Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. Deut. 6:4-5

Today we come to the final attribute of three, loving God will all our ‘strength’.

Before we examine this characteristic. it’s also important to note that when Jesus quoted these verses in the New Testament it was not a new idea but something that God’s people were very familiar with. These verses are used as a prayer that is recited by devout Jews on a daily basis. They knew these verses, inside and out, they understood what all the Hebrew words meant, yet Jesus still had to remind them. In our modern Christianity we often mistake knowing or believing something, for living in it. I can ‘know’ all about a celebrity that I have never met, but I ‘know’ my wife better than anyone. Can you see the difference? God does not just want us to know about Him or His word. He wants us to know him and to live in that knowledge.

This is important, as we have already seen ‘love’ is something we primarily consider to be a feeling, however, love is also a choice. I can choose to love someone even if I don’t ‘feel’ like it. Christians often find themselves knowing that they are supposed to ‘love their enemies’ (Matthew 5:44) but let’s be honest, often we really don’t feel like doing that. This is where Loving with all our strength comes in, we must choose to act in a loving way. If love is not physically expressed, is it really love? Love must be enacted! This is true of loving people and loving God, sometimes we must choose to love even when we don’t feel it.

The Hebrew word for strength in the above verse is ‘me-od’. It can be strange word to translate because it means ‘very’. When God had created the world and saw that it was ‘very’ good (Gen. 1:31) it’s this word that is used. It’s mostly used as a multiplier; it adds force to other words. It’s often phrased as ‘great’ or ‘exceedingly’. It’s used twice, back-to-back, in Genesis 7:19 to express the water rising and covering the whole earth, expressing the incredible and overwhelming nature of the flood.

So where do we get ‘strength’ from? Loving God with all your ‘very’ wouldn’t make much sense. In this instance ‘strength’ seems to be the most appropriate fit, we should make sure we love God to the uttermost, to love him with ‘all’ our strength. We don’t just love God by a token amount, on the contrary, we are to love Him with everything. The word can also mean ‘muchness’, ‘abundance’ even ‘forceful’. If the other two characterisers with all our ‘heart’ and ‘soul’ were not sufficient, with all our ‘strength’ implies all our effort. When showing love to God there isn’t such a thing as ‘too much’, Jesus has given everything for us, should we not also love him whole-heartedly in return?

To ensure that we understand this, there is one person in the Old Testament who is said to have achieved this, King Josiah (2 Kings 23:25). He stopped at nothing to ensure he loved God, he removed absolutely everything that would prevent him for showing God love. Will we do likewise?

- Joseph Jones