Importance: 70%
The Big Idea
How do we actually love God with our Whole heart?
Related Epistle: The Struggle to be in God’s Word
The Impossible Task
(Used in OS📃Epistle Feb 2022)
Living a Christian life, especially the proper shape and rhythm of devotional practices, has been a question on the minds of believers ever since the beginning. Christians from all over the world have painted pictures of an ideal Christian life ranging from living alone in the desert, to faithfully carrying out one’s daily tasks in the midst of normal life. But no matter the final picture of what a good Christian life should look like, things eventually come back to the underlying issue. What is the point of living? What are humans actually created to do and be?
The answer to these questions can be found quite clearly in the iconic sermon of Moses held in the book of Deuteronomy:
“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.”
- Deuteronomy 6:4-9
Love God… What does it mean to Love God? It is a question that sits at the heart of all Christian life and expression. It is something I have found myself completely unable to understand in my own personal life. Either, I obsessively drive to express this full bodied love with puritanical regularity and sterile structure. In this obsessive drive to “love” God, what should be times of devotion become grudging chores of obligation, or mindless repetition. But when desperately trying to avoid this, I relax into apathetic forgetfulness, wandering around, struggling to find the time, energy, or will to approach such a lofty task as loving God with my whole being. There seems to be no inbetween. A basic human ineptitude to even begin this journey of being. The more I have learned, the scarier this reality has become – everyone who says they have figured it out are just plain lying. There is no guru or path to enlightenment. We sinful humans have no commonality with a holy – perfect – God. Yet at the same time, this is the same God who spoke us into existence. The one who is the source and sustainer of our very life, without Whom we would be less than nothing: uncreated, formless, and void.
This dissonance is not something that can be dismissed. It is a basic part of our human conundrum. An element that finds expression in every area of our lives. It is a problem that screams for an answer. The answer that so often seems to be: “try harder,” “spend more time,” “just be a better person.” Yet no matter how hard we try, nothing but failure and disappointment lie down those roads. The words of Isaiah are bitter truths in our ears: “We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment.” - Isaiah 64:6
Our human inability to love God is summed up succinctly in the words of R.C. Sproul in his book The Holiness of God:
“How can we love a holy God? The simplest answer I can give to this vital question is that we can’t. Loving a holy God is beyond our moral power. The only kind of God we can love by our sinful nature is an unholy god, an idol made by our own hands. Unless we are born of the Spirit of God, unless God sheds His holy love in our hearts, unless He stoops in His grace to change our hearts, we will not love Him.”
The radical power of the Gospel is that it makes the impossible possible. In and of myself there is no love for God. I can work and toil, sweat and groan but the works of my heart crumble into dust in my hands. But through the work of Jesus, there is another way. All humans are moving in a direction. In our sinful condition we are moving away from God. The fractures of sin and evil threaten to pull us apart piece by piece, hurtling us ever closer to the uncreated chaos of nothingness. In the words of St. Athanasius:
“Evil has not from the beginning been with God or in God, nor has any substantive existence; but that men, in default of the vision of good, began to devise and imagine for themselves what was not.”
- Contra Genetis §7
In essence, evil and sin is striving for what is not. Desiring and seeking after what God has not created and is not good. To love God is to be completely recreated. Pulled, not toward nothingness, but toward connection with the maker Himself. It is in God alone that we find order for our disorder, peace for our chaos, wholeness for our fractured beings. It is in returning to the origin of our creation that the Creator teaches us how to love again. Apart from Him we have nothing, especially not love.
In life this looks like a constant journey to return to the lost reality of God’s good creation. Yet this reality is not lost, it is here now in the work and will of Jesus. Not just being restored, but reimagined and recreated by the powerful hand of God. Here in this life we see and experience but a taste of this cosmic reorientation. May the Holy Spirit turn our hearts to enter into this love that surpasses understanding. Amen.
“We love because he first loved us.” - 1 John 4:19