Deuteronomy 6:5 And you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. 1. This verse is the meeting point of the law and the Gospel. Very wonderful it must have sounded in the ear of Israel. To be bidden, not only or chiefly to fear Him as the God revealed in lightnings and thunderings and voices on Sinai; not only or chiefly to keep themselves from provoking a wrath so awful, a jealousy so sensitive and so terrible; but to love Him, to love Him as the whole of duty, to love Him notwithstanding — nay, partly because of — His incommunicable glory! 2. The words are very strong, very touching: "With all thine heart." Let the affections, even the emotions, find in God their object and satisfaction. "And with all thy soul." Let the immortal thing within thee, let the everlasting being which thou art, come out towards this Lord God, and devote itself, in the central life, in the moving will, to Him as its Creator, Owner, Father, Saviour, Comforter. "And with all thy might." Not with the feeblest, but with the mightiest of all thy faculties of thought and speech and action — with the mightiest of all, at their mightiest, in a devotion of which man is the priest and self the sacrifice. 3. Two things lie on the surface of the text. (1) The first is, the testimony here borne to God. He asks our love. What an idea must this give of His character! We all know how it draws us towards a man to know that, being active, manly, strong, and supporting many burdens of care, and work, and thought, and responsibility, he also has a warm heart — nay, even is womanly in his tenderness; craves affection; is touched by the response of gratitude; loves love; has even a void place within till love fills it. Does not this raise him in your esteem? The tenderness is the complement of the strength. (2) And what is this love which God asks of us? It is not different in kind, it differs only in direction, from that which we give one to another. Think what love is, as you give it to your nearest and best beloved. Think of it in its spring in the heart; think of it in its course day by day; think of it as it prompts the word and the act that shall give pleasure; think of it as it makes presence a delight and separation a sorrow; think of it as it wrings from your soul the sob of anguish when you have vexed or wounded or wronged the object of it — and there, in those experiences common to all of us, you have the affection which God Himself here calls love, and which He asks of us. 4. And now reflect upon the mighty consequences and inferences of this demand. See how it deals with life — the life of men, the life of nations — in so far as it is received. (1) There is a thirst, in all of us, for liberty. Some men idolise liberty; care not if it run to licence; abhor, not tyranny alone, but authority; ask, "Who is Lord over us?" or mingle truth and falsehood, saying, "Even in religion there can be no obligation." See in this text how God offers liberty. He bids us love. He would make us free by one great Abolition Act. He would strike off the fetters of religion itself. (2) There is another cry of the age — and that is, equality. An impatience of differences; an obliteration of distinctions, clamoured for on the one side — on the other, half-yielded, half-resisted, selfishness resisting — vanity, whether the vanity which would discern, or the vanity which would lead, or the vanity which would please this echoing the cry and yielding. This is one cry of equality. Another is the impatience of God in equalities — those, I mean, which He keeps in His own power: differences of constitution, of fortune, or circumstance; differences which make one man prosperous and another unsuccessful, etc. Now we see how the offer of God's love bears upon all these things. If all may have this — and if nothing but this can satisfy, endure, give peace, or survive death — where is inequality? Where, in a moment or two will it be? (3) It is needless, yet delightful, to record, in harmony with the last reflection, the operation of this love of God upon the unity of the human brotherhood. Philanthropists, as well as revolutionists, talk much of fraternity. Christians know that brotherhood hangs upon falsehood; that only they who love from the heart "Him that begat" will ever love from the heart "the begotten of Him." (Dean Vaughan.) Parallel Verses KJV: And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. |
    |