With All of My Heart

Deuteronomy 6:5 says Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.

For me love has to be expressed, so I had to think about how do I express how I love God with all of my heart, my soul and my strength. For me loving God with all my heart was easier to grasp, because my heart represents my affections. It is from my heart where I express myself, my inner being, and my emotions. The way I would know if my heart loves God would be: How my heart expresses my emotions, what I feel inside, is my heart at peace, is there joy in my heart.

Loving God with all my strength meant that my actions, my efforts what my energy get spent doing represents this part. It is what I do to express this love

What stood out as a challenge for me is how I love God with all my soul. I had to pause for a moment and ask myself what that exactly means.

I have come to believe that loving God with all of my soul refers to offering Him my devotion. The essence of soul is life, personality, inner self and identity. It is where I make decisions and choices that determine the type of lifestyle and behavior I choose.

It means loving God in the way I live every day. My choices in life reflect or expresses what I treasure most.

I have to ask myself: do my choices in everyday life reflect that I treasure God. I know that at times I do and at times I don’t. At times I become selfish, so I realize that I continuously have to question my own choices, their motivation. Loving God with all my soul also speaks about obedience. My choice to say yes to God is based on my attitude to whether I want to do what God want me to do.

The little divine moments and nudges that uses to push me into obedience, that I need to listen to those more and not reason myself out.  I don’t have to allow my fears to stand between me and saying yes to God. God loves me too much to embarrass me so if in my attempts to respond to God means that I have missed the mark, its fine, maybe I heard myself. I can still move on because I have learned that as I respond to each and every nudge I believe it is from God, I become more confident in Him and are encouraged to say even more YESES.

I have come to realize that loving God with my heart is interrelated with loving God with my soul and my strength. The condition of the one love reflects or motivates the condition of the other or even changing the condition of the other.

I choose to Yes to God, I choose to love Him with all my heart, my soul and my strength. I commit to allow Him to expose the insecurities that keep drawing me back.