Rich, deep, and full love

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength. (Mark 12:30 ESV)

That’s a powerfully passionate statement. As Christians, we are to love God with all of our being—with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength. That’s a call for rich, deep, and full love. A complete love, a love-Him-with-everything-you’ve-got love.

God is so passionate about being in relationship with us that He sent His only Son, Jesus, to sacrificially lay down His life through His death on the cross in order to bridge the gap between Himself and humanity. That’s how much He loves us. That’s how much He wants to be in relationship with us.

He’s passionate about humanity. He’s passionate about you. He’s passionate about all of us. And we feel the same passion about being in relationship with Him. As the verse says, “We love Him, because He first loved us.” (1 John 4:19) We could rephrase this concept to say that we are passionate for Him because He was first passionate for us.

To convey His deep love and passion for us, God used language and imagery in the Bible which speaks of us as being married to Him. He said, “Your Maker is your husband, the Lord of hosts is His name.” (Isaiah 54:5) This and other marital metaphors describe the passion which God has for us. It represents the passionate union of heart, mind, and spirit that He desires to have with each of us. [1]

To fall in love with God is the greatest of romances, to seek Him the greatest adventure, to find Him the greatest human achievement. - Saint Augustine

[1] Anchor Cultivating a Passion for God