Love... with all your heart
Rev. Cynthia O'Brien
Feb 5, 2006
Deuteronomy 6:4-9
DT 6:4 Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. 5 Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. 6 These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. 7 Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. 8 Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. 9 Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.
Mark 12:28-34
MK 12:28 One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, "Of all the commandments, which is the most important?"
MK 12:29 "The most important one," answered Jesus, "is this: `Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. 30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.' 31 The second is this: `Love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no commandment greater than these."
MK 12:32 "Well said, teacher," the man replied. "You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but him. 33 To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices."
MK 12:34 When Jesus saw that he had answered wisely, he said to him, "You are not far from the kingdom of God." And from then on no one dared ask him any more questions.
A boy named Mike was raised in a religious family in San Francisco. As a child, he was not too interested in spiritual things. He was more interested in a pick-up game of touch football, and dreamed of someday wearing a Niner jersey.”
He came to an active faith at a Billy Graham crusade, and still, all he wanted to do was play football. He got a scholarship with the USC Trojans, but injuries sidelined him. He was drafted by the St. Louis Cardinals but cut after 4 weeks. He was picked up by the New York Jets, but during the preseason they let him go.
A girl he had met at Bible camp came back into his life. Kathy strengthened his faith, and Proverbs 3:5-6 became the personal line of scrimmage at which I dug in. "Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding. In all of your ways acknowledge him and he will make your paths straight."
They were married. Then a job opened up in Utah. Mike says, “Some of our friends questioned our judgment in accepting it. But Kathy and I viewed my position as assistant coach at Brigham Young University as a unique opportunity. We wanted to be an evangelical witness to the players, coaches and students on this predominantly Mormon campus. God blessed our motives.”
As his family grew with four daughters, so did his career. He joined the staff of the San Francisco 49ers. He said, “Less than five miles from the Cow Palace where I had responded to Billy Graham's message, Candlestick Park became the stadium where I expressed my faith in God in the course of my job as offensive coordinator.”
When the media began to speculate that Mike would be offered the head coaching position of an NFL team, he prayed diligently.
He says, “When the offers came, it seemed obvious to us that the needs of our daughters must take precedence over my career. I opted to decline the contracts and stay with the Forty-niners. Sportswriters and colleagues scoffed at my reasoning. They said I'd never be approached again.”
But one year later he was ready for it and he was hired by the Green Bay Packers to carry the mantle of legendary head coach Vince Lombardi.
Now the coach of the Seattle Seahawks, Mike Holmgren still trusts in the Lord. He is as passionate as ever for football, and for God. And when he thinks about winning, he remembers the salvation that Jesus Christ won for him on the cross.
Lest you begin to think that the Seahawks are God’s choice for today’s game, the Steelers coach goes to Fox Chapel Presbyterian Church and he makes it to the early service every Sunday that he is in Pittsburgh.
So have you heard the one about the football game where both teams were led by Christians and both teams prayed before the game? A fan seated next to a rabbi asked the rabbi what he thought would happen if both teams prayed with equal faith.
“In that event,” replied the rabbi, “I imagine the Lord would simply sit back and enjoy one fine game of football.”
--
Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.
It’s right in the middle of the Old Testament law, and in the middle of the wisdom of Jesus. It’s central to the Bible and central to our faith. Love the Lord your God with everything that is in you, and love your neighbor.
How do you love with all your heart?
In premarital counseling, it’s not unheard of to see a couple who are so completely infatuated that they believe they will be head over heels every hour of every day for EVER. You show them a graph of the growth of a marriage:
Romantic Infatuation. Dissolusionment. Mature Love.
and they say, “Oh, we’re definitely at Mature Love” when they haven’t begun to feel the stresses and strains of a normal long marriage.
How do you love with all your heart?
Over dinner, wife says to husband, “I thought about you all day,” and bats her eyelashes at him. At that point, he has a choice: Say he thought about her too, or tell the truth and confess he didn’t think about her at all. It’s not that he doesn’t love her, but he just didn’t think about her when he was paying attention to his work.
At Bible study, one woman clutches her Bible to her heart and says, “I just love the Scriptures, I read in the morning, I read at noon, and I read at night. I can’t get enough of God’s word.” Another woman who reveres the Scriptures all of a sudden panics and thinks, maybe I’m not spiritual enough, what am I doing wrong?
David Roche is a humorist and speaker who has a severely disfigured face from a birth defect. He has acquired such wisdom through his life that he now goes around the country speaking and encouraging people who are facing changes and challenges.
His signature piece is called “The Church of 80 Percent Sincerity.” He says,
"Look, 80 percent sincerity is about as good as it's going to get. So is 80 percent compassion. 80 percent love. So 20 percent of the time, you just get to be yourself."
Presbyterian writer Anne Lamott described him this way:
When David insists you are fine exactly the way you are, you find yourself almost believing him. When he talks about unconditional love, he gives you a new lease on life, because the way he explains it, you may for the first time believe that even you could taste of this; because, as he explains it, in the Church of 80 Percent Sincerity, everyone has come to understand that unconditional love is a reality, but has a shelf life of about eight to 10 seconds. So instead of beating yourself up because you only feel it fleetingly, you savor those moments when it appears. "So we might say to our beloved, "Honey, I've been having these feelings of unconditional love for you for the last eight to 10 seconds." Or, "Darling? I'll love you til the very end of dinner."
[For Anne Lamott’s whole article and a picture of David Roche, go to
http://www.davidroche.com/lamott.htm
or http://dir.salon.com/story/mwt/col/lamo/1999/05/27/sincerity/index.html?sid=67603
Those are encouraging words. There are times when we don’t feel love like we think we ought to. Not only for people, but also for God. It’s not something to feel horribly guilty about. It’s something to acknowledge. It’s OK to be where you are.
But I’ll be honest with you: you don’t want to stay there, because loving God with your whole heart is a commandment, the greatest commandment. So here’s how you move forward. The more you are hearing God’s word, the more you are listening to God in your prayers and not just talking, the more you soak up the Scriptures, the more you pay attention to God, the more you will know that you are loving the Lord your God with all your heart, as the Scripture commands you to do.
And when you act on godly principles, you will be enacting your love for God. What does the Lord require of you, said Micah, but to do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with your God? When you help those in need, you are loving God with all your heart. It felt really good to bring a bag of food for SnowCap today. It’s a tangible way of showing love for God and neighbor.
One other thought on loving with all your heart. As a parent of young children, I am often told by older parents, “Enjoy this time. It goes too fast.” None of us can truly appreciate that until the time has gone by, but I do try to heed that advice. And one of the reasons I do is that I am with people at the other end of life, when I officiate at a funeral, and we stand up there with our cup of coffee and a homemade cookie and we say, “I wish I had known him better,” and the widow and the adult children and grandchildren kick themselves for all the lost opportunities.
At the end of your life, what will you wish you had spent more time doing? When a loved one dies, what will you regret not having done or said? We don’t know what tomorrow holds. It can all change in a moment.
So God calls us to love with all our heart. It’s not easy – you may feel it only fleetingly. But inasmuch as it is in your power, love with everything that is in you. In doing so, there can be no regrets.
Let us pray.
Loving God, in our weakness, you have given us a great capacity to love and to receive love. Open our hearts and make us strong enough to love our family, to love our community, and to love you with everything that is in us. We pray in the name of Jesus, who taught us what love looks like. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment