Part 1: Do I Visit God—or Live With Him?

Learning to Say, “Come With Me, Lord”

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Synopsis

Jesus said the greatest commandment is to love the Lord our God with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind, and all our strength. But how do we actually do that? How do we make ourselves love God more when the desire is there, but the flesh keeps getting in the way?

Fifteen years ago, I was praying and telling God how much I loved Him. My business was doing well. My family was doing well. I was sober, and life seemed good. Then a question entered my mind that stopped me: “Do you really love Him?” When I searched my heart, I realized I was grateful to God, but I did not truly love Him. So I admitted it: “Lord, I don’t love You.” I expected anger. Instead, what followed changed my relationship with God forever. The message I understood was simple: “Of course you don’t love Me, because you don’t know Me. Now we can start working on that.”

Since that night, I have spent years asking questions because I wanted to know the God I claimed to love. But recently another question emerged. Perhaps knowing God is only part of what Jesus meant. What does it mean to love Him with all of me?

In this episode, I investigate the words Jesus used—heart, soul, mind, strength, and especially the word “all.” I examine how Abraham, Moses, David, Daniel, Mary, Peter, Paul, and Christians who came after them actually lived their love for God. Again and again, a pattern emerges. They did not manufacture stronger religious feelings. They learned to trust, surrender, abide, obey, return, and include God in increasingly larger portions of their lives.

Perhaps loving God is not about adding more religious activity to our schedules. Perhaps it is about ending the division between our time with God and the rest of our lives. Scripture speaks of God when we sit down, when we walk, when we lie down, when we rise, when we eat, when we drink, and in whatsoever we do. God was never meant to be someone we visit during prayer and then leave behind when ordinary life resumes.

What if loving God with all of ourselves means bringing Him into all of it—the work, the family, the decisions, the pleasures, the disappointments, the temptations, the money, the ambitions, the failures, the questions, and even the parts of ourselves that still resist Him?

Maybe the prayer does not need to be complicated.

Maybe it begins with four words:

“Come with me, Lord.”

Monologue

Last night, I found myself thinking about something Jesus said that I have heard for most of my life. When He was asked which commandment was the greatest, He answered, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.” In Mark, we are also given the words, “and with all thy strength.” I have read those words countless times. I have taught about loving God. I have told God that I love Him. But last night one word would not leave me alone. The word was “all.”

All my heart, all my soul, all my mind, and all my strength. Suddenly, I wasn’t thinking about whether other Christians were doing this. I was looking at myself. I started examining my own life and asking a question that was surprisingly difficult to answer. Am I actually loving God with all of me? I know that I love Him. I know that I want to love Him more. But wanting to love someone more and knowing how to do it are two different things. I can make myself perform an action. I can make myself pray, read Scripture, fast, give, or serve. But I cannot simply command my heart to feel more love.

That question took me back about fifteen years to one of the most important prayers of my life. At the time, things were good. My business was doing well. My family was doing well. I was sober. Life seemed fair to me, and I had so much to be thankful for. One night I was praying and telling God how much I loved Him when a question came into my mind that I knew wasn’t my own thought: “Do you really love Him?” I stopped and thought about it, and when I became completely honest with myself, I knew the answer.

I was thankful to God. I appreciated what He had done for me. I was grateful for my sobriety, my family, my business, and the life I had been given. But gratitude and love were not necessarily the same thing. I realized that I was thanking God for what He had done while claiming to love someone I really didn’t know. Finally, I said something I was almost afraid to say: “Lord, I don’t love You.” I thought He would be angry with me. After all, I had just admitted that I was failing at the commandment Jesus called the greatest of them all.

Instead, in my spirit, it was as though heaven erupted. I heard what sounded like millions of angels celebrating, almost like somebody had just kicked the winning field goal. I was confused because that was the opposite of what I expected. Then the Lord told me, “There you are. We have been waiting for this moment for a long time. Of course you don’t love Me, because you don’t know Me. Now we can start working on that because you were finally honest with yourself.”

That experience changed the direction of my life because I realized something incredibly simple: how can I truly love someone I don’t know? I can believe in someone I don’t know. I can obey someone I don’t know. I can fear someone I don’t know. I can be thankful to someone I don’t know. I can even spend my life studying information about someone without really knowing that person. But genuine love requires relationship, and relationship requires knowing the person I claim to love.

So I started asking questions. I have been asking questions ever since. I wanted to understand why God does what He does. I wanted to understand His character. I wanted to understand why certain things happened in Scripture. I wanted to understand Jesus. I wanted to know what makes God angry, what brings Him joy, why He corrects us, why He forgives us, why He allows certain things, why He tells us not to do other things, and what He actually wants from us. Underneath thousands of questions was really one question I had been asking for fifteen years: “Who are You?”

Then last night, something changed. After all these years of trying to know Him, I wasn’t asking anymore whether I love God. I believe I do. Instead, I found myself asking whether I love Him the way He asked me to love Him. Am I loving Him with all my heart, all my soul, all my mind, and all my strength? And if I’m not, how do I do that? The desire is there. The want is there. But so is my flesh.

That led me to another question. Christians often speak about human beings as body, soul, and spirit, and Scripture itself can use that language. Yet Jesus didn’t say to love God with your body, soul, and spirit. He spoke of the heart, soul, mind, and strength. I began wondering whether Jesus was not trying to describe the parts from which a human being is constructed at all. Maybe He was describing the extent to which a human being belongs to God. Maybe the most important word in the commandment is the word I had been reading past all these years: “all.”

Then another problem appeared. Scripture tells me that I cannot earn salvation through works. Christ accomplished what I could never accomplish. Jesus says that He chose us. Paul says that God works within us both to will and to do according to His good pleasure. Galatians says that love itself is fruit of the Spirit. If God chooses, Christ saves, the Spirit produces the fruit, and God is even working within my willingness, then what exactly am I supposed to do? If God says He will do the work, why does He continually command me to do something?

Jesus gave us a picture that may answer that question when He described Himself as the vine and us as the branches. A branch does not manufacture life. It receives life from the vine. The branch cannot grit its teeth and force itself to produce grapes. Yet Jesus still gives the branch an instruction: abide in Me. Remain with Me. Stay connected to Me. The fruit does not come because the branch becomes powerful enough to produce life on its own. The fruit comes because the branch remains connected to the source of its life.

That made me wonder whether I have been asking the wrong question. Maybe the question is not, “How do I manufacture more love for God?” Maybe the question is, “How do I remain with God so that He can produce within me the love I cannot manufacture?” God works, but I respond. God leads, but I follow. God convicts, but I repent. God teaches, but I listen. God opens the door, but I walk through it. God produces the fruit, but Jesus tells me to remain attached to the vine.

Then I began looking at people who actually lived this. Abraham brought God into his future and trusted Him when he could not see where the road was going. Moses kept returning to God and eventually asked to know His ways. David brought God his worship, his fear, his anger, his failures, his repentance, and his victories. Daniel brought God into the ordinary rhythm of every day. Mary sat at the feet of Jesus and listened. Peter discovered that saying he loved Jesus eventually meant caring for the people Jesus loved. Paul surrendered the direction of his life and learned to follow.

I saw the same pattern when I looked at Christians who came much later. In Colin Whittaker’s Seven Pentecostal Pioneers, the men he describes were not copies of one another. Some were evangelists, some teachers, and some missionaries. Their personalities and ministries were different, yet Whittaker repeatedly describes lives marked by prayer, surrender, persistence, obedience, and a willingness to follow God when following became costly. Their love for God did not produce identical lives, but it repeatedly produced lives increasingly placed at God’s disposal. 

Then something finally clicked for me. Maybe loving God isn’t primarily about how often I visit Him. Maybe it is about whether I take Him with me when I leave. I can pray in the morning and then go live the rest of my day as though that conversation ended when I said amen. I can read my Bible and close it. I can attend church and go home. I can spend hours studying God and then make my business decisions without including Him. I can call for Him immediately when something goes wrong and barely acknowledge Him when everything is going right. Without even realizing it, God can become someone I visit.

But when I went back to the command in Deuteronomy, I noticed what surrounds it. God speaks about His words when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up. He talks about teaching them to your children and putting them around your home. These are not descriptions of extraordinary religious moments. These are descriptions of ordinary life. Sitting down, walking somewhere, going to bed, waking up, talking to your children. God was not describing visiting hours. He was describing a life lived with Him.

Paul says something similar when he tells us that whether we eat or drink, or whatsoever we do, we should do all to the glory of God. Eating and drinking are about as ordinary as life gets. Colossians says that whatsoever we do in word or deed should be done in the name of the Lord Jesus. Suddenly, loving God with all of ourselves begins looking much less like trying to maintain an intense religious emotion and much more like refusing to divide life into the part where God is present and the part where I go off on my own.

That is when four words came to me that may be the simplest way I know to describe what I am learning: “Come with me, Lord.” When I go to work, come with me, Lord. When I have a difficult decision to make, come with me. When I am angry with someone and I don’t know what to do with that anger, come with me. When I am spending time with my family, come with me. When I succeed, when I fail, when I am afraid, when I am tempted, when I am confused, when I am enjoying something wonderful, and when I am walking through something painful, come with me, Lord.

That does not mean turning every ordinary decision into a religious ritual or becoming afraid to move without receiving some supernatural instruction. It means I stop deliberately excluding Him. Instead of asking God to stay in the prayer room while I go live my life, the relationship continues when the prayer ends. Instead of asking God merely to bless decisions I have already made, I begin including Him while I make them. Instead of giving Him Sunday morning and a few minutes before bed, I begin discovering what it means for my whole life to belong inside the relationship.

And maybe this is where the flesh enters the picture. I used to think of the flesh primarily in terms of obvious sin, but the flesh does not always say, “Do something wicked.” Sometimes it simply says, “Mine.” My time, my money, my plans, my entertainment, my reputation, my anger, my pleasure, my business, my future, my opinion, my way. Perhaps loving God with all of myself means that whenever I discover another place where I am saying “mine,” I invite Him into that room too.

This is not how I earn His love. This is not how I earn salvation. God loved first. Christ acted first. Grace came first. The Spirit works within me. My surrender is not payment for any of those things. It is my response to them. Perhaps that is why Paul can tell us to work out what God is working within us. Grace does not mean that I become passive. Grace means that I can respond to something I could never have produced by myself.

When I look back fifteen years, I realize the journey may have begun with the most honest thing I had ever said to God: “Lord, I don’t love You.” I thought those words would push Him away, but instead they opened the relationship because I finally stopped pretending. I began asking Him to let me know Him. For fifteen years, that has led me through questions, Scripture, mistakes, corrections, discoveries, and things about God I never understood before.

Now perhaps I am entering another part of that same journey. Fifteen years ago, the prayer was, “Lord, I want to know You.” Today, the prayer is becoming, “Lord, I want all of me to know You, love You, and live with You.” I know there are parts of me that want Him and parts of me that still want my own way. I know there are rooms I have opened and probably rooms I have not even realized are still locked. But maybe loving God with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength does not begin with pretending those rooms are already His. Maybe it begins with opening the next door.

So perhaps the question for this episode is not simply whether I believe in God, worship God, obey God, thank God, or even whether I tell God that I love Him. The question is whether I visit God or live with Him. When the prayer ends, does He come with me? When the Bible closes, does the relationship continue? When ordinary life begins again, do I leave Him behind, or have I finally begun learning to say, wherever this day takes me, “Come with me, Lord”?

Part 1 — “Lord, I Don’t Love You”

About fifteen years ago, I had an experience with God that changed the way I understood my relationship with Him. At the time, my life was going well. My business was doing good. My family was doing good. I was sober. After everything I had been through earlier in my life, I finally felt like life was being fair to me. I had plenty of reasons to be thankful, and I was thankful. I believed God had been good to me, and I regularly told Him so.

