Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. – Deuteronomy 6:5
This is one of those verses we hear often in Christian circles. It is familiar, poetic and sounds good, and for that reason, I think it is easy to skim over with little attention. Today, as I read it again, God stopped me in my tracks and asked me “do you?” There is a little word in there that makes a huge difference. It is the word “all”. More often, the truth is that I love the Lord with some (maybe even most) of my heart, some of my soul, and very little of my strength.
I’m so grateful for God’s grace—that He loves me and continues to work in me in spite of myself. My prayer is like the father in Mark 9 who said “I believe. Help me overcome my unbelief”. I say to the Lord “I love you, help me to love you with all of me.”
I’m reminded of this “quality” story I heard one day:
The facilitator talked about reaching a 99.999999% success or approval rate. Most people find 99.99% success seems like a high quality product. Applied to airline flights (30000 flights per day, 365 days per year = 10,000,000+ flights), 99.99% success means .01% failure, or 1,095 plane crashes per year, or 3 crashes PER DAY.
We may not be crashing planes be being “pretty good” and mostly obedient, but we do not know what we’ve missed or how far off course we’ve driven ourselves by not giving “all”.
Fortunately, God allows for course corrections. In fact, given our nature to fall off course (sin), constant course corrections are mandatory.