How God Wants Us to Love Him

When experts in the Mosaic Law asked Jesus a question to try to trap Him, Jesus replied, “‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. A second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’” (Matthew 22:37–39 NLT).

Jesus essentially was saying, “Look, I know what you’re trying to do. You are trying to set a trap for Me. But I’m saying to you that if you love God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind and you love your neighbor as yourself, then following the law will come out of that love.”

The Ten Commandments can be divided into two sections. The first section deals with our relationship with God. And the second section deals with our relationship with others. If we love God with all our hearts, souls, and minds, we will not have other gods before Him. And if we love our neighbors as ourselves, we won’t steal from them. We won’t covet what belongs to them. And certainly, we won’t kill them.

Jesus was saying that if you can get this down, if you can love God with all your heart, soul, and mind and love your neighbor as yourself, then following the law will flow from that love.

When we speak of the “heart” in our culture, we generally refer to our emotions. We’ll say, “My mind tells me one thing, but my heart tells me another.” We’re basically saying, “Logically, I see something one way, but emotionally, I feel different about it.”

The “heart” of people varies from culture to culture. The American Bible Society reports that other cultures and languages use different words to represent the core of their being. For instance, in one culture, the core of their being is represented by their stomachs. In another culture, it is their throats. So, in these cultures, they would love the Lord with all their stomachs or with all their throats.

But does loving the Lord with our whole being (heart, stomach, or throat) mean that we merely love Him with our emotions and disengage our intellect? No. In Hebrew, the original language of Deuteronomy 6:5, the “heart” refers to the core of one’s personal being.

Next, to love the Lord with our soul also refers to what we would call emotion. Lastly, the mind refers to what could be translated as “might,” which means “intellectual, willful vigor and determination of mental endeavor and strength.”

So, when Jesus said, “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind” (Matthew 22:37 NLT), He was saying that our love of the Lord should be intelligent, feeling, and willing. And notice God wants all three.

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