One night, I was praying and telling God how much I loved Him. I don’t remember thinking there was anything unusual about that prayer. Christians say that all the time. We sing songs about loving God. We tell God we love Him when we pray. We read that loving Him is the greatest commandment. So there I was, telling God something I had probably said many times before, when suddenly a question came into my mind that stopped me: “Do you really love Him?”

I knew immediately that this was different from the thoughts I had been having. The question forced me to examine what I was actually saying. Instead of automatically answering yes, I sat with it. Did I really love God? I knew I was grateful to Him. I knew I appreciated the life I had. I knew I was thankful for my sobriety, my family, my business, and everything that seemed to be going right. But the more honestly I looked at myself, the more uncomfortable the answer became.

I realized that I was confusing gratitude with love. I was thankful for what God had done for me, but being thankful for what someone gives you is not necessarily the same thing as loving the person who gave it. If someone helps me when I am struggling, I can appreciate that person without really knowing them. I can be grateful for their generosity without having a relationship with them. When I examined what was happening inside me, I realized that much of what I was calling love for God was actually gratitude for the condition of my life.

Then I did something that frightened me. I stopped telling God what I thought a Christian was supposed to tell Him, and I told Him the truth. I said, “Lord, I don’t love You.” I remember expecting that admission to make Him angry. After all, Jesus said loving God is the greatest commandment. Here I was standing before God admitting that I wasn’t doing the very thing He said mattered most.

But what happened next was nothing like what I expected. In my spirit, I heard what sounded like a shout coming from heaven. It was as though millions of angels suddenly erupted in celebration. The closest way I can describe it is like the reaction of a stadium when somebody kicks the winning field goal. I had just confessed, “Lord, I don’t love You,” and instead of experiencing the anger I expected, I experienced what sounded like celebration.

I was confused. Why would heaven celebrate that? Then the Lord told me, “There you are. We have been waiting for this moment for a long time. Of course you don’t love Me, because you don’t know Me. Now we can start working on that because you were finally honest with yourself.” That answer completely changed the meaning of what had just happened. The celebration wasn’t because I didn’t love God. It was because I had finally stopped pretending that I did.

God already knew what was inside my heart. My confession did not reveal something to Him that He didn’t know. It revealed something to me. For perhaps the first time, I had separated what I thought I was supposed to feel from what was actually there. Instead of presenting God with the answer I thought He wanted, I presented Him with the truth. And the truth was that I could not honestly say I loved someone I barely knew.

That realization raises an uncomfortable question for Christianity. How many times do we teach people to say that they love God before we teach them how to know Him? A child learns the words. A congregation sings the songs. A preacher says, “If you love the Lord, say amen,” and everybody responds. None of those things are necessarily wrong, but saying that I love God and actually knowing the God I claim to love are not automatically the same thing.

Jesus Himself made knowing God central when He prayed, “And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.” He did not describe eternal life merely as knowing information about God. There is something relational in those words. Scripture reveals God’s actions, His character, His mercy, His justice, His patience, His correction, His promises, and ultimately His Son because God is not merely giving humanity rules to follow. He is revealing Himself.

That night also taught me something about honesty before God. I had been afraid that the truth would damage my relationship with Him, but hiding the truth was actually preventing the relationship from becoming real. Adam hid after he sinned. Cain avoided the truth when God questioned him. David spent part of his life discovering what happens when we conceal what is happening inside us. Yet Scripture repeatedly brings people back to confession, because God cannot be fooled by the religious version of ourselves that we sometimes present to Him.

There is no point telling God, “I trust You completely,” when I know that I don’t. There is no point saying, “I forgive this person,” while hatred is still burning inside me. There is no point saying, “Your will be done,” when what I really mean is, “Please approve my will.” God already knows the difference. The person who needs the truth is me. Perhaps one of the first ways we begin loving God with all our heart is by giving Him the heart that is actually there instead of the heart we think we are supposed to have.

That became the beginning of a fifteen-year journey for me. Once I admitted that I didn’t really know God, I wanted to know Him. I began asking questions, and I never really stopped. Why did God do this? Why did Jesus say that? Why does God allow this? What does this passage actually mean? What is God’s character really like? What does He want from us? What have I believed about Him simply because someone else told me it was true? I wasn’t satisfied anymore with knowing what people said about God. I wanted to know Him for myself.

Looking back now, I can see something I did not understand at the time. That uncomfortable question, “Do you really love Him?” was not the end of my relationship with God. It was the beginning of a more honest one. I had been thanking God for His gifts, but now I wanted to know the Giver. I had been talking to God, but now I wanted to understand the One I was talking to. I had been saying, “I love You,” but now I wanted those words to become true.

Fifteen years later, I believe the question has changed. I am no longer sitting here wondering whether I love God at all. I am asking something that may be even more challenging. Jesus did not merely tell me to love God. He said to love Him with all my heart, all my soul, all my mind, and all my strength. That word “all” has forced me to examine the relationship again, because perhaps knowing God was only the beginning. Now I have to ask what happens when the God I have spent years trying to know wants to become part of everything.

Maybe that is why I needed that first moment of honesty so many years ago. Before I could learn what it means to say, “Come with me, Lord,” I first had to stop pretending He was already with me everywhere. Before I could give Him all of myself, I had to admit what was really in my heart. And before I could learn how to love God, I first had to admit the truth: “Lord, I don’t love You. I need to know You.”

Part 2 — Can You Love Someone You Don’t Know?

After that night, the question became obvious to me. If I did not really love God because I did not really know Him, then how was I supposed to get to know Him? I had known about God for most of my life. I knew Bible stories. I knew commandments. I knew what Christians said about Him. I knew how to pray. I knew how to thank Him. But knowing information about someone and actually knowing that person are two very different things.

Think about how relationships work in ordinary life. I can read a biography about someone and learn where they were born, what they accomplished, what they believed, and what they said. I might eventually know hundreds of facts about that person, but I still do not know them personally. I know about them. There is a difference, because relationship requires more than information. It requires time, attention, honesty, trust, communication, and experience.

I began wondering whether we sometimes do the same thing with God. We learn theology about Him. We memorize verses about Him. We listen to sermons about Him. We defend doctrines about Him. We argue with other people about Him. We can become incredibly knowledgeable about God while never stopping to ask whether all that knowledge has actually brought us closer to knowing Him. It is possible to spend years studying someone’s words while never understanding their heart.

Jesus said something remarkable in John 17:3 when He prayed, “And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.” That changes the way I think about eternal life. Jesus did not merely describe eternal life as eventually going somewhere after we die. He connected eternal life with knowing God. The relationship itself is central.

That also makes me look differently at Scripture. Maybe the Bible is not merely a collection of rules telling me what God permits and prohibits. It is also a record revealing who He is. When God shows mercy, I learn something about Him. When He becomes angry, I learn something about Him. When He corrects someone, I learn something about Him. When He waits patiently, I learn something about Him. When Jesus touches someone everyone else avoids, I learn something about Him. When Jesus weeps, forgives, confronts hypocrisy, welcomes children, washes feet, or goes to the cross, I am being shown the character of God.

That means I can begin reading Scripture differently. Instead of always asking, “What does this passage tell me to do?” I can also ask, “What does this passage show me about God?” Why did Jesus respond this way? Why did this matter to Him? Why did He show compassion here and anger there? Why was He patient with one person and confrontational with another? What does He protect? What does He forgive? What does He oppose? What does He value? Those questions move Scripture from merely being an instruction manual toward becoming part of a relationship.

This may also explain why I have spent so many years asking questions that sometimes make other Christians uncomfortable. I wanted to understand. I did not want to repeat an answer simply because I had heard it all my life. If something about God did not make sense to me, I wanted to know why. If two passages appeared to say different things, I wanted to investigate them. If something I had been taught about God did not seem consistent with the character of Jesus, I wanted to examine it. Underneath all of those questions was the promise I made after that night: if I am going to say that I love God, I want to know the God I am saying I love.

But there is a danger here too. Knowing God cannot become merely an endless intellectual investigation. I can become so fascinated with questions about God that God Himself becomes the subject of my research rather than the One with whom I am living. I can study His words without talking to Him. I can investigate His history without trusting Him today. I can learn Hebrew and Greek words, compare manuscripts, read commentaries, study theology, and accumulate thousands of books while still keeping the actual relationship at a distance.

Moses gives us an important example of the difference. In Exodus 33, Moses says to God, “Shew me now thy way, that I may know thee.” That is an extraordinary request. Moses had already seen things most human beings would never see. He had witnessed the plagues in Egypt. He had crossed the Red Sea. He had seen God’s provision in the wilderness. Yet Moses still wanted to know Him. Miracles had not eliminated the need for relationship. Experiences with God had actually created a deeper desire to understand the God behind the experiences.

Then Moses asks, “I beseech thee, shew me thy glory.” What I see in Moses is hunger. He does not appear satisfied with simply knowing that God exists or knowing that God can perform miracles. He wants God Himself. That is different from approaching God primarily because we want something from Him. There is a difference between seeking God’s hand and seeking God’s face, between wanting what He can provide and wanting to know the One who provides it.

That distinction takes me right back to my testimony. When my business was doing well, my family was doing well, I was sober, and life seemed fair, I had plenty of reasons to thank God’s hand. I could point to things in my life and say, “God has been good to me.” But the question that came that night forced me beyond His hand. If all those things disappeared, what would remain between God and me? Did I love God, or did I love the life for which I was thanking Him?

Job forces us to confront that question in an extreme way. Satan’s accusation was essentially that Job’s devotion had a price attached to it. Job feared God because God had blessed him and protected everything around him. Remove the blessings, the accusation went, and Job’s relationship with God would collapse. Whatever else we learn from Job, that accusation exposes a question every believer eventually has to face: do I want God, or do I primarily want what I believe God can do for me?

This is where 1 John 4:19 becomes so important: “We love him, because he first loved us.” Scripture does not begin the story with human beings somehow producing enough affection to reach God. It begins with God loving. God reveals Himself. God acts. God gives. God calls. God forgives. God sends His Son. Our love is a response to something that originates in Him. Perhaps the more accurately I understand His love, the more capable I become of responding to it.

That means learning to love God more may involve learning to recognize how He loves. Sometimes I may mistake love for getting what I want. If God provides something I wanted, I say He loves me. If He removes something, tells me no, corrects me, or allows me to walk through something painful, I may begin wondering where His love went. But any parent knows that love cannot be measured simply by how often someone says yes. Sometimes love comforts, sometimes it provides, sometimes it protects, and sometimes love refuses to participate in something that will destroy the person it loves.

The life of Jesus gives us perhaps the clearest picture. If I want to know what God is like, I cannot ignore Jesus. Jesus told Philip, “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.” So I have to watch Him. Look at who Jesus moves toward. Look at who He defends. Look at who He corrects. Look at what makes Him angry. Look at the people everyone else considers worthless. Look at His patience with His disciples. Look at His response to Peter after Peter denies Him. Look at Him washing the feet of Judas while knowing exactly what Judas is preparing to do.

The cross then becomes more than a doctrine I am required to believe. It tells me something about the God I am trying to know. Jesus said, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” Christianity tells me that before I ever figured out how to love God correctly, God demonstrated His love toward us. I am not trying to persuade a reluctant God to accept me. I am responding to a God who moved first.

That may be why forcing myself to feel more love has never seemed like the answer. Love grows through knowing. The more I know someone’s character, the more opportunities I have to trust them. The more I experience their faithfulness, the deeper that trust can become. The more honestly I communicate with them, the more real the relationship becomes. Maybe God has not been asking me to manufacture an emotion. Maybe He has been inviting me to know Him deeply enough that love becomes the natural response.

But knowing someone also means allowing that person to know you. Of course, God already knows everything about me, but there is still a difference between God knowing what is inside me and me willingly bringing what is inside me into the relationship. That was what happened fifteen years ago. God already knew I did not love Him the way I claimed. The breakthrough came when I stopped hiding behind the correct words and said what was actually true.

