Love God With All Your Soul

As part of Lent we’re inviting people to enter into practices centred around “The Jesus Creed”:

‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these. (Mark 12:29-31)

In this season we are reminded that God’s love transforms us into people who are beloved to love. Each week we emphasize a different part of the Jesus Creed. This week: love God with all your soul.

The Bible is never abstract and Biblical Hebrew is down-to-earth language and very limber—each word can bend towards multiple meanings. For example the Hebrew word for soul can be translated as “person, self, life.” But it can also be translated as “throat.” The idea is that our throats are how we express ourselves, it’s where we breathe and take in the food and water needed for life. It is the place where we thirst most for God (Ps. 42:1), where God refreshes us (Ps. 23:3), and the place where we express our praise for God (Ps. 103:1).

So the invitation to practice this week is loving God by praising God with all of your soul/expression/throat. Psalm 103 in particular is a masterclass in teaching us how and why to love God with our souls:

“Praise the LORD, my soul [throat]
all my inmost being, praise his holy name.
Praise the LORD, my soul,
and forget not all his benefits…” 
(Psalm 103:1-2)

I invite you to take a moment right now and praise God with your soul.And to help you, you can finish this statement aloud by finding one thing you want to praise God for:

"Praise the LORD, my soul,
and forget not ______”

And if you’re struggling with praising God, that’s okay. You’re not alone. It might seem like a hard season for praise. But here is some clear and gentle wisdom from biblical scholar Ellen Davis: “We cannot defer praising God until we are fully satisfied with our situation. The basic dynamic of praise is not that God gives us something and we say, ‘Thanks.’ … Instead, through praise, we discover how much we have in fact already been given.”

Praising God is precisely how we discover how much we have in fact already been given. Try it this week. Praise God with your soul and discover how much you already have been given.

Invitation to Practice:

• Praise God aloud through your throat. Here are a variety of ways to do this.
• Read and pray Psalm 103 aloud, let it be a guide for you this week.
• Give thanks aloud to God for at least 3 specific things a day (“forget not all his benefits”). Much work has been done by psychologists and spiritual teachers on the importance of practicing daily specific gratitude for our well-being.
• Sing worship songs aloud to God.
• Share and tell others about things you are praising God for.

Michael Yang is the campus pastor of The Tapestry Nights
Photo Credit: @Rainier Ridao