Loving from the Heart

Jesus was quoting Deuteronomy 6:5 when He said, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart…” He said this was the greatest commandment. How does anyone love God with all their heart? Were the Israelites capable of doing this when God gave them that command? Are we capable of doing that now?

We have been encouraged to do this by many teachers and preachers. I don’t have a problem with the command. After all, God is the One who gave the command. The problem comes when we try to keep this command. Keeping this command is easier done than said. Yes, I intentionally reversed the two.

“Heart” in the context of this passage is indicating the inner man. What is the inner man? That is the part of us which is unseen. Our deepest desires, values, and attitudes come from our inner man. Think of this place as the source of “me.”

When God created humanity, He combined Himself with His creation. Have you noticed there is no command given to Adam and Eve to love God with all their heart? That is because loving God was already a part of their inner man. In other words, their inner man already loved God naturally. They did not need to be told to do what they were already doing.

Adam and Eve’s “me” was combined with “I AM” (Gen. 1:26; Ex. 3:14). When their outer man was behaving, behavior was an expression of their inner man – who was filled with God’s character. They were loving God with all their heart. They weren’t following a command; loving God was natural.

After the fall, humanity lost the image of God in their inner man. Our “me” was no longer infused with “I AM.” When Jesus quoted Moses, He was speaking to an audience who did not possess the character of God in their inner man. Even after reminding his audience of this greatest commandment, He knew they were incapable of keeping the command. A dead man cannot do what a living man can do.

Because all of humanity died in Adam (Rom. 5:12), Jesus came to give life (John 10:10). When He put His life in us, He gave us a new heart that is capable of loving God (Jer. 24:7; Acts 15:8-9). He gave us a heart that values what God values and desires what God desires (Phil. 2:13).

When I attempt to love God with all my heart by utilizing human effort, I can become frustrated with myself because I see my failure more than I see my success. This is not loving God from my heart, but rather from my behavior. It is compared to me asking you to walk like yourself. If I tell you to concentrate real hard, you will stop walking like yourself. You will become too focused on replicating a behavior that, before that moment, came naturally.

God told Ezekiel He would give us new hearts that would contain His Spirit (2 Cor. 1:22), Who would cause us to behave the way He desires (Ez. 36:26-27). Living from our heart is not living from our emotions, but rather living out the godly desires and values God has placed in us (Rom. 5:5; 6:17-18; 10:1).

This new creature has a new “me” filled with “I AM” (1 Cor. 6:17). My capability to love God with all my heart comes from who I am, not what I do. To see loving God with all our heart as a behavioral action is to reverse what God has done. God has placed His love in His children so that His children can love Him with all their hearts. This is why loving Him is easier done than said. As soon as we try to intellectualize loving God, we aren’t naturally expressing love to Him anymore.

If you feel like you are struggling with loving God, what are you looking at as the source of that struggle? I’ll bet you are focusing on your sinful behaviors. You are allowing your behavior to tell you who you are. Seeing ourselves through this lens is conforming to the world. When we begin to see ourselves the way God sees us, our minds are renewed to the truth that we are new creatures who love God with all our hearts.

Look in your heart. How do you feel about God? Do you love Him? If you do, then let that love define your life and how you live it.

“The good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth what is good…” (Luke 6:45a, NASB)

The Way That Seems Right: Knowledge

Is it necessary to know the difference between good and evil? What is the standard of good? Is there almost good, or almost evil? These are important questions.

God told Adam not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. That command alone seems to imply God did not want His creation to know the difference between the two. Somehow that doesn’t seem right. After all, as parents we want our children to know the difference. Why? Because we want them to be able to make “good” choices. Did God want His creation to make good choices? I believe He did.

What do we need to possess in order to make good choices? Our knee-jerk answer is knowledge. We think, “How can I make a good decision without knowing all the variables?” Many times, however, we make a decision believing it is the right choice only to discover later there was something we didn’t know that would have changed our decision.

When God told Adam not to eat, He was essentially telling Adam he did not need “knowledge” in order to make good choices. Rather, Adam only needed God’s life in him, animating his desire to be good. God knew when Adam trusted God’s goodness in him, he would always make the right choice.