Perhaps that is why honesty remains so important to loving God. If I am angry with Him, I can tell Him. If I am confused, I can tell Him. If I am disappointed, I can tell Him. If I do not understand something He has allowed, I can ask Him. If I want something I know I should not want, I can bring that into the conversation too. The Psalms show people doing exactly this. Biblical relationship with God is not sanitized. People cry, question, complain, confess, rejoice, worship, fear, hope, and sometimes simply wait.

I think this is where my understanding has changed. For years, asking questions was part of learning who God is. I still believe that matters enormously. But now I am beginning to wonder whether knowing God eventually has to move beyond asking, “Who are You?” into asking, “How do I live with You?” At some point, knowledge becomes relationship, and relationship begins affecting ordinary life.

Maybe that is the next stage of what began fifteen years ago. First I had to admit, “Lord, I don’t love You because I don’t know You.” Then came years of asking, “Lord, who are You?” Now the question seems to be becoming, “Lord, if I know You and love You, what does it mean to live every part of my life with You?”

That brings me back to Jesus’ commandment. He did not merely say to know God. He said to love God with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind, and all our strength. Knowing Him makes love possible, but love apparently wants something more. Love begins reaching into the person who has come to know Him, until eventually the question is no longer simply whether God has a place in my life. The question becomes whether there is any part of my life where I am still living without Him.

Part 3 — Why Didn’t Jesus Say Body, Soul, and Spirit?

As I continued looking at the greatest commandment, another question started bothering me. Christians often describe a human being as body, soul, and spirit. Paul uses those exact categories when he writes in 1 Thessalonians 5:23, “I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.” If those words describe the whole person, why didn’t Jesus say, “Love the Lord your God with all your body, all your soul, and all your spirit”? Instead, He used a different set of words.

In Matthew 22:37, Jesus says, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.” But when we read Mark 12:30, we find, “with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength.” Luke 10:27 also gives heart, soul, strength, and mind. At first glance, this can seem strange. If Jesus is giving us the greatest commandment, why does the wording vary, and why doesn’t it match the familiar description of spirit, soul, and body?

The answer begins when we realize that Jesus was quoting something much older. He was reaching back to Deuteronomy 6:5, part of the passage known in Judaism as the Shema: “And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.” Jesus was not creating a new formula for the human being. He was pointing back to the command Israel had been given centuries earlier and identifying it as the greatest commandment.

That helped me see that I may have been asking the words to answer a question they were never intended to answer. When Paul speaks of spirit, soul, and body, he is describing the whole person in one context. When Deuteronomy and Jesus speak about heart, soul, mind, and strength, the purpose is different. The question is not necessarily, “What components make up a human being?” The question is, “How completely is this human being to love God?”

That distinction matters because the biblical meaning of “heart” is much larger than the way we normally use the word today. When I hear “heart,” I naturally think of feelings. I love someone with my heart, so I imagine affection, warmth, tenderness, and emotion. Those things can certainly be involved, but the biblical heart also reaches into intention, desire, decision, loyalty, and thought. The heart is the inner place from which the direction of a person’s life comes.

That changes the command immediately. Loving God with all my heart cannot simply mean trying to feel stronger affection toward Him. It begins reaching into what I want, what I choose, what I treasure, what I refuse to surrender, and where my loyalty ultimately rests. Jesus said, “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” The location of my heart is revealed not merely by what I say I love, but by what I treasure.

Then there is the soul. The Hebrew word behind Deuteronomy is nephesh, and this is another place where our modern Christian vocabulary can sometimes cause confusion. We often picture the soul as an invisible object living somewhere inside the physical body. But nephesh can carry the sense of the living being, the life, the self, the person. When God breathed into Adam the breath of life, Genesis says that man became a living soul. The picture is not merely of God inserting a separate object called a soul into a body. The human being becomes a living nephesh.

So when Israel was commanded to love God with all the soul, this reaches into the life itself. I begin hearing the command differently. Love God with your life. Love Him with who you are. Love Him with the living person He has given you to be. This is no longer something confined to what happens inside my head while I am praying. If my whole life is involved, then eventually my relationships, choices, priorities, time, and direction become involved too.

Then we come to one of the most fascinating words in the commandment. Deuteronomy says to love God with all your “might.” The Hebrew word is me’od, and it is unusual because its basic meaning is connected with ideas such as very, exceedingly, greatly, or abundance. It is not simply the Hebrew word for muscles. When English Bibles translate it as “might,” they are trying to communicate something broader than physical strength alone. The command reaches toward the fullness of what I have available to me.

That may include physical strength, but it can reach beyond it. My abilities, resources, energy, possessions, opportunities, influence, and capacity can all become places where love for God is expressed. Suddenly, loving God is reaching into things I would normally consider mine. What do I do with what I have? What do I do with what I can do? Where does my energy go? Where does my time go? What happens to the resources that have been placed in my hands?

When the command appears in the Gospels, “mind” is made explicit. Whatever questions we might ask about exactly how the Gospel writers render the ancient command, the result is unmistakable. Jesus does not exclude our thinking from loving God. My intellect is not an enemy of faith. Asking questions is not automatically evidence that I lack faith. My mind itself can become something through which I love God.

That matters deeply to me because I have spent fifteen years asking questions. For a long time, I sometimes wondered whether asking so many questions meant there was something wrong with my faith. But if Jesus tells me to love God with all my mind, then perhaps refusing to think deeply about Him would be the greater problem. Loving God with my mind means I want truth about Him more than I want comfortable answers about Him. It means I am willing to discover that something I believed was wrong. It means I would rather have God correct my understanding than spend my life defending an idea simply because it belongs to me.

But loving God with the mind also carries a warning for someone like me. I can spend so much time thinking about God that thinking becomes a substitute for being with Him. I can research Him, investigate Him, compare translations, study history, examine theology, and ask endless questions while forgetting that the purpose of knowing more about someone is eventually to know the person better. Loving God with all my mind does not mean making God an endless intellectual puzzle. It means giving Him my thinking too.

Then I began noticing something else. Every one of these expressions is preceded by the same word. Jesus does not merely say heart, soul, mind, and strength. He says all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength. Perhaps the individual categories matter, but maybe their greater purpose is to remove every excuse for compartmentalizing God. Whatever part of myself I can name, the answer is the same: this belongs inside the relationship too.

That began changing the way I thought about the commandment. Maybe Jesus was not asking me to divide myself into four compartments and figure out how to love God separately with each one. Maybe He was doing exactly the opposite. Maybe He was gathering the entire person together and saying that love for God cannot be confined to one compartment. It cannot live only in emotion while my thinking belongs somewhere else. It cannot live only in my mind while my actions go another direction. It cannot exist only during worship while my resources, ambitions, relationships, and private life remain untouched.

This also helps explain why “spirit” does not have to appear explicitly in the list. Its absence does not mean that my spirit is somehow exempt from loving God. Jesus is not giving us an inventory where anything left off the list does not count. The language is comprehensive. The entire direction of the command is toward wholeness. Whatever I am, whatever I possess, whatever I think, whatever I desire, and whatever strength or capacity I have is being brought under the words “love the Lord thy God.”

That is where this became personal again. I started wondering whether I have spent years loving God intensely with certain parts of myself while leaving other parts mostly untouched. Perhaps I have pursued Him strongly with my mind because I desperately wanted to know Him. Perhaps another person loves Him deeply through service. Someone else may express extraordinary devotion through prayer. But Jesus does not say to find the part of yourself that naturally responds to God and give Him that part. He says “all.”

This does not mean every believer will look identical. The pioneers I have been reading about certainly did not. Smith Wigglesworth, Donald Gee, Howard Carter, Willie Burton, Teddy Hodgson, and the others had different personalities, abilities, ministries, and callings. Yet the book repeatedly describes men whose faith increasingly reached into their work, time, prayer, resources, decisions, and futures. Their devotion did not erase their individuality. It redirected what they had toward God. 

Maybe that is what Jesus is getting at. God does not need me to become somebody else in order to love Him. He asks for the person I actually am. If I have a mind that asks questions, bring Him that mind. If I have abilities, bring Him those abilities. If I have resources, bring Him those resources. If I have fears, bring Him those fears. If I have desires that are fighting against Him, bring Him those too. The command does not say to create another person who is worthy of loving God. It says to love Him with all of the person who is already standing before Him.

And that brings me back to the problem of the flesh. If “all” means the whole person, then I cannot solve the flesh problem by pretending that part of me does not exist. I have to bring that part into the relationship too. I can tell God, “This is what I want, but I know it may not be what You want.” I can bring Him the conflict instead of hiding it. Jesus Himself prayed in Gethsemane about what He was facing and then said, “Nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.” The presence of a competing desire did not prevent surrender.

So perhaps heart, soul, mind, and strength are not four impossible standards that I have to achieve before God will accept my love. They are four ways of saying something much simpler and much larger: bring your whole life into the relationship. Bring what you feel, bring what you think, bring who you are, bring what you have, and bring what you can do. Do not give God the religious part of yourself while protecting everything else.

That leaves one word still staring at me: “all.” If Jesus really meant all, then the question is no longer simply whether I love God. The question becomes whether there are places inside my life where I still say, “This belongs to me.” My time, my money, my plans, my entertainment, my anger, my ambitions, my opinions, my future, my private thoughts, my strength, and even my weaknesses all become part of the investigation. Maybe the greatest commandment is not asking how intensely I can feel toward God. Maybe it is asking how much of me I am willing to live with Him.

Part 4 — What Does “All” Actually Mean?

The more I looked at the greatest commandment, the more I became convinced that the word I had overlooked for years was “all.” Jesus did not simply tell us to love God with our heart, soul, mind, and strength. He deliberately repeated the word. All your heart. All your soul. All your mind. All your strength. That repetition makes the command much harder to reduce to emotion. Jesus seems to be describing a love that eventually reaches everywhere.

At first, that can sound almost impossible. What would it mean to love God with all my heart every moment of every day? Does it mean that every thought has to be about God? Does it mean I should feel guilty when I am concentrating on business, enjoying a meal, watching something entertaining, talking with my family, or simply resting? If that is what “all” means, then ordinary human life itself would seem to compete with loving God. But when I went back to the passage Jesus was quoting, I found almost the opposite.

Immediately after Deuteronomy says to love God with all your heart, soul, and might, it begins describing ordinary life. God’s words are to be upon the heart. They are to be taught to the children. They are to be spoken about when sitting in the house, walking by the way, lying down, and rising up. The command does not remove people from ordinary life. It brings God into ordinary life. Home, children, travel, morning, evening, conversation, and daily routines all become places where the relationship with God continues.

That made me wonder whether “all” means something different from what I first imagined. Maybe loving God with all of myself does not mean thinking consciously about God every second. Maybe it means there is no part of my life that I deliberately separate from Him. I can concentrate completely on my work while still doing that work as someone who belongs to God. I can enjoy dinner with my family without turning dinner into a Bible study. I can laugh, rest, build something, solve a problem, take a walk, or enjoy something beautiful without leaving God behind.

Paul seems to carry this same idea into the New Testament when he says, “Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God.” I find his examples fascinating because he chooses eating and drinking. He could have said preaching, praying, fasting, or giving. Instead, he begins with things human beings do every day. Then he opens the door as wide as possible: “whatsoever ye do.” Colossians says something similar: “And whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus.”

Perhaps that is what “all” begins to look like. God is not confined to the obviously spiritual activities. Prayer belongs to Him, but so does the hour after prayer. Bible study belongs to Him, but so does what I do after I close the Bible. Sunday belongs to Him, but so does Monday morning. The question is not whether every activity looks religious. The question is whether I am living that activity with God or whether I have entered a part of my life where I no longer want Him involved.

