⁵ Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. ⁶ These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts.Deuteronomy 6:5-6

At first glance God’s command to love Him with all your heart, soul and strength seems simple. As I pray and ask God for a deeper meaning of this verse, I learn that it is anything but simple. On any given day, I begin spending time with God – reading His word and centering myself on His truths to focus me for the day. At that moment all is well with this world. As I move out of my prayer time, somedays I am immediately jolted to reality by the routines of daily life – getting lunch ready and finding out the bread is moldy, packing my bag for school (I am a teacher) and searching frantically for the cute idea that I downloaded last night and cannot find anywhere in the morning or my son asking a question that at that moment I feel I just don’t have time for. Now my day is on warp speed in order to get to work on time and be ready for 25 third graders to walk through the classroom door. The calm prayer time has quickly derailed and a train wreck is in sight. How can I still love God with all my heart, soul and strength when my focus has been scattered by the mundane nuances of my life? For me the first answer is to:

1. Breathe – just breathe!

In that act of breathing in deeply, I am breathing in God and asking Him to fill my very being with His love and strength. As I breathe out, I am whispering my prayer to God asking Him to focus my heart, soul and strength on Him and Him alone.

2. Don’t make this harder than it is!

The second thing is to look at the command in Deuteronomy 6:5 – God requests three things from us – to love Him with all our heart, soul and strength. God does not mean for this to be hard but instead simple. The Faithlife Study Bible describes this verse in the following way: “with all your heart and soul” should not refer to separate arts of the human person. The terms heart and soul overlap and encompass all of our emotions and intellect. The word “strength” or “might” in Hebrew is an adverb meaning exceedingly. Yahweh’s love is the whole package and He asks for us to worship Him with undivided loyalty – no spilled coffee moments or running on warp speed to catch up should get between us and God. Simply put we should be faithful to God in our thoughts, words and actions.

3. Pray!

Lord I need you! Those four simple words have pulled me through more mini-crises than I can count. The time that it takes to breathe out “Lord I need you” is enough time to change my perspective and focuses my sight back on God. Take that time because a change in focus causes a change in perspective.

Remember that God’s command to love Him with all your heart, soul and strength sounds simple but for the times that it is hard, He is always by our side ready to lift us up in grace, strength, love and whatever else we need.

The graphic above is courtesy of Proverbs 31 OBS (Online Bible Study). The post is a reflective response to the verse Deuteronomy 6:5 which evolved out of the current study that I am involved in based on Lysa Terkeurst’s book What Happens When Women Say Yes to God Experiencing Life in Extraordinary Ways.

I’m linking with Proverbs 31 OBS today!

If you would like to learn more about this study and saying #YestoGod click the links below:

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