Trail Life Meditation: Strength and Loving Your Neighbor

<I was asked to give a meditation, for my son’s Trail Life group, on “strength” as it relates to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength…” as well as the commandment to “love your neighbor as yourself” that we find in Mark 12 and Luke 10. It’s my first time preparing something like this for a group outside of my church or blog. I’m hoping I fulfilled the brief.>

As we’ve been talking about all weekend, in the book of Mark, Jesus is asked what the greatest commandment is and He replies, “Love the LORD your God with all your heart, mind soul and strength.  We’ve heard about loving God with ALL our heart, mind, and soul, but it was a puzzled to me to figure out what it means to love God with all our strength.

When we think of someone who possesses great strength we think of bodybuilders like Arnold Schwarzenegger or maybe wrestlers like The Rock and Jon Cena.  We think of super heroes like the Incredible Hulk or Thor.  It didn’t seem quite right to think that God wants every one of His children to be body builders and love Him with how much they can deadlift or bench press.  

So, I did what I normally do when something doesn’t quite make sense.  I looked up the word “strength” in the original language.  Here in the book of Mark the Greek word for strength can mean physical strength, energy, or force.  What do we use our muscles, and our energy for?  Our force or our will?  To DO things, to take action.  We are our heart, mind, and soul.  Our strength then is what we choose to do, the actions we take.  

Now, this command quoted here is originally given in the book Deuteronomy, and the Hebrew word for strength takes this even further.  In that language the word can mean your talents as well as any object you happen to have in your hand.  So, the command is that we love the LORD with all our actions and being.  In everything we think, feel, are, choose to do, and even with everything we pick up; with all of our actions and being…we are commanded, not asked or suggested, we are commanded to Love Him with it.

AND THEN Jesus gives them a bonus great commandment.  

He declares that the second greatest is like the first.  Love your neighbor as your self.  

On one level we understand this command.  We talk about being kind, being respectful, being courteous.  Back in the day, boys like yourself were encouraged to aim at doing at least one good deed daily.  Jesus gave us the Golden Rule that I’m sure you all know says to do to others as you would have others do to you.  But is this command just politeness?  Is it just saying we should be “nice”?  As usual with Jesus, He always calls us to go further than being “nice”.  

How is loving your neighbor as yourself LIKE the first commandment to love the Lord your God with all your heart mind soul and strength?  We understand that God is worthy of our entire being, worthy of being loved with all of our thoughts and actions.  So how is loving our neighbor LIKE that first commandment?  

How is it that we love God?  We show our greatest love for Him we do things that He tells us to do in his scriptures.  If we think about what He asks us to do we realize that what He is really calling us to do is to be like Him.  To do things the way He does, to be motivated by what motivates Him, for our goals to be like His.  The Apostle John tells us not simply that God loves us, but that HE IS LOVE.  He wants us to Love those around us the way He loves.

In the gospel according to Luke that recounts this event, the man immediately asks the question, “Who is my neighbor?”  Loving God is all well and good.  He saw that first commandment as easy compared to the second.   Jesus gave an answer in the form of the Parable of the Good Samaritan.  Your neighbor is not just people you like.  It can be family, friends, strangers, people with strange customs or beliefs, bullies, personal enemies, and even enemies of your nation.  What makes it even more complicated is that we are not just called to “like” them or “be nice to them”.  We are called to Love them the way God loves them, which means to have deep compassion for them and to seek their ultimate good, regardless of how you feel about them.  Your neighbor is literally anyone within the immediate area.  Anyone you can see is your neighbor.

And that is call, the great quest, of the Christian life. This is the command given to all followers of Jesus that we are to aspire to every day for the rest of our life.