There is an ancient Jewish interpretation of the Shema that makes this even more interesting. In the Mishnah, the command to love God “with all your heart” was understood as involving both the good inclination and the evil inclination. “With all your soul” was understood so radically that it included remaining faithful even if one’s life were required. “With all your might” could be understood in relation to one’s possessions, and another interpretation connected it with receiving whatever circumstances came upon a person while remaining devoted to God. Whatever we make of each interpretation, these ancient readers clearly understood “all” as reaching far beyond religious feelings.

That first interpretation especially caught my attention because I had been saying that the want is there, but my flesh gets in the way. I had been thinking that perhaps I would finally love God properly when the competing desires disappeared. But what if loving God with all my heart does not mean waiting until there is no conflict inside me? What if it means bringing the conflict itself under God? The part of me that wants Him and the part of me that wants something else both come into the relationship.

Paul describes that conflict openly in Galatians when he says that the flesh desires against the Spirit and the Spirit against the flesh. He does not describe Christianity as reaching a place where believers never again experience that tension. Instead, he tells them to walk in the Spirit. That means the presence of another desire cannot automatically mean that I do not love God. The important question is what happens when the desires disagree.

That is where Gethsemane becomes so important. Jesus prayed, “Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.” There is nothing dishonest in that prayer. Jesus brings what He desires before the Father. He does not pretend the suffering ahead is pleasant. Yet the final answer is surrender. “Not my will, but thine.” This shows me that surrender is not necessarily the absence of another desire. Surrender is what happens when another desire exists and God still receives the final answer.

That may be one of the reasons loving God can involve strength. Love becomes visible when there is something else I could choose. If there were never competing desires, surrender would cost nothing. If forgiveness were always easy, forgiving would require very little of me. If generosity never cost me anything, giving would reveal very little. If obedience always happened to match exactly what I already wanted, I could spend my entire life believing I was surrendered without ever discovering whether God actually had my will.

This is what I began seeing in the lives of the Pentecostal pioneers I have been reading about. Their devotion was not demonstrated by living without competing interests, responsibilities, personalities, or ambitions. It became visible when those things came into contact with what they believed God was asking of them. Teddy Hodgson is a powerful example because he had built a successful furniture-restoration business and initially reasoned that he could remain where he was and financially support missionary work instead. When challenged about personally going to the Congo, he began offering reasons not to go and recognized that he was making excuses. The struggle itself did not prove he lacked love for God. What mattered was what eventually received the final answer. 

That helped me recognize something about the flesh that I had not fully considered. The flesh does not always present itself as obvious wickedness. Sometimes the thing competing with God can be completely legitimate. A business is not evil. Having plans is not evil. Enjoying comfort is not evil. Money is not automatically evil. Rest is not evil. Wanting security is not evil. Even wanting something different from what eventually happens does not automatically make someone rebellious.

The problem begins when a legitimate thing becomes the place where I tell God, “You cannot have this.” That is where the word “all” becomes uncomfortable. I can give God ninety-nine rooms in my house while keeping one door locked. I can tell Him that He has my life while quietly maintaining one category marked private. I can surrender my Sunday while protecting my money. I can surrender my money while protecting my anger. I can surrender my anger while protecting my ambitions. I can surrender my ambitions while protecting a relationship I know is pulling me away from Him.

This is why I am beginning to think loving God with “all” of myself is not a single emotional achievement. It is a continuing relationship in which God keeps revealing rooms I did not realize were locked. I may sincerely believe that I have surrendered everything, and then something happens that exposes another place where my first response is, “No, not that.” Instead of treating that discovery as proof that I never loved God, perhaps I should recognize it as an opportunity to love Him there too.

Abraham’s life repeatedly looks like this. God tells him to leave what is familiar and go somewhere he will later be shown. Then Abraham has to wait for what God promised. Later comes the terrible test involving Isaac. Again and again, something Abraham values comes into contact with whether he will trust God. Abraham is not earning God’s covenant through these moments. God is the One who called Abraham and made the promise. But Abraham repeatedly has to decide whether another part of his life will be entrusted to the God who called him.

Moses experiences something similar. When God calls him, Moses has objections. He asks who he is to do this. He worries about what he will say. He points to his difficulty speaking. Eventually he asks God to send someone else. Yet this reluctant man eventually becomes someone who says, “Shew me now thy way, that I may know thee.” The man who once gave God reasons why he could not go eventually becomes the man who does not want to go anywhere without God’s presence.

That last part is especially important to this episode. In Exodus 33, Moses tells God, “If thy presence go not with me, carry us not up hence.” Moses had learned something that I am only beginning to understand more deeply. The destination was not enough. The promise was not enough. Success was not enough. Moses did not merely want God to tell him where to go and then wait behind while he went there. He wanted God’s presence to go with him.

That sounds remarkably close to the words we discovered: “Come with me, Lord.” Maybe that prayer is not a new idea at all. Moses was essentially saying that thousands of years ago. If You are not going with me, I do not want to go. The blessing without the presence is not enough. The destination without the relationship is not enough. What good is arriving somewhere God promised if I learned how to make the journey without Him?

This also changes the way I think about success. Sometimes suffering exposes what we have withheld from God, but success can do the same thing. When everything is falling apart, including God can feel natural because I know I need Him. When everything is working, I can slowly begin living independently without realizing it. My business succeeds because I know what I am doing. My plans work because I made good decisions. My family is fine. The bills are paid. Life becomes manageable, and God can quietly move from being the One I live with to the One I thank occasionally.

That was part of what made my experience fifteen years ago so revealing. I was thanking God while life was good, but the question forced me to look beneath the gratitude. I had included God in my thanksgiving, but had I included Him in myself? I was grateful for the blessings, but did I know the One who had blessed me? Now, years later, the word “all” is asking me another version of that same question. Have I learned to include Him only in my search for answers, or have I learned to include Him in my ordinary life?

Maybe “all” is not God demanding that I achieve some impossible level of spiritual intensity. Maybe “all” is God saying, “Do not build a room where I am not welcome.” Bring Me your heart when it loves Me and when it is conflicted. Bring Me your soul, your actual life. Bring Me your mind with all its questions. Bring Me your strength, resources, abilities, and opportunities. Bring Me the parts that are easy to surrender and the parts where you still say “mine.”

That means loving God more may not begin with adding something to my life. It may begin with noticing where I leave Him out. Instead of asking only, “What more can I do for God?” perhaps I should also ask, “Where am I still living without Him?” That question reaches into my work, my relationships, my entertainment, my money, my private thoughts, my plans, my disappointments, my victories, my failures, and the things I want so badly that I am afraid to place them in His hands.

Maybe that is what the word “all” has been trying to tell me. God does not merely want to be the most important appointment on my schedule. He wants the schedule. He does not merely want to hear about the important decisions after I make them. He wants to be present while I make them. He does not merely want me to visit Him when I need direction. He wants to walk with me after the direction has been given.

Perhaps the question behind “all” is therefore surprisingly simple. Is there anywhere I go where, in practice, I tell God to stay behind? If there is, maybe loving Him more begins there. Not by condemning myself for discovering another locked room, but by opening the door and saying what Moses had learned to say in his own way: “If Your presence does not go with me, I do not want to go without You.” In the simplest words I know how to say it, “Come with me, Lord.”

Part 5 — The Spirit Is Willing, but the Flesh Is in the Way

Once I began thinking about loving God with “all” of me, I ran into what may be the most practical problem in this entire investigation. I want to love God more. The desire is genuinely there. I want Him involved in my life. I want to surrender what needs to be surrendered. I want to know Him more deeply. Yet there is another part of me that still wants comfort, control, pleasure, recognition, security, and my own way. That is where I found myself saying something I suspect many Christians understand: the want is there, but my flesh keeps getting in the way.

Jesus Himself used words very close to this in Gethsemane when He found His disciples sleeping instead of watching with Him. He told them, “The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.” I used to hear those words mostly as a criticism of the disciples for falling asleep. Now I hear something else in them too. Jesus recognized that there could be a sincere willingness inside someone while human weakness was simultaneously pulling in another direction. The willingness was real, and the weakness was real.

Paul describes an even deeper conflict in Romans 7. He says, “For to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not.” Whatever theological debates surround that chapter, those particular words describe something many believers recognize immediately. I can know what is right. I can even want what is right. Yet wanting it does not automatically mean doing it becomes easy. There can be a distance between what I sincerely desire before God and what I actually choose when the moment arrives.

Then Galatians makes the conflict explicit: “For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other.” Paul does not tell these believers that the existence of this struggle proves they have no relationship with God. He tells them how to live within the struggle: “Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh.” That distinction matters enormously because I may have been waiting for the wrong evidence that I love God.

Perhaps I have imagined that if I truly loved God enough, I would eventually stop wanting anything contrary to Him. Temptation would disappear. Selfishness would disappear. My desire for comfort would disappear. Forgiveness would become effortless. Giving would never hurt. Obedience would always feel natural. My flesh would simply become quiet because my love for God had finally become strong enough. But that is not the picture I find when I look at the lives of people in Scripture.

Abraham loved and trusted God, yet Abraham also became afraid and made bad decisions. Moses encountered God and still argued with Him about his calling. David could write extraordinary words of devotion to God and still commit terrible sin. Peter could sincerely tell Jesus that he was willing to die for Him and then deny knowing Him only hours later. These were not people whose relationship with God eliminated human weakness. Their stories show what happened when faith, desire, fear, failure, repentance, and surrender collided.

Peter especially helps me understand this. At the Last Supper, Peter is completely confident in himself. He tells Jesus, “I will lay down my life for thy sake.” I do not think Peter was deliberately lying. I think Peter believed what he was saying. His spirit was willing. He loved Jesus. But Peter did not yet understand the weakness of Peter. When the pressure arrived, fear exposed something inside him that his words had hidden even from himself.

After the resurrection, Jesus does not simply discard Peter because the flesh won that battle. He restores him. Three times Jesus asks Peter about love, and then three times the conversation moves toward responsibility for others: feed My lambs, feed My sheep. Peter’s failure did not prove that love was impossible. It exposed how much Peter still needed Christ. The man who had confidently announced what he would do for Jesus had to become the man who understood that he could not follow Jesus through human determination alone.

That may be one of the dangers in the way I have sometimes thought about surrender. I can say, “Lord, I give You everything,” and genuinely mean it. But I do not necessarily know everything that “everything” contains yet. Peter thought he had given Jesus everything until a frightened servant girl exposed a room inside him that Peter did not know was still locked. Sometimes God does not reveal what remains unsurrendered by giving us a list. Life reveals it.

Pressure reveals it. Money reveals it. Success reveals it. Failure reveals it. Marriage reveals it. Children reveal it. Temptation reveals it. Criticism reveals it. Being misunderstood reveals it. Waiting reveals it. Not getting the answer we wanted reveals it. Sometimes another person simply saying “no” to us reveals something we did not know was inside our heart. These moments can show us where our mouths have already said “Yours” while some deeper part of us is still saying “mine.”

This is where I think we can misunderstand the flesh. The flesh is not always standing in front of us holding something obviously sinful. Sometimes it offers something completely reasonable. Stay comfortable. Protect yourself. Make sure you are secure. Do not risk what you have built. Do not forgive until the other person apologizes. Do not give too much. Do not let anyone think you were wrong. Do not surrender this because you worked hard for it. None of those thoughts initially sound like someone announcing rebellion against God.

That is why Teddy Hodgson’s story in Seven Pentecostal Pioneers caught my attention. He had a successful furniture-restoration business, equipment, prospects, and a future. There was nothing sinful about restoring furniture or operating a successful business. When missionary service in the Congo pressed upon him, he could even reason that he might remain home and financially support missionary work instead. The issue was not whether business was evil and missionary work was holy. The issue became whether something legitimate had become something he could not place before God. Whittaker’s account shows Hodgson eventually recognizing that the reasons he was giving for not going were excuses. 

