What Does Matthew Even Mean? (Pt. 1)
In Matthew chapter 22 in verses 37-38, Jesus tells us to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.” What does that even mean? There are obvious, surface level answers, but I think that this verse goes substantially deeper than that. And I don’t think that Jesus stated this as a simple suggestion, it sounds like it was a command.
The first part says to “love the Lord your God with all your heart”. Let’s break that down further. What does it mean to truly love the Lord your God with all your heart. ALL your heart. That sounds like the hardest thing I’ll ever try to do.
Because loving the Lord your God with all your heart means that you give God your entire heart, as broken as it is. It means your heart doesn’t belong to any man or woman, it can’t belong to music, you can’t give your heart away to its desires, you can’t love anything more than God. On a practical level, that’s basically impossible for us. Without God, it would be impossible. Because no matter how great He has proven himself to be, we will still take that for granted and move on to the “next best thing”. God is the best thing, whether we realize it or not, or no matter how long it takes us to realize it. Giving our hearts away to Him is the best thing to do. He is the only one who will take proper care of them. He created them.
So what do we do with this? If I am being honest, loving God with all of my heart does not sound fun because of how much I am present in this world. It doesn’t sound fun because I know how much I love my sin and the fleshly desires of my heart when it comes down to it. I admit that. That is why it is the hardest thing. But I know that I have to fight those temptations, evils and desires because I know that deep down, God satisfies my heart, and He is the only one who can. Not to say that other things are all bad, because even I love music, food, my family, and friends to the point where I think I would do some pretty crazy things for them. But the thing is that we can’t allow ourselves to get caught up in all that. The more we get caught up in the earthly things, and caught up loving the earthly things, the harder it is to keep our hearts in Gods hands to love and care for us. So when we apply this, I am not saying that we shouldn’t listen to music, or love our families or get married, because those are wonderful things. I am saying that to give our hearts to those things, or even to get extremely close to those things without giving God His rightful number 1 place in our lives is dangerously easy to do. So we pray, “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one”. And with prayer has to come action, so actively be aware of the intense love that God has for you, enough to where you don’t feel a need to run to those other things even when it gets hard. Instead, you will run to the father.
This was part one of breaking down this verse. Check out part two or three!
P.S. A great song that I recently heard was “Run to the Father” by Cody Carnes. I think the idea of it goes well with the article. Give it a listen:)
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