All Your Heart – The Kingdom Curriculum XV (4)

All Your Heart

The great commandment

And He said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and the first commandment.” Matthew 22:37, 38

“You will seek Me and find Me. When you seek Me with all your heart, I will be found by you,” declares the LORD…. Jeremiah 29:13, 14

How Much Do You Love It?

Loving God, and seeking Him, begins in the heart. The heart is that part of the soul that generates our affections–longings, desires, feelings of love, hope, and so forth. If the set of our hearts is not right, it will be difficult to persuade our minds, consciences, or bodily members to do anything worthwhile. The heart is the heart of the matter in the way we live, as both Jesus and Solomon acknowledged (cf. Mt. 15:18, 19; Prov. 4:23).

Many of us, perhaps most, are not very good housekeepers when it comes to our hearts. We allow all kinds of secondary interests to take primacy of place in our affections. We love our sleep, our morning coffee and breakfast, our work and leisure time. And because we love these things so much, they’re what occupy our thoughts, guide our choices, and demand our strength. So where does loving God and seeking Him fit into so cluttered a heart?

God defines the kind of seeking it takes in order to find Him as engaging every ounce of attention our hearts can muster. Only when He is the commanding object of our devotion–the driving force for all our seeking–the sine qua non for everything that will satisfy us in life–only when this is true will we be engaged in seeking God the way He requires.

But how do we learn to love God like that? First, put away everything that distracts you from Him, or, at least, put them in their proper place on the shelves and in the closets of your heart. Then, arrange the activities of the day–those things that have a legitimate claim on your affections for this day–in the light of His presence. That way, as your affections warm to these daily activities and duties, your heart will begin to warm through them to God, the Giver of every good and perfect gift. Then, turn up the heat of your passion toward God with lavish thanksgiving and intercession for the business of the day. Now you’re getting there.

Learn to love God more by meditating in His Law daily. You can order your copy of The Law of God today and take up this discipline with joy. Go to www.MyParuchia.com, point your browser to “Publications,” then click on the drop-down option, “Waxed Tablet Publications.”

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In the Gates is a devotional series on the Law of God by Rev. T.M. Moore.

T.M. Moore is editor of the Worldview Church. He serves as dean of the Centurions Program of the Wilberforce Forum and principal of The Fellowship of Ailbe, a spiritual fellowship in the Celtic Christian tradition. He is the author or editor of twenty books, and has contributed chapters to four others. His essays, reviews, articles, papers, and poetry have appeared in dozens of national and international journals, and on a wide range of websites. His most recent books are The Ailbe Psalter and The Ground for Christian Ethics (Waxed Tablet).

Scripture quotations in this article are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, (c) copyright 2001,2007 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Editor’s note: The use of a translation other than the Authorised Version in an article does not constitute an endorsement in whole or in part by The Christian Observer.