That is much more challenging to me than a simple list of sins because it means loving God reaches into good things too. Something does not have to be evil to become something I place ahead of Him. My business can be good. My house can be good. My plans can be good. My hobbies can be good. My desire for security can be understandable. My reputation can matter. My relationships can be precious. The question is not whether I am required to throw all those things away. The question is whether I can allow God into them.

Maybe the flesh can be recognized by one little word: “mine.” This is my money, so God gets no voice here. This is my business, so I will make these decisions myself. This is my free time, so what I do with it is nobody else’s concern. This is my anger, and I have earned the right to keep it. This is my future, and I already know what I want it to look like. This is my opinion, and I refuse to reconsider it. This is my pleasure, and I do not want God asking questions about it.

That does not mean having personal desires is sinful. Jesus had a human will, and Gethsemane makes that impossible to ignore. He prayed, “Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.” I keep coming back to that prayer because it may be the clearest picture of what surrender actually means. Jesus does not pretend that the cup is desirable. He does not hide what He wants from the Father. He brings His desire completely into the relationship and then places it beneath the Father’s will.

Maybe that is how I bring my flesh to God. I do not have to pretend that I want something I do not want. I can say, “Lord, I want this. I really want this. Part of me does not want to surrender this. Part of me is afraid of what will happen if I give this to You. But I want You more than I want to keep You outside this part of my life.” That seems far more honest than trying to convince God that the struggle does not exist.

This takes me back to what happened fifteen years ago. The turning point was honesty. I said, “Lord, I don’t love You.” I did not fix the problem before bringing it to Him. I brought Him the problem. Maybe the same principle applies now. If my flesh is standing in the way of loving God with all of me, perhaps I do not overcome that by hiding the flesh until I can present God with a better version of myself. Perhaps I bring Him the resistance itself.

There is something else that changes when I think this way. Temptation can become a place of relationship rather than merely a private battle I am trying to win before God notices. Instead of disappearing into myself when temptation comes, I can immediately include Him. “Lord, this is what I want right now. You already know it. Come with me into this.” Suddenly, “Come with me, Lord” is not only something I say when I am doing well. It may be most important when I am not.

The same can happen with anger. Instead of becoming angry and leaving God outside until I have calmed myself down, I can bring Him directly into the anger. I can tell Him exactly why I am angry and ask what He wants me to do with it. David’s Psalms show that God is not frightened by honest human emotion. The goal is not pretending the emotion does not exist. The goal is refusing to build a private room where the emotion exists without God.

Failure can work the same way. One of the flesh’s most dangerous responses after sin is hiding. Adam did it immediately. Once I have failed, I can begin thinking that I need to get myself cleaned up before returning to God. But if God is the One who transforms me, withdrawing from Him after failure is like disconnecting the branch from the vine because the branch failed to produce fruit. The very moment I most want to hide may be the moment I most need to remain.

This does not make sin harmless. It makes relationship the place where sin is confronted. Grace does not mean that God simply agrees with everything I want. Sometimes including God will make me uncomfortable because His presence exposes what I was trying not to see. “Come with me, Lord” becomes dangerous to the parts of my life that depend upon God staying outside.

If I invite Him into my business, I may have to reconsider how I make money. If I invite Him into my entertainment, I may have to reconsider what I am feeding my mind. If I invite Him into my anger, I may have to forgive someone I would rather punish. If I invite Him into my spending, generosity may begin competing with something I wanted to buy. If I invite Him into my ambition, I may discover that succeeding is not the same thing as obeying.

That is why loving God with all of me cannot merely be a feeling. Love eventually encounters choice. Jesus said, “If ye love me, keep my commandments.” He was not saying that obedience purchases His love. He was showing that love eventually becomes visible. There comes a point where what I say about God meets what I actually choose.

Yet even there, I have to remember where the power comes from. Galatians does not call love the fruit of human determination. It calls love the fruit of the Spirit. Jesus does not tell the branch to manufacture life. He tells it to abide in the vine. My responsibility is real, but so is my dependence. I walk, but I walk in the Spirit. I obey, but God works within me. I surrender, but even the desire to surrender may be evidence that He is already working.

So maybe I have been too discouraged by the fact that my flesh still speaks. Perhaps the question is not whether the flesh ever speaks. The question is whether I continue inviting God into the conversation. When the flesh says, “mine,” I can answer, “Lord, come into this too.” When fear says, “protect yourself,” I can say, “Lord, show me what trust looks like here.” When pride says, “you have to win,” I can say, “Lord, show me what You care about more than my being right.”

The spirit can be willing while the flesh is weak. Jesus already knew that about His disciples, and God knows it about me. Loving Him with all of myself therefore cannot require pretending that weakness has disappeared. Maybe it means that weakness itself no longer gets a private life away from Him. I bring Him the willing part, the resistant part, the obedient part, the frightened part, the strong part, and the weak part.

Then the prayer becomes even more meaningful. “Come with me, Lord” does not mean, “Come with me because I have finally become good enough company for You.” It means, “Come with me because I cannot do this without You.” Come with me into the part of my life that is easy, and come with me into the part where my flesh is fighting. Come with me when I obey, and do not let me run away when I fail. If loving You with all of me means there can be no room where I deliberately leave You outside, then especially come with me into the room where I am struggling to open the door.

Part 6 — If God Does the Work, What Am I Supposed to Do?

This is where I ran into what seemed like a contradiction. Scripture tells me that I am saved by grace and not by works. Jesus says that He chose us. The Holy Spirit produces the fruit. God changes the heart. God gives strength. God teaches, corrects, and transforms us. If God is the One doing all of this, then what exactly is left for me to do? If I cannot save myself and cannot transform myself, why does Scripture contain so many commands telling me to repent, follow, obey, seek, endure, forgive, love, and surrender?

Paul puts both sides of this question almost beside each other in Philippians. He tells believers to “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling,” but then immediately explains, “For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.” I find those words extraordinary because Paul does not seem bothered by the tension. I am told to work, yet God is working within me. I am willing, yet somehow God is involved even in the willing. I am doing, yet God is working within the doing.

That takes me directly back to something I said earlier. The want is there. I want to love God more. I want to know Him. I want Him involved in all of my life. I have been looking at that desire and thinking about everything preventing me from fulfilling it, but Philippians makes me ask another question. Where did the desire come from? What if the very fact that I want to love Him more is already evidence that God is working within me?

If that is true, then perhaps my responsibility is not to create what God has promised to produce. My responsibility is to respond to what He is already doing. When He convicts me, I respond with repentance. When He teaches me, I listen. When He exposes something I have been protecting, I surrender it. When He puts someone before me who needs love, I love them. When His direction conflicts with my flesh, I choose which one I will follow. God initiates the work, but Scripture continually calls me to respond.

Jesus gives us perhaps the clearest picture of this in John 15. He says, “I am the vine, ye are the branches.” A branch cannot produce its own life. It cannot disconnect itself from the vine and then work harder until fruit appears. Jesus explicitly says, “Without me ye can do nothing.” Yet He does not therefore tell the branches that they have nothing to do. He gives them a command: “Abide in me, and I in you.”

That word “abide” has become much more important to me during this investigation. Abiding means remaining. Staying. Continuing. The branch’s responsibility is not to become the vine. The branch’s responsibility is to remain connected to the vine. Life comes from Christ. Fruit comes because of that life. Yet there is still something relational being asked of me: remain with Him.

This is where the words “Come with me, Lord” begin to connect with something Jesus actually taught. Perhaps abiding is not simply something I do during a morning prayer. I do not abide for thirty minutes and then disconnect for the rest of the day. If Christ is the vine and I am the branch, the relationship is supposed to continue into everything. I am not visiting the vine. My life depends upon remaining in it.

Then Galatians gives us another piece. Paul calls love part of the “fruit of the Spirit.” That means the very thing I have been trying to understand how to produce is something Scripture says the Spirit produces. Love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance are called fruit. A fruit tree does not staple fruit onto its branches to prove that it is alive. Fruit grows because life is working inside it.

But Paul does not use the fruit of the Spirit as an excuse for passivity. In the same chapter he says, “Walk in the Spirit.” Again, I see both sides. The Spirit provides what I cannot provide, but I am told to walk. God supplies the life, but I have decisions to make about where my feet go. The Christian life is neither self-salvation through effort nor sitting motionless waiting for God to make every decision for me.

Maybe that is why the word “follow” appears so often in the ministry of Jesus. Jesus does not merely tell people to believe certain facts about Him. He says, “Follow me.” Following assumes someone else is leading. I do not determine the destination and then ask Jesus to follow me there. I watch where He is going and move in that direction. He leads, but I still have to move my feet.

This distinction helps me understand works differently. Ephesians says, “For by grace are ye saved through faith,” and then makes it unmistakable that salvation is “not of works, lest any man should boast.” But the very next verse says, “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works.” Paul does not reject works. He rejects works as the cause of salvation. Then he immediately expects works to appear as the result of what God has created.

That is a very important distinction for this episode because I do not want “Come with me, Lord” to become another religious burden. I do not want to turn loving God into a new checklist where I spend every evening measuring whether I included God enough times during the day. That would simply turn relationship back into performance. I would be trying to earn through constant awareness what Christ already gave through grace.

The pioneers I have been reading about help illustrate this difference because their lives were filled with activity, yet Whittaker does not portray them as men trying to purchase God’s acceptance through their accomplishments. He describes people whose convictions produced action. Willie Burton went into missionary work. Donald Gee poured himself into teaching and writing. Howard Carter devoted himself to ministry and the study of spiritual gifts. Teddy Hodgson eventually surrendered the successful future he had been building and went to the Congo. Their works were different because their callings were different, but their actions flowed out of what they believed God was asking of them. 

That helps me understand why James can say that faith without works is dead without contradicting Paul’s teaching that salvation is not earned by works. A living tree produces something because it is alive. The fruit does not make the tree alive. The fruit reveals the life already working within it. In the same way, obedience does not purchase my relationship with God, but a relationship with God eventually begins changing what I do.

Jesus said, “If ye love me, keep my commandments.” I used to hear that almost like a test: prove that you love Me by doing enough things correctly. But within everything else Jesus teaches, I think there is something more relational happening. If I love someone, what matters to that person begins to matter to me. If I love Jesus, I cannot continually say that His desires are irrelevant to the way I live. Love eventually produces response.

This is exactly what happens in healthy human relationships. If I love my wife, I do things because I love her. Those actions do not make us married every morning. I am not earning another twenty-four hours of marriage by being considerate. But if I claimed to love her while deliberately ignoring everything that mattered to her, eventually the claim would become difficult to believe. Love is not created by works, but love becomes visible through what it does.

Maybe that is the relationship between grace and obedience. I am not obeying so that God will choose me. I am responding because He already called me. I am not surrendering something so Christ will finally decide to save me. I surrender because I belong to Him. I am not loving my neighbor to accumulate enough spiritual points to enter heaven. I love my neighbor because the God who loved me is changing what I value.

That brings us back to the greatest commandment. If God commands me to love Him while also being the source of the love He commands, then perhaps the command is inviting cooperation rather than demanding manufacture. God is not standing at a distance saying, “Produce enough love and then come see Me.” He draws me into relationship, reveals Himself, gives His Spirit, works within my desires, and then says, “Walk with Me.”

I think this is what I had been missing when I asked what we have to do if God says He will do the work. Maybe the answer is not another work. Maybe the answer is response. I cannot create sunlight, but I can step out of the basement. I cannot create the vine’s life, but I can remain attached to it. I cannot produce the Holy Spirit, but I can choose whether I walk according to the Spirit or continually follow the flesh.

There is also a tremendous difference between surrender and passivity. Surrender does not mean doing nothing. Jesus surrendered completely to the Father, yet His life was filled with action. He traveled, taught, healed, confronted, prayed, served, suffered, and ultimately went to the cross. “Not my will, but thine, be done” did not produce inactivity. It determined whose will directed the activity.

