I have recently been reading through the book Think Orange by Reggie Joiner. It's a pretty good book; I will give a final verdict on it when I finish. The book is about meshing the church and family together, to help kids learn the best that they can about God. A passage that gets a lot of attention in the book is Deuteronomy 6:4-9, which I happen to also have read recently in my quiet time in God's Word. I'll share the passage with you, and then we will look at it a bit and see how this applies to our lives.
"4 “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one! 5 You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. 6 And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart. 7 You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up. 8 You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. 9 You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates." -Deuteronomy 6:4-9, NKJV
Let's start at the beginning. Verse 4 says "the LORD our God, the LORD is one!" Observe that LORD is in all caps; Moses (the author of Deuteronomy) isn't screaming the word "Lord" at us. No, the word is in all caps to show that this use of the word "Lord" is in the Hebrew word "Yahweh." The word "Yahweh" is the Hebrew word for "personal God." He is in everything: our lives, their lives, everything. He exists, and is all over the place. Now, we see that Moses is saying that this personal, deeply-entwined-in-our-lives God is one. He is the only God. There is no other. This distinction and reminder to Israel (Moses's audience in this speech) is for a specific purpose: to remind them that God is everywhere, and involved in everything. The fact that He is so deep within everything in the world makes Him kind of a big deal. In fact, He's the biggest deal ever. Moses wants this idea of God first to preface everything that he would say next. This applies to us, too. As we look at the next verses, let's remember that God is everywhere, and He is the only God.
Ok, so now Moses has established that God is the only God, and He's all over the place. I think I made that clear above. So then Moses says, "You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength." Ok, so once we remember how awesome God is, Moses says to love this awesome God with all of our heart, soul and strength. I could go further into the Hebrew meanings of those three entities, but I'll sum it up by saying that Moses is saying to love God with your entire being. Every. Little. Bit. Of. You.
These words may sound familiar to any of you who have grown up in church, or been in church really at all. Jesus would repeat this statement in His ministry, saying that the greatest commandment is to love God with all of our being (Matt. 22:37). So, if the Savior of the world says that this is the greatest commandment, then it must be important, right? Eternally so.
Observe that Jesus called it the greatest "commandment." A command is something you must follow, right? We are being ordered to love God. That's not an idea Jesus introduced; look at the verse above from Moses. It states "you shall..." By saying that we shall do anything, it means that it is to be a certainty that it occurs. This is a huge, ginormous statement!
We have a God, who is personal, within our lives and everyone and everything else's lives, who is in control of the entire universe. This very same God is commanding that we love Him; in fact, it is His biggest command. The most important thing, if we can't get anything else right, is that we love Him. Ladies and gentlemen, please don't miss this. We are ordered to love God with all of our being. This is our ordered task.
Ok, Bryan, you may say. I get that the all-over, amazing God has commanded me to love Him with my entire being. But what does this look like? Glad you asked. Moses has the answer as we look further into this passage.
"And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up. 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."
Moses says that if we love God, these are the things that we shall do when loving God. We will keep those words in our hearts, memorizing them and applying them to everything. We will teach our children to love God(the part Think Orange focuses on). We will talk about our love for God when we sit in our house. We will talk about our love for God when we are out and about. We will talk about our love for God as we laying down to go to sleep. We will talk about our love for God as we get up in the morning. We will make the love of our God known by every aspect of our life. It will be so obvious that we love God that we might as well have "I LOVE GOD" written on our hands and heads and on our doors and the gates of our house.
Every single part of your life is to scream "I LOVE GOD!" People are to look at you, and see how much you love Him. Everywhere we go, we are to talk about the God that created the world, the God that we have rebelled against, the God that didn't smite us all the first time we sinned, the God that sent His Son (and Himself) to die both for His glory and our salvation from our rebellion. The God that defeated death and rose again. The God that is everywhere, at all times. The God that will reign from a throne, and all will bow before Him.
Do you love this God? Is it obvious in everything you do? Do people look at you and say, "Wow, they love God!" or do they see just another person that disobeys the greatest commandment we have been given?
