What does it mean to love the Lord your God with all your soul?
by Kristina Kays, George Fox professor
In Mark 12:30 Jesus states "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength" indicating that obedience to this greatest commandment brings us near the Kingdom of God. This process requires our total being, our all, in the task of loving God, others and self. The soul can be described as the core of our passions, longings, desires, and motivations.
How do we love the Lord with all our soul? Initially we must come to know our passions, longings, desires, and motivations. If we are honest, not all of our souls' longings are pure and well-directed. Although sometimes disturbing, the command is that this facet of self is to be brought under obedience in loving the Lord.
How does this appear if our passion is to create sculpture, poetry or food? It does not mean that the figure, poetry or food must expressly represent God or be a Jell-O mold of a Christian symbol; it means that this passion to create shall honor the Lord, not self, nor intentionally dishonor others. This can be a great stumbling block for us in our heart, soul, mind, and strength. We are self-focused and rarely work naturally to serve others.
Critical in loving with our all is to understand our motivations. We must come with our whole being to loving the Lord. If we withhold a fraction of self, we are maintaining control over some territory and reducing our act of love to directing separate parts, which is awkward and outside the command. These verses emphasize the concept of our whole being, our all. Loving the Lord is to be done with all our heart, our entire mind, all our soul and all our strength.
As the Gestalt psychologist, Kurt Koffka, (1935) stated, "It has been said: The whole is more than the sum of its parts. It is more correct to say that the whole is something else than the sum of its parts, because summing up is a meaningless procedure, whereas the whole-part relationship is meaningful" (p. 176). His proposition applies to our concept of loving the Lord with our all. Our all is a whole-part relationship.
To truly love the Lord, we must not hold back any portion of our heart, soul, mind, or strength, nor ask the heart, soul and mind to love, while preserving the strength for our own self-edification. Loving the Lord with our all our soul is intrinsically tied to loving the Lord with all our heart, mind, and strength. It is turning over the all of our motivation and self to honor the Lord, and finding that in this surrender we begin to draw near to the Kingdom of God.