That may be the simplest way I can understand my part. God does not need me to do His part, and I should stop trying. I cannot save myself. I cannot forgive my own sins. I cannot produce spiritual life. I cannot transform my heart through sheer determination. I cannot manufacture the fruit of the Spirit. Those things belong to God. But when God moves, I can respond.

If He says forgive, I can stop explaining why I deserve to remain angry and begin taking the next step toward forgiveness. If He exposes dishonesty in my business, I can correct it. If He shows me that something I am watching is feeding something destructive inside me, I can turn it off. If He places someone in front of me who needs help, I can help. If He shows me that I was wrong, I can stop defending myself. None of those actions purchase salvation. They are places where the relationship becomes real.

And when I fail, response still matters. I can hide, justify, blame, and harden myself, or I can return. David failed terribly, but when the truth finally confronted him, he said, “I have sinned against the LORD.” Peter failed terribly, but he returned to Jesus. The gospel is filled with people who did not respond perfectly the first time. The direction of their lives was shaped by whether they ultimately came back when God called.

Perhaps that is why repentance is such a central Christian word. Repentance is not merely feeling terrible about myself. It involves turning. If I discover that I have been walking away from God in some area of my life, repentance is the moment I turn around. I do not have to rebuild the road back to God. Christ has already made the way. I turn and begin walking toward Him again.

Now the words “Come with me, Lord” sound different to me. They are not merely asking God to accompany whatever I already decided to do. If I am serious about those words, I also have to be willing for Him to say, “James, I am not going that direction.” At that moment, I have a decision. Am I asking God to come with me, or am I willing to go with Him?

Maybe eventually the prayer changes from “Come with me, Lord” into something even deeper. I begin the day asking Him to come with me because I do not want to leave Him behind. But as the relationship grows, I start realizing that He was never supposed to be following me in the first place. Jesus’ words were “Follow me.” So perhaps what I really mean when I say, “Come with me, Lord,” is, “Do not let me go anywhere without You, and when I start walking somewhere You are not leading, turn me around.”

That is not works-based salvation. That is relationship. God leads and I follow. God works and I respond. God produces and I remain. God corrects and I turn. God loves and I learn to love. The branch does not boast about producing the fruit because the branch knows where the life came from. But the branch also understands something else: it was never created to live disconnected from the vine.

Maybe that is my part. Not to become the source, but to remain with the Source. Not to earn what Christ has already given, but to live from it. Not to manufacture love for God, but to stop continually walking away from the One who is teaching me how to love. The more I understand that, the simpler the prayer becomes: “Lord, You do what only You can do in me, and teach me to respond when You do it. Come with me today, and teach me to follow You.”

Part 7 — How Did People Who Loved God Actually Live?

At this point in the investigation, I wanted to stop defining love and start looking at people who actually lived it. It is one thing to tell me to love God with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength. It is another thing to show me what that looks like when somebody has a family, a job, fears, desires, weaknesses, responsibilities, and plans of their own. If I want to understand how to love God, perhaps one of the best questions I can ask is very simple: how did the people who loved Him actually do it?

Abraham is one of the first people who gives us an answer. God called him to leave his country, his relatives, and his father’s house and go to a land that God would show him. Abraham did not receive the entire map before he left. He had a promise and a direction. God moved first by calling him, and Abraham responded by going. That pattern keeps appearing throughout Abraham’s life. God promises, Abraham waits. God directs, Abraham moves. God tests, Abraham responds. His relationship with God repeatedly requires him to trust God with something he cannot completely control.

What strikes me about Abraham is that his faith was not perfect. He made mistakes. He became afraid. He tried to solve problems himself. At times, he seemed to struggle with how God’s promise could possibly happen. Yet God kept working with him. Abraham’s life was not a straight line from unbelief to flawless faith. It was a relationship in which Abraham gradually learned that the God who called him could be trusted with more and more of his life.

Moses shows me something different. When God first called Moses, Moses had questions and objections. “Who am I?” became “What shall I say?” Then came concerns about whether people would believe him, followed by his concern about speaking. Finally, Moses essentially asked God to send somebody else. If loving God required immediately wanting everything God wanted, Moses would be a difficult person to explain. Yet this reluctant man eventually became someone whose greatest concern was whether God’s presence would go with him.

In Exodus 33, Moses says something that now sounds completely different to me: “If thy presence go not with me, carry us not up hence.” Moses was being offered a destination, but he had discovered that the destination without God’s presence was not enough. He did not merely want instructions from God. He wanted God. Then Moses says, “Shew me now thy way, that I may know thee,” and later, “I beseech thee, shew me thy glory.” The man who once wanted someone else to go eventually became the man who did not want to go anywhere without God.

David shows me another part of loving God because David’s relationship with Him was remarkably honest. Read the Psalms and you find worship, joy, fear, confusion, anger, loneliness, confidence, repentance, desperation, and praise. David did not bring God only the polished parts of himself. He brought God what was actually happening inside him. When he was afraid, God heard about it. When he felt surrounded, God heard about it. When he rejoiced, God heard about it. When his sin was exposed, God heard his confession.

David’s failures also prevent me from turning loving God into perfection. David could love God deeply and still make catastrophic choices. That does not make those choices acceptable. It shows me why repentance matters. When Nathan confronted David concerning Bathsheba and Uriah, David eventually stopped hiding behind his position and said, “I have sinned against the LORD.” Loving God did not mean David never fell. One of the things that distinguished the relationship was that when truth finally broke through his defenses, David returned.

Daniel gives me yet another picture because his devotion appears in routine. When the decree was signed forbidding prayer to anyone other than the king, Daniel did not suddenly invent a dramatic act of faith. Scripture says he went home and prayed as he had done before. The crisis revealed a relationship that had already been built into ordinary life. Daniel did not wait for the lions’ den to begin including God in his day. God was already there.

That challenges me because dramatic moments can make devotion easier to recognize. I can imagine myself making some enormous stand for God, but what about Tuesday morning when nothing dramatic is happening? What about an ordinary meal, an ordinary business decision, an ordinary conversation, or an ordinary hour when nobody is watching? Daniel reminds me that loving God can be expressed through the quiet decision to continue living with Him when there is no audience and no crisis.

Mary of Bethany shows me something else entirely. In Luke’s Gospel, while Martha is occupied with serving, Mary sits at Jesus’ feet and listens. Jesus does not condemn service, but He recognizes what Mary has chosen. Later, Mary pours costly ointment upon Jesus. Other people can calculate the value of what she has done, but Mary seems to see value differently. Something precious becomes expendable because of what Jesus means to her.

There is a lesson there for someone like me because I can become very focused on doing. Researching, teaching, working, solving, producing, helping, investigating, and serving can all be good. But it is possible to become so busy doing things connected with God that I stop sitting with God. Mary reminds me that relationship cannot always be measured by productivity. Sometimes loving someone means giving them attention without needing to accomplish anything.

Peter may be one of the most encouraging examples because Peter loved Jesus while repeatedly discovering how incomplete his surrender still was. Peter left his nets and followed Him. Peter recognized Jesus as the Christ. Peter insisted he would die for Him. Then Peter denied Him. After the resurrection, Jesus met Peter not with a lecture about his résumé of failures, but with a question about love: “Lovest thou me?”

What Jesus does next is crucial. Peter answers, and Jesus says, “Feed my sheep.” Love for Jesus turns outward toward people Jesus loves. Jesus does not tell Peter merely to sit somewhere generating stronger feelings toward Him. If you love Me, care about what I care about. Take care of My sheep. Suddenly the first and second great commandments begin touching each other. Loving God eventually changes how I treat people.

Paul gives us perhaps the clearest picture of surrender as a continuing way of life. Paul had education, religious standing, conviction, and a direction for his life. Then Christ interrupted him. The man who thought he was serving God discovered that he was fighting against what God was doing. Paul’s response eventually becomes the pattern we have been discovering throughout this episode. God reveals, and Paul responds. His direction changes because someone greater than Paul now has the right to direct Paul’s life.

Paul later writes, “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.” Whatever else we draw from that passage, Paul’s understanding of Christianity is clearly larger than adding Jesus to the life he already had. Something fundamental about ownership has changed. His life is still being lived, but it is no longer understood as something completely independent from Christ.

Then I looked at the Pentecostal pioneers in the book I have been reading, and I saw many of these same patterns appearing centuries later. Colin Whittaker describes seven very different men: Smith Wigglesworth, Stephen Jeffreys, Donald Gee, Howard Carter, Harold Horton, William F. P. Burton, and Teddy Hodgson. One of the strengths of the book is precisely that they were not identical. Whittaker presents evangelists, teachers, writers, missionaries, and ultimately a missionary martyr. 

Whittaker’s own preface contains a small story about Willie Burton that affected me because it is not spectacular at all. Burton was scheduled to speak at a Baptist church, but when he discovered that they were not having Communion that Sunday, he asked whether Whittaker’s family could share Communion with him beforehand. Whittaker says Burton had maintained the practice of remembering his Lord at the Lord’s table every Sunday. Here was a man remembered for extraordinary missionary work, yet Whittaker chose to preserve this quiet picture of him wanting to remember Christ around a table with one family. 

The same preface tells another story that fits what I saw in Daniel. Whittaker describes an older man named Robert Cook who had prayed for forty years concerning something he believed God had promised about a spiritual work in Luton. When Cook finally believed he was seeing that promise fulfilled, he explained that he had been praying for forty years to live to see it. Whether someone agrees with every interpretation surrounding that event or not, the characteristic Whittaker emphasizes is persistence. This man kept bringing the same hope before God for decades. 

Then there is Teddy Hodgson. His story is particularly important to me because Whittaker describes a question from Hodgson’s younger years that sounds remarkably similar to my own testimony. A Christian asked him whether he loved the Lord Jesus, and the question exposed something inside him. Later, as his life developed, Hodgson built a successful furniture-restoration business. When the possibility of missionary work in the Congo confronted him, he could imagine remaining home and supporting missionary work financially. Eventually he had to face whether his reasonable explanations were actually excuses.

That story helped me see that the question “Do you love Him?” does not necessarily get answered once. I answered it fifteen years ago by admitting that I did not know God well enough to say what I had been saying. Hodgson’s life, as Whittaker tells it, suggests that the question can return in another form later. I may sincerely love God and still discover something I am reluctant to place in His hands. Love keeps reaching into new territory.

When I put Abraham, Moses, David, Daniel, Mary, Peter, Paul, and these later Christian lives beside one another, I do not see a single personality type. I do not see one method that everybody followed. Some were bold. Some were reluctant. Some were contemplative. Some were active. Some were teachers. Some were missionaries. Some experienced dramatic encounters, while some of the most revealing moments were extremely ordinary.

But I do see a pattern. They kept responding. When God called, they moved. When they were afraid, they learned to trust. When they failed, they returned. When they did not understand, they asked. When something precious came into conflict with what they believed God was asking, they eventually had to decide who received the final answer. They prayed, listened, waited, obeyed, questioned, repented, served, and continued.

That means loving God cannot simply be measured by how emotionally intense I feel during worship. Some of the greatest expressions of love may occur when I feel very little. Getting up and praying again after years of waiting may be love. Forgiving someone when I do not feel like forgiving may be love. Telling God the truth about what is inside me may be love. Changing direction when I realize I was wrong may be love. Sitting quietly at His feet when I would rather stay busy may be love.

I also notice that God did not demand the entire finished person before beginning the relationship. Abraham had to learn. Moses had to learn. David had to learn. Peter certainly had to learn. God worked with people over time. That gives me a different way of thinking about the word “all.” Maybe “all” does not mean that on the first day of following God I already understand every room inside myself and have perfectly surrendered every one of them. Maybe it means that whenever another room is revealed, the direction of the relationship is toward opening it.

That makes the question much more personal. I do not need to become Abraham, Moses, David, Daniel, Mary, Peter, Paul, Smith Wigglesworth, Willie Burton, or Teddy Hodgson. God is not asking me to imitate another person’s personality or calling. The question is what happens when God meets me inside the life I have actually been given. What happens with my business, my family, my questions, my abilities, my weaknesses, my time, my money, my plans, and my future?