I grew up with an understanding that the “knowledge” Adam gained after eating from the tree was God’s standard of good and evil. In other words, what they knew as good was right and what they knew as evil was wrong. This is how we teach our children. We teach them what is right and what is wrong.

Paul compares humans to an “earthen vessel” (2 Cor. 4:7). We are a container designed to be filled with the glory of God. If I buy a gallon of milk, I am buying a gallon-size container with milk in it. When I pour the contents out, I am pouring out milk, not the container. Just like this example, when we display godliness, we aren’t producing godliness – just as the milk container is not producing milk. We are pouring out godliness that is the glory of God.

When Adam ate from the wrong tree, he could no longer contain the glory of God. However, an exchange took place; he now contained a knowledge he could use to decide whether something was good or evil. He didn’t gain God’s knowledge, but rather a knowledge. Adam’s knowledge replaced his former dependence on God’s life. This human understanding (inherited from Adam) is used to decide whether something is right or wrong. It is based on a subjective look at the world around us, instead of God’s objective truth.

This subjective knowledge is easy to observe in humanity today. When you see conflict and wars, differences of opinion, differences in religion and politics, you are witnessing humanity “doing what is right in their own eyes.” People disagree as to what is right and wrong. Some see your right as wrong and your wrong as right. It is a maddening and futile way of living. It is easy to understand why God said, “You will surely die.”

The knowledge fallen humanity uses to navigate life doesn’t come from God; it comes from the world. Yes, education, culture, preferences, tradition, religion, etc. is used to build this knowledge, but it cannot replace containing God’s glory. 

Even believers can choose to depend on this way of understanding to get needs met. This "way" is a fleshly way of living, not the way God designed us to live (Rom. 8:1-8).

Solomon said in Proverbs 14:12, “There is a way which seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death.” (NASB) He also said, “…do not lean on your own understanding.” (Prov. 3:5b, NASB) Isaiah recorded God’s words, “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways.” (Is. 55:8, NASB) God doesn’t want us to depend on our knowledge to navigate this life. He wants us to trust Him. He wants us to walk by faith and not by sight (2 Cor. 5:7).

Only God is good. He is the standard. The only way to access true good is to know God. This “knowing” is more than knowledge gained from reading, studying, and listening; it is intimate relationship with the truth. If you know God, you know truth Himself!

Goodness

What is the hope/desire/goal of the believer? Is it not to be good or be holy? To be worthy?

There are two distinct paths one can take to accomplish this ‘goodness.’ The path most have been taught and practice is to minimize sinful behavior through making ‘good’ or godly choices that will hopefully be pleasing to God. In this path, the historical Jesus is the model to be studied and followed. However, the focus is on sin and how to manage it. There is a constant comparison of Jesus’ lack of sin to our struggle with sin. The distance between the two scream at us, “You are bad!”

This path can produce moments when it seems we are close to being good enough, but there are mostly moments of disappointment because the goal is still very far away.

Where does the desire to be good come from? Do sinful, unholy people want to be good? I don’t think so. Evil is not good, it is the opposite. Evil can want to be comfortable, peaceful, happy, content, but not good. Evil is repelled by good. The desire to be good comes from a place of goodness.

The smaller, less traveled path, is the way of faith. This path of faith is walking without dependence on physical sight, hearing, touching, smelling and tasting. If you could gain goodness through your physical experience, you would not need faith, just more commitment, more energy, more application, etc.

Faith is dependence on the unseen, not the seen. Faith is moving out in life knowing and believing something to be true without the physical evidence. Don’t misunderstand, you can invest your faith in lies, but the results will be disastrous. When we understand who we are in Christ, the truth that we are intrinsically good, we don’t have to ‘try’ to be good. God has declared it to be so.

When we walk this path of faith, we are believing we are good, and then practicing our goodness. As with anything we practice in this life, we will make mistakes – not because we want to. Those mistakes don’t speak to our goodness, but only to the fact that we are truly practicing.

Which path are you walking? Are you struggling with trying to be good? Or, are you practicing your goodness by faith?