it in your devotion time. Your group can sing along (everyone’s mute on, please) with my former church congregation in the video for a gathered integral “church service” experience. (You may notice that we are doing an older hand movement of God Being Us with our hands on our hearts. We had yet to learn that our spiritual womb is the primary source of our divine identity.) Here are the words to the new hymn.
GOD IN THREE DIMENSIONS
Music by Jean Sibelius (“Finlandia”)
Words by Wanda Heatwole
Concept by Paul Smith
Infinite God, beyond our comprehension
in whom we are, and live and move.
O Divine Mystery, O vast Creator,
Infinite God, we stand in awe of you.
O Divine Mystery, O vast Creator,
Infinite God, we stand in awe of you.
Intimate God, each day you’re always with us.
Emmanuel, a God who’s always there.
Jesus, our guide, our friend, and our model,
Intimate God, we offer praise to you.
Jesus, our guide, our friend, and our model,
Intimate God, we offer praise to you.
O Inner God, within us as our true self,
energy cosmic, light divine.
We are your shining light to the whole world.
O Inner God, we now give thanks to you.
We are your shining light to the whole world.
O Inner God, we now give thanks to you.
O God, revealed in three dimensions,
as divine mystery, friend, and light.
You’re ever-present, with us as we journey,
Infinite, Intimate, and Inner God.
You’re ever-present, with us as we journey,
Infinite, Intimate, and Inner God.