Perhaps this is how they did it. They did not figure out how to feel perfectly toward God. They kept letting the relationship reach farther into their lives. They learned to include Him in another decision, another fear, another failure, another possession, another day, and another part of themselves. God kept moving, and they kept responding.

That brings me back to the simplest words I have found during this entire investigation. Maybe loving God with all of myself is not something I accomplish in one enormous moment. Maybe it happens through thousands of smaller moments when I could walk somewhere alone but instead say, “Come with me, Lord.” Then, as I learn to recognize His direction, those words begin changing too. I am no longer merely asking Him to accompany my life. I am learning to make His presence so central to my life that I can finally say, “Lord, wherever You are going, I want to come with You.”

Part 8 — Maybe God Was Never Supposed to Be a Part of My Life

There is a phrase Christians use all the time that I am beginning to question. We talk about making God “a part of our lives.” It sounds right because we mean that God is important to us. But the more I have thought about the greatest commandment, the more I wonder whether God was ever supposed to be merely a part of my life. Maybe that is the problem. If God is one part, then there are other parts that exist separately from Him.

I can divide my life into categories without even realizing what I have done. There is God, family, work, money, entertainment, friendships, hobbies, politics, health, and everything else. God may even be at the top of the list. I can sincerely say that God comes first while still living most of those other categories largely without Him. He is first among the parts, but He remains a part.

The greatest commandment seems to destroy that arrangement. “All thy heart, and all thy soul, and all thy mind, and all thy strength” does not sound like God asking for the largest compartment. It sounds like God reaching through every compartment. Maybe He does not simply want first place on my list. Maybe He wants to be present in the way I live the entire list.

When I went back to Deuteronomy 6, this became difficult to miss. After commanding Israel to love God with all the heart, soul, and might, Moses immediately moves into daily life. “And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart.” Then he says to teach them diligently to the children and speak of them “when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.”

Look at how ordinary those things are. Sitting in your house is not a religious ceremony. Walking somewhere is not a religious ceremony. Going to bed is not a religious ceremony. Getting up in the morning is not a religious ceremony. Talking to your children is family life. Yet immediately after saying, “Love God with all of you,” Scripture begins describing God inside the normal rhythm of a person’s day.

That may be one of the clearest explanations of “all” we have. God does not tell Israel to spend every waking moment inside the tabernacle. He tells them to remember Him while living. They still have fields to work, food to prepare, children to raise, houses to maintain, disputes to settle, journeys to make, and sleep to get. Loving God does not remove them from ordinary human existence. It changes how ordinary human existence is lived.

Paul says something remarkably similar in 1 Corinthians 10:31: “Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God.” Again, look at the examples. Eating and drinking. Paul could hardly have chosen more ordinary activities. Then he opens the statement to nearly everything else with the words “whatsoever ye do.” Colossians 3:17 does the same thing: “And whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus.”

That means there may not actually be a category called “my spiritual life” that can be separated from the rest of my life. If I belong to God, my spiritual life includes what happens at work. It includes how I speak to my family. It includes what I do with money. It includes what I watch when nobody else is around. It includes how I treat the waiter at a restaurant. It includes how I respond when someone insults me. It includes what I do when I succeed and what I do when everything falls apart.

This does not mean that everything becomes a church service. I think that distinction is important because otherwise this teaching can become exhausting. Loving God with all of my life does not mean I have to turn dinner into a sermon, interrupt every conversation with a Bible verse, or feel guilty because I spent an hour concentrating completely on a business problem. Jesus Himself ate meals, attended a wedding, traveled, rested, visited friends, and participated in ordinary human life.

The difference is not between religious activity and ordinary activity. The difference may be between ordinary life lived with God and ordinary life lived as though He were absent. I can work without leaving God behind. I can rest without leaving God behind. I can laugh without leaving God behind. I can enjoy something beautiful without leaving God behind. In fact, enjoyment itself can become thanksgiving when I recognize the Giver inside the gift.

This made me examine prayer differently. I have often thought of prayer as the time when I go to God. That is certainly part of prayer. Jesus Himself withdrew to pray. There is value in intentionally becoming quiet, shutting out distractions, and giving God our attention. But perhaps the purpose of those concentrated times with God is not to create the only place where the relationship exists. Maybe prayer teaches me how to recognize the relationship everywhere else.

Marriage gives me a simple way to understand this. I can sit down with my wife and have an intentional conversation where she has my complete attention. That matters. But when the conversation ends, my marriage does not end. I do not become unmarried when I go to work. My relationship continues even when we are doing different things. The fact that I am married affects decisions I make when my wife is not physically standing beside me because I am still living inside that relationship.

Maybe my relationship with God is supposed to become something like that, except deeper. Prayer is intentional conversation, but “amen” does not mean goodbye. Closing my Bible does not mean God stays inside the book until tomorrow. Leaving church does not mean I am leaving God’s presence. The relationship continues into whatever happens next.

This may also explain why Scripture speaks so frequently about walking with God. Enoch walked with God. Noah walked with God. Abraham was told to walk before God. Israel was repeatedly told to walk in God’s ways. Paul tells Christians to walk in the Spirit. Walking is not usually a single dramatic event. It is movement over time. One step followed by another, followed by another.

The book Seven Pentecostal Pioneers gives a small but powerful picture of this kind of continuing devotion. In his preface, Colin Whittaker remembers Willie Burton wanting to share Communion even when the church where he was scheduled to preach was not holding Communion that Sunday. Whittaker describes Burton’s practice of remembering Christ at the Lord’s table every Sunday. Whatever else Burton accomplished as a missionary, Whittaker remembered this ordinary consistency too. His public ministry and private devotion were not completely separate worlds. 

Whittaker also tells the story of Robert Cook praying for forty years concerning something he believed God had promised about Luton. Again, I am struck by the ordinary persistence of it. Forty years contains thousands of mornings when nothing dramatic happened. Thousands of meals, bills, conversations, disappointments, illnesses, ordinary Tuesdays, and ordinary Thursdays passed while this man continued praying. Whatever conclusions someone draws about the prophecy itself, Whittaker’s account presents a man who kept the matter before God through decades of ordinary life. 

That may be much closer to loving God with all of our lives than constantly searching for extraordinary spiritual experiences. Extraordinary moments happen, and I have had moments in my own life that I will never forget. But most of my life is not extraordinary. Most of life happens between the miracles. It happens while making coffee, answering messages, working, driving somewhere, eating dinner, dealing with a problem, getting tired, and going to sleep.

If God is only present in the extraordinary moments, then I will spend most of my life without Him. But if God can be included in the ordinary, then suddenly almost every moment becomes somewhere relationship can happen. I do not have to manufacture a spiritual experience. I simply stop excluding Him from the experience I am already having.

That changes how I think about business. Instead of dividing my day into time with God and time doing business, I can begin asking what it means to do business with God present. Is this honest? Is this fair? Am I treating someone as a person or merely as a way to make money? Am I making this decision because it is right or because I can get away with it? If success requires me to become someone God is telling me not to become, then perhaps success is no longer success.

It changes family life too. Loving God does not compete with loving my family because Jesus connected love for God with love for people. Maybe one of the ways I include God in my home is by becoming more patient with the people who live there. Maybe worship is sometimes putting down what I am doing and listening to someone who needs me. Maybe loving God with my strength sometimes means giving energy to someone when I would rather keep that energy for myself.

It changes entertainment because I can ask whether I am comfortable bringing God with me into what I am watching or doing. That does not mean living terrified that God is looking over my shoulder waiting to catch me enjoying something. It means refusing to build a recreational life where my relationship with Him is suspended. If I continually feel that I need God to stay outside while I enjoy something, that feeling itself may be worth examining.

It changes money because money can easily become one of the rooms marked “mine.” I can thank God for providing it while never asking what He wants me to do with it. Including God does not mean giving away everything I own. Scripture includes provision, stewardship, generosity, responsibility, and care for family. But it does mean that my money cannot be completely separated from the God I say owns my life.

It even changes rest. Sometimes Christians can feel guilty when they are not accomplishing something for God. But if God comes with me into my rest, then rest does not have to be time stolen from Him. Jesus told His disciples at one point, “Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest a while.” A life with God includes work and rest. The question is not whether I am constantly producing something. The question is whether I remain in relationship through both.

Then I began thinking about the opposite question. Where do I instinctively leave God behind? That may tell me more about my relationship than asking where I intentionally seek Him. Where do I think, “I don’t really want to pray about this because I already know what I want”? Where do I avoid Scripture because I suspect what it might say? Where do I stop asking whether something is loving because I benefit from it? Those may be the places where the word “all” is still trying to reach me.

This is why I no longer think the goal is simply to make God a bigger part of my life. I am beginning to think that language is too small. God is not asking for a larger slice of the pie. He is asking what the entire pie is for. He is not asking for more visiting hours. He is inviting me to discover what life becomes when there is no artificial boundary between the sacred part and the ordinary part.

Maybe this is what I have been learning without realizing it for fifteen years. I started by trying to know God. I asked questions because I wanted to understand Him. But knowing someone eventually changes how you live with them. If I have come to know Him better, then perhaps the next invitation is not simply to learn more about Him. It is to stop walking away from Him when the research is finished.

That is why these four words have become so meaningful to me: “Come with me, Lord.” I am beginning to understand that they are not merely a prayer for God’s protection while I go about my plans. They are a declaration that I do not want a separate life anymore. I do not want a God part and a James part. I do not want to visit God in prayer and then return to the part of the day I consider mine.

Maybe God was never supposed to be a part of my life. Maybe my life was always supposed to be lived in Him. If that is true, then loving God with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength may be far more practical than I ever understood. It means I wake up, live, work, love, struggle, rest, succeed, fail, repent, laugh, grieve, and eventually lie down at night without deliberately leaving Him behind. The prayer that begins the morning can continue through everything that follows, even when no words are being spoken: “Come with me, Lord.”

Part 9 — “Come With Me, Lord”

After everything I have looked at so far, I keep coming back to those four words: “Come with me, Lord.” They sound simple, almost too simple for a command as enormous as loving God with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength. But maybe that is why they have affected me so deeply. I have spent fifteen years trying to know God better, asking questions, studying Scripture, examining what I believe, and trying to understand His character. Now I am beginning to see that knowing someone eventually creates another question: what does it actually mean to live with them?

When I say, “Come with me, Lord,” I am not asking God to physically move from one location to another. I know He is already present. I am changing my own awareness and intention. I am saying that wherever I am about to go, whatever I am about to do, whatever decision I am about to make, I do not want to behave as though God has been left behind. I want the relationship to continue.

That can begin the moment I wake up. Before the phone, before the news, before the problems of the day start demanding my attention, I can simply recognize Him. I do not need an elaborate prayer every morning to prove my devotion. Sometimes it may simply be, “Good morning, Lord. Thank You for another day. Come with me today.” That small prayer changes something because I have begun the day remembering that I am not entering it alone.

Then I go to work. This is where “Come with me, Lord” becomes practical because work contains hundreds of decisions that never look spiritual. What should I charge? What should I promise? How should I handle this customer? Should I take this opportunity? Is this deal fair? Am I telling the entire truth, or am I presenting the truth in a way designed to mislead someone? Loving God at work may have very little to do with talking about God at work. It may have everything to do with whether His character is welcome in the way I conduct myself.

There may even be moments when I do not know what the right decision is. Instead of assuming that every difficult choice requires a supernatural sign, I can bring God into the process. I can pray, think, seek wisdom, examine Scripture where it applies, consider how my decision affects other people, and then make the best decision I can. “Come with me, Lord” does not mean becoming unable to act without hearing a voice from heaven. It means refusing to act as though His wisdom and character are irrelevant.

