What does it mean when Jesus says to “love your neighbor as yourself? Do we really have a good idea of what that means? We spend the next three episodes examining the radical call to love our neighbor, the obstacles to love and finally defining exactly WHO our neighbor might be based on Jesus’ teachings in Luke chapter 10.

What does it mean to love God with all our strength? There are 3 ways to consider this. First, strength means well toned muscles. So in order to Love God with all my strength I need a faith and a love for God that is well toned. Another way to define strength is as something that we have in abundance or something that we are particularly good at doing. So loving God with all our strength is to love him with the strengths and gifts he has given me. And a final way to think about loving God with all my strength is to realize- I have no strength of my own- so to love God with all my strength is to actually love him through my weakness and let him work through those weaknesses.

Webster's dictionary defines the soul as the spiritual part of us. The soul is our deeply felt moral and emotional being. These characteristics are only present in rational beings- that would mean human beings. It is our soul that embodies the deepest part of us and it drives our search for meaning and purpose in this world. So what does it mean to love the Lord our God with all of our soul?

What does it mean to love the Lord our God with all our mind? How does our thinking about God shape who we are and how we relate to the world? We started answering these questions last episode as part of our series on the Greatest Commandment: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your MIND and all your strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. Today we go deeper into this aspect of loving God with all our mind by examining three different worldviews that shape who we are and how we think about God. How we think about God will shape how we love Him and each other.

What is the purpose of the mind in our faith? How does what we think about God shape who we are? The Greatest Commandment says to Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your MIND and all your strength. There is an important aspect to our loving God and others, that is more than just an emotional rush. Real love is deliberate. It is purposeful. It is thoughtful and it takes action. Paul tells us in Colossians to “Set your MINDS on things above, not on earthly things.” That means an active portion of our loving God is engaged in thinking and setting our minds on God and the things of God.

What is love? What does it mean to love? What does it mean to love God with all our hearts? In today’s episode we are beginning in earnest our examination of the Greatest Commandment: Love the Lord your God with all your HEART, all your soul, all your mind and all your strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. Love is by definition relational which means that love is not just an emotion describing how we feel. LOVE is a verb- an action word! When we Love God with all our heart then our love in action will look like God's love in action- patient, humble, selfless, persevering and sacrificial.

In this next series of Known and Loved we are going to explore Jesus’ greatest commandment aiming to understand what it means to love the Lord our God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength and to love others as we love ourselves. We will also be trying to understand that this God of ours is EPIC and multidimensional- That’s why we do need to love him and each other with all of these facets of our being.

Spiritual disciplines don’t exist to restrict us, they exist to free us. We enter in them confined and then emerge on the other side finding life and open spaces. We close this series by looking at tips for how to be successful in motivating our hearts to embrace a Secret Life with God, understanding this is how we build intimacy with the God of the universe who knows and loves us. This is how we become conformed to His likeness, and whatever He asks of us is nothing that He has not already done for us.