Wholehearted or “Hole”hearted?

In my previous post I wrote about my recent heart catheterization. As I reported, the test revealed my heart was fine, for which I am very grateful. If you haven’t yet read that post, I encourage you to do so, as you may enjoy some of the more humorous aspects of that experience.

At the close of the article, I listed several Bible verses which speak about “the heart.” While appropriate for my theme, “You gotta have heart,” the kind of heart spoken of in those verses, and throughout the Bible, is not the kind that pumps blood or undergoes a heart catheterization. Rather, when the Bible speaks of the heart, it almost always refers to a person’s will, thoughts, feelings, desires, and so on. We use the word the same way in English, too, as in “You gotta have heart” (courage, desire), or “That person has a good heart” (attitude, character), or “I heart my wife” (love). Our use of heart is so similar to the way the Bible uses it that we usually know immediately what the Bible is talking about when it says, “heart.” In fact, our use of heart likely comes from the biblical usage of the term.

Given that understanding, we turn to what Jesus said when asked about which of God’s commandments was the greatest. Matthew 22:34-40 records what happened:

But when the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered themselves together. One of them, a lawyer, asked Him a question, testing Him, “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment. The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets.”

There’s a lot we could talk about in this passage, such as the attitude of the Pharisees in asking the question; the division of the Ten Commandments into two tables – one dealing with the love of God (Commandments 1-3) – and the other with the love of neighbor (Commandments 4-10); what it means to love God (a feeling, an attitude, or actions?); and what it means to love our neighbor (again: a feeling, an attitude, or actions?). But the point I want to focus on is this: Jesus said to love the Lord our God “with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” What is that all about? It’s about much more than just saying, “I heart God.” The word used for love in this passage is from the Greek word, agape, which transcends feelings to express commitment, devotion, and selfless action. But according to Jesus, it goes even further.

Jesus calls us to love God whole-heartedly. We are to love God without reservation, without conditions, without exception. God wants all of us, and all of each of us. He wants us to recognize him as Lord with our whole being, and to obey him in all he has commanded us. What does that look like? Does it mean we all become monks and nuns (or more properly, monks or nuns) and spend 24 hours a day in the church sanctuary in worship and prayer? Or give all our possessions away and fast every day? Or give our life on the mission field? Maybe . . . As the 20th Century Lutheran pastor and martyr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, put it, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” Talk about following Christ without conditions!

To better understand what it means to love God “wholeheartedly,” let’s look at the opposite, and consider some of the many “holes” in people’s love which show they only love God “hole-heartedly“:

1. The Time Hole: “Okay, so I went to church yesterday. I gave God his due, and now I’m off the clock. As the beer commercial once said, ‘It’s Miller time!'” What’s wrong with this picture? I mean, besides the fact I don’t drink beer? Our relationship with God is not one of many things we schedule or allocate time to. If we truly love God, we love him all the time, not just when the calendar and clock call us to worship. All the time we have is a gift from God, so why do we try to divide it into “his time” and “our time,” as if he didn’t matter during our time? The important point here is not that we spend 24/7 attending religious services in a church building; what’s important is knowing God is with us and present every second of our lifetime. There is no time or place when we are away from him, and there is no time when God does not love us nor want us to love him. Wherever we are, we can keep God in our thoughts and prayers, and honor him with our lips and actions.
2. The Money Hole: Jesus ran into this problem when he encountered a rich, young ruler who wanted to follow Jesus, but wasn’t willing to sell all he had and give it to the poor – “for he was extremely rich” (Luke 18:23). Jesus went on to say that it was difficult for the wealthy to enter heaven because their riches became their priority – the hole in what otherwise could have been fervent love for God. Any time we put money and material possessions before God, we are not loving him completely; when we realize that all we “own” still belongs to God and we are but his managers of that wealth, then we begin to make all our financial decisions according to what we believe God wants them to be. That shows our love for him and trust in him that he will graciously provide all our needs.
3. The Social Media Hole: In previous years I might have called this “peer pressure” or “social pressure,” but just to show I’m hip to current trends, I’m calling this the “social media hole.” Whatever we call it, it refers to people wanting to be accepted by other people, especially by those they like. They don’t want to be mocked or laughed at; they don’t want to seem like a religious fanatic, they don’t want to be excluded; so they go along with even anti-Christian bias in social and public media, leaving God out of the discussion or even dissing him. If you really love someone, you stand up for them, and won’t let them be insulted, even by your friends; but for many there’s a hole in their love for God because they let him be denied or insulted freely.
4. The Plan B Hole: Here the person likes the Christian message, but decides to hedge his or her bets just in case it’s not completely true. Maybe it’s another formal religion, or maybe a philosophy built around science, or maybe they depend on some sense of personal spirituality and mystical experiences. Whatever the “other” plan might be, the person reveals his or her lack of faith in the God of the Bible, and therefore a lack of love. If people truly love God wholeheartedly, then they have no fall-back plan; they so live and trust God that if Jesus is not the way to heaven, then they will be totally lost forever. Are you willing to live under that commitment?
5. The Pride Hole: “Sure we love God, but don’t we have to love ourselves as well? Doesn’t God want me to perform for him, to show him I’m worthy of his love? If I love God, don’t I have to prove it by being religious and holy? God saved me, but didn’t I have something to do with that – something in me that God saw as worthy and lovable?” This is actually a very subtle flaw, in that it sounds good to want to please God; the problem is that by believing I had anything to do with my salvation I actually am despising Christ and his sacrifice. Why did he need to die if I could have been good enough for God without it? Loving God is accepting fully his gift of grace and not trying to make it depend on my cooperation. The song, “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me” (1991 by The Temptations), refers to love between people, not the love God has for us.
6. The Feelings Hole: “I really want to love God more, but I just don’t feel it. I try but I don’t have any deep emotional experience when I pray or attend worship services. If only I felt “my heart strangely warmed” as did John Wesley before he founded Methodism, or felt a “burning in my bosom” as the Mormons say I should, or wept and shook and dropped on the floor like my Pentecostal friends do, then I would feel closer to God.” You can see the error in this thinking. Is my faith and love for God dependent on my fickle and changing emotions (“He loves me, he loves me not, he loves me . . .) or on his promises which find their “yes” in the atoning sacrifice of his Son, Jesus Christ for me? Romans 5:8 should give us all the “feeling” we need to love God: “but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
7. The Knowledge Hole: Maybe we don’t love God fully because we just don’t know him. We have not read his Word enough to know what we need to know about him. We don’t understand the depth of his love for us, the lengths he went to in order to save us, and his bountiful provision of all our needs, including life itself. This ignorance is our fault, especially in this country where we have unlimited access to a hundred different Bibles in every format in our language. For some, the ignorance is willful, because they fear reading about their moral and religious obligations; ignorance of God’s Law is bliss . . . but the Bible says people perish out of their ignorance: “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge” (Hosea 4:6). The remedy is to spend more time in God’s Word, where you will find good news of God’s love that frees us from the judgment of the Law.
8. The Lock-Box Hole: Do you keep secrets from the ones you love? Maybe you’re embarrassed about something you said or did, or maybe you just want your own private area to keep separate. In marriage, it might be a “man-cave” where a guy has and does what he wants in a certain space. Little kids might have a clubhouse with “No girls allowed!” or “Boys keep out!” posted. Adults may keep a lock box to hold their most precious and secret possessions. The problem comes when people treat God like that, trying to keep an area of their life secret from God (as if they could). They’re willing to turn over most areas of their lives, but not everything;
9. The Black Hole: Okay, at first, I listed this just because of the name; I thought it would be cool to include it as a joke. But the more I thought about it, I realized it actually does describe one of the reasons that many people fail to love God fully. These people attribute Creation to natural processes, such as the “Big Bang” and black holes. They divide science from religion, and look to science for the answers regarding the physical reality, and to religion for “spiritual” matters. In doing so they are robbing God of his creative genius and power, and of his ownership over all reality, both “seen and unseen” (Nicene Creed). They are falling into the trap warned against by the Apostle Paul, who wrote in Romans 1: “For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.” (There’s that “heart” reference again.) To attribute the origin of anything God created to some impersonal process apart from him, robs him of the glory due him and diminishes our love for him.

How many of these are playing a part in your affections toward God? Are there “holes” in your heart by which you are holding back on your complete love for our Creator and Redeemer? Are you willing to search out these holes and fill them with true worship and love for God?

Christ gave us Law that day, and it sounds scary. How is it possible to love God so deeply and completely that we can say “with all our heart?” Of course, we can’t. It is an impossible standard. We can strive for it but never obtain it fully. Knowing this, we properly despair at our shortfall. How can we love God? We stand condemned by our failure.

But that’s where grace comes in. 1 John 4:19 tells us, “We love because he first loved us.” Our love is a response to God’s love; Christ came into the world not to condemn us, but to seek and to save the lost (all of us!); and while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. We fulfill God’s commandments, including the greatest commandment – to love God with our whole heart – by believing in the One he sent – his only Son, Jesus Christ. May that knowledge richly bless you, and may your love for our Lord and Savior increase constantly. May you love him, “Wholeheartedly”!

May the Lord bless you and keep you, the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you, the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace. Amen.

Read: Romans 1:18-32, 1 John 4:7-21