Dave's Diary

Matthew 22:34-37

Jesus replied: ‘“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” (v.37)

This one verse is spiritual treasure chest containing many beautiful ‘jewels’ of truth and grace. Some of those ‘jewels’ shimmer with practical beauty and reveal truth to us about the importance of worshipping God through our everyday lives. But today’s devotion is limited to lifting out one particular jewel and appreciating its beauty – the jewel that applies to what I would call our deliberate “relational worship”. By this I mean the worship we engage in when we deliberately communicate our thoughts and feelings of honour, praise, gratitude and love for God as a Person … to God Himself. That worship may be individual and private, or it may be corporate and public.

How does one love God with all one’s heart, soul and mind through relational worship? I encourage you to consider your own thoughts on that before reading mine in the next paragraph.

To my mind, relationally worshipping God with all one’s soul means making the conscious decision of one’s will that one will now focus completely on God and offer one’s love, praise and admiration to God – whether one feels like it or not. It is a matter of the will and one’s resolve to put all other loves and all other distractions aside and to apply all of one’s mental, emotional and spiritual energy to giving God one’s absolute and undivided attention and devotion … right now. It is choosing to worship!

Relationally worshipping God with all of one’s mind means spending all the mental energy currently at one’s disposal to focus one’s thoughts on God, in order to think deeply about God, the revealed truth about God, and one’s relational knowledge and experience of God. It means to apply one’s mind to accurately identifying the qualities of God that one has experienced or discovered and which are worthy of honour and praise. It means identifying the ways God has been good, kind and gracious to one in the immediate past and which give one reason to thank God meaningfully. And it means to think deeply about how best to put all of those thoughts into words that accurately represent one’s sincere praise and gratitude to God. It is choosing to worship by truthfully and accurately expressing our thoughts about the goodness, glories and wonders of God.

And relationally worshipping God with all of one’s heart means to dig into the recesses of one’s emotional being in order to discover and then to find ways to express the feelings, emotions and affections one has for God freely and accurately to God. It is choosing to worship God by truthfully and accurately expressing our love and affection to God. This level of worship will often be accompanied by more than just words – actions such as bowing, kneeling, raising our hands to God or even weeping, often accompany heart-expressing worship.

As you journey through today I encourage you to ponder what you might be able to do to worship God more fully with your soul, heart and mind. And may the Lord give us grace to bring Him the worship He so richly deserves … offering all of our hearts and all of our souls and all of our minds to God. Amen.