Then someone makes me angry. This may be where the prayer becomes much harder. It is easy to say, “Come with me, Lord,” while walking into something I enjoy. It is different when someone insults me, betrays me, misunderstands me, or treats me unfairly. My flesh immediately begins building a case. I know what I want to say. I know what I think they deserve. That may be the exact moment when I need to say, “Come with me, Lord. I am angry, and You know I am angry. Before I answer this person, show me how You want me to respond.”

That does not mean pretending the other person did nothing wrong. Jesus confronted wrongdoing. Scripture gives us ways to address conflict. Loving someone does not mean allowing them to abuse us or pretending that truth does not matter. But including God changes what I am seeking. Am I trying to correct something, protect someone, establish a boundary, or speak truth, or am I trying to hurt this person because they hurt me? Those motivations can look very similar from the outside while being completely different inside the heart.

Then there is temptation. I think this may be one of the most important places to learn these words because temptation naturally makes us want privacy. Something inside me says, “I want this, and I don’t want God involved in the decision.” That is almost the definition of the locked room I have been talking about. Maybe the first response to temptation does not always need to be a complicated spiritual battle. Maybe it begins by opening the door: “Come with me, Lord. You already know what I want. I don’t want to hide it from You.”

There is something powerful about bringing temptation into relationship because secrecy gives temptation room to grow. Adam’s response after sin was to hide. When I begin hiding from God, I am moving in the same direction. But what if instead of running away because I am ashamed of what I want, I move toward Him because of what I want? “Lord, this is exactly where my flesh is right now. Come into this with me.” I am not asking Him to approve the desire. I am refusing to have the desire without Him.

The same principle applies after failure. If I sin, my instinct may be to avoid God until I feel spiritually presentable again. But that makes no sense if God is the One who restores me. When Peter failed, Jesus did not disappear from Peter’s life. Peter needed to return to the One he had failed. If I have learned anything from my testimony fifteen years ago, it is that honesty can become the doorway back into relationship. I do not need to pretend before God. I need to tell Him the truth.

“Come with me, Lord” also belongs in success, and I think success may sometimes be more dangerous than failure. When I am failing, I know I need help. When everything is working, I can slowly stop asking. I know what I am doing. The business is good. The family is good. The bills are paid. The plan is working. That was the setting of my own experience fifteen years ago. I was thanking God because life was good, but I had not yet recognized the distance between gratitude for His blessings and actually knowing Him.

So when something succeeds, maybe I say, “Come with me, Lord. Don’t let this success become the place where I stop needing You.” When money comes in, I include Him. When people praise me, I include Him. When something I worked hard on succeeds, I can enjoy it and still recognize where my life comes from. Loving God does not require pretending that accomplishment is meaningless. It means accomplishment does not become another room where I quietly close the door.

I can include Him in enjoyment too. This matters because I do not want this episode to leave anyone believing that living with God means becoming afraid to enjoy life. Scripture contains feasts, celebrations, weddings, meals, friendship, music, rest, beauty, and thanksgiving. Jesus attended a wedding. He ate with people. He accepted invitations into homes. Gratitude can turn enjoyment toward God rather than away from Him. Sometimes “Come with me, Lord” may simply become, “Thank You for this. This is good.”

Then there are the completely ordinary moments. Driving somewhere. Making dinner. Sitting outside. Working on something around the house. Going to the store. There may be nothing to pray about and no decision requiring discernment. I do not think loving God requires filling every quiet second with religious words. Two people who know each other deeply can sometimes be together without talking. Presence itself can be enough.

That may be important because otherwise “Come with me, Lord” could become another form of anxiety. I could start monitoring myself constantly. Did I think about God enough during the last hour? Did I invite Him into that conversation? Did I forget Him while I was watching television? Did I pray before making that purchase? Before long, I would have transformed relationship into spiritual bookkeeping, and the very words that were supposed to bring freedom would become another burden.

I do not believe that is what loving God with “all” means. A husband does not spend every second consciously reminding himself that he is married. Yet the relationship is still real. It has become part of how he understands himself and makes decisions. In the same way, perhaps living with God eventually becomes less about constantly reminding myself that He is there and more about developing a life where His presence is assumed.

That is why I think there is a difference between including God and constantly asking God for permission. Scripture already gives us enormous amounts of wisdom about how to live. God has given us minds, judgment, responsibility, and freedom. I do not necessarily need to ask God whether I should order chicken or fish for dinner. I can choose and thank Him for the meal. Relationship is not paralysis.

But there will be decisions where something inside me already knows why I do not want to ask. Those are different. If I am avoiding prayer because I am afraid God may challenge what I have already decided to do, then perhaps I have found another locked room. The problem is not that I forgot to ask permission. The problem is that I intentionally do not want His presence affecting the decision.

This is where “Come with me, Lord” becomes a test of my own heart. Can I sincerely say those words before doing this? Can I bring Him into this conversation? Can I bring Him into this purchase? Can I bring Him into this relationship? Can I bring Him into this entertainment? Can I bring Him into this ambition? Can I bring Him into this argument? If something inside me immediately says, “No, not here,” perhaps I have discovered the exact place where the word “all” is still working on me.

There is another side to these words that I cannot ignore. If I say, “Come with me, Lord,” I have to be prepared for the possibility that He does not want me going where I am headed. I cannot use God’s presence as a blessing over decisions I have already made. There may be moments when I begin walking toward something and realize that following Jesus means turning around. At that point, the prayer changes.

Jesus never actually told His disciples, “Ask Me to follow you.” He said, “Follow me.” That means “Come with me, Lord” is not the final destination of this idea. It is the beginning. I am learning not to leave Him behind, but eventually living with Him means discovering that I am not supposed to be the one choosing every destination. Sometimes I ask Him to come with me, and somewhere along the road I realize He is saying, “No, you come with Me.”

Maybe that is what happened to Abraham. Maybe that is what happened to Moses. Maybe that is what happened to Peter and Paul. God entered the life they were already living, but He did not merely become a companion to their existing plans. The relationship eventually changed where they were going. Abraham left home. Moses returned to Egypt. Peter left his nets. Paul discovered that the direction he believed was righteous was actually opposing Christ.

This is where loving God becomes surrender without becoming works. I am not changing direction so that God will love me. I am changing direction because I trust the One I have come to know. That is why the fifteen years of questions matter. Trust grows from knowing someone. The more I learn His character, the more possible it becomes to say, “I don’t understand why You are leading me this way, but I know enough about You to follow.”

Perhaps one day the words “Come with me, Lord” become unnecessary because the relationship has become so deeply woven into ordinary life that I no longer think in terms of leaving Him anywhere. Until then, I think those four words can teach me something. They remind me when I wake up that the relationship continues. They remind me when I am tempted that I do not need to hide. They remind me when I succeed that I still need Him. They remind me when I fail that I can return. They remind me when I am making decisions that my life is no longer something I want to live separately from Him.

Fifteen years ago, my prayer was essentially, “Lord, I need to know You.” Now I think He may be teaching me what comes after knowing. Knowing creates trust, trust makes surrender possible, surrender changes how I live, and somewhere inside that process love grows. I cannot force that love into existence, but I can stop building places where the relationship is excluded.

So tomorrow morning, I may begin very simply. “Lord, I don’t know everything this day will contain. I don’t know where my flesh will fight You. I don’t know where I will get it right or where I will fail. I don’t want to pretend that I have already given You every part of myself because You may show me something today that I have never seen before. But I want You here. Come with me, Lord, and if somewhere along the way I begin walking somewhere You are not leading, teach me to stop, turn around, and come with You.”

Part 10 — Stop Visiting God

After everything I have examined in this episode, I think I finally understand why the title bothered me so much: Do I visit God, or do I live with Him? Because I realized how easy it is to build an entire Christian life around visiting God. I can visit Him every morning in prayer. I can visit Him when I open my Bible. I can visit Him on Sunday. I can visit Him when I need help. I can visit Him when I am frightened, confused, thankful, or desperate. I can have very sincere encounters with God and still spend enormous portions of my ordinary life functioning as though I am on my own.

There is nothing wrong with setting aside special time for God. Jesus Himself withdrew from other people to pray. He went into solitary places. He spent entire nights in prayer. Those concentrated times matter because relationships need attention. The problem begins when I unconsciously believe that the relationship ends when the concentrated time ends. I say amen, stand up, and go back to my life. I close the Bible and return to my life. I leave church and return to my life. That phrase itself may reveal the problem: “my life.”

If I belong to Christ, what exactly am I returning to that does not include Him? Paul writes, “Ye are not your own. For ye are bought with a price.” He also says, “For to me to live is Christ.” Those are enormous statements. They do not describe Christianity as adding a relationship with Jesus to an otherwise independent life. Something about ownership itself has changed. The life I keep calling mine has been entrusted back to the One who gave it to me.

Maybe this is why Jesus used such complete language when describing the greatest commandment. All your heart, all your soul, all your mind, all your strength. He leaves me nowhere obvious to build a second life. There is no sentence afterward saying, “And once you have given God those things, everything else belongs entirely to you.” The command reaches into the whole person because perhaps relationship with God was never intended to exist beside life. It was intended to become the way life is lived.

That changes how I think about prayer. Prayer is no longer simply where I go to meet God. Prayer becomes part of an ongoing conversation. There may be concentrated moments when I shut everything else out and give Him my complete attention, but afterward the relationship continues. I may not be speaking to Him consciously every minute, just as people who love one another do not speak every second they are together. Silence does not mean absence.

It changes Bible study too. I can spend hours investigating Scripture, comparing passages, studying history, examining words, and asking questions. I believe there is tremendous value in that because much of my own journey toward knowing God has happened through those questions. But eventually I have to close the book and live what I have discovered. If my study teaches me that God is merciful, then eventually His mercy should affect the way I treat someone. If I discover that God cares about truth, eventually that should affect my business. If I learn that Jesus forgives, eventually forgiveness has to encounter someone I do not want to forgive.

That may be one of the clearest ways to tell whether I am merely visiting God. If everything I learn about Him remains inside the place where I learned it, then the relationship has become compartmentalized. I can know extraordinary amounts of theology while my anger remains untouched. I can understand prophecy while treating people terribly. I can defend Scripture while refusing to forgive. I can speak about surrender while protecting the one thing I have already decided God cannot have.

Jesus repeatedly connected love with obedience, but I am beginning to hear that differently now. Obedience is not the admission price into a relationship with God. It is what happens when the relationship begins reaching into real decisions. If Jesus says forgiveness matters and I love Him, eventually that teaching meets my resentment. If Jesus says generosity matters, eventually it meets my money. If Jesus says truth matters, eventually it meets the places where dishonesty would benefit me. Love becomes visible when the God I say I love is allowed to influence the life I actually live.

This is also where the second great commandment begins appearing naturally. Jesus did not separate loving God from loving our neighbor the way I sometimes do. He placed them together. John later makes the connection even more uncomfortable by asking how someone can claim to love God, whom he has not seen, while refusing to love the brother whom he has seen. Perhaps one of the clearest ways God comes with me into ordinary life is through the way I treat the people I encounter there.

That means I may leave a beautiful prayer time believing I have just loved God deeply, only to encounter the real test ten minutes later when somebody irritates me. I may sing that I surrender everything and then become furious when somebody interferes with my plans. I may tell God that all my strength belongs to Him and then refuse to use any of that strength helping someone because I am tired. The ordinary moment does not cancel the worship that came before it. It reveals whether the worship is beginning to travel with me.

Maybe that is why Jesus’ story of the Good Samaritan follows the discussion of loving God and loving our neighbor in Luke. The question does not remain theological for very long. There is a wounded man lying beside a road. People with religious identities pass him. Then someone stops. Love becomes something that happens on a road, involving time, inconvenience, physical effort, compassion, and money. The commandment leaves the religious discussion and enters ordinary life.

I think that is what I have been discovering throughout this episode. Loving God is not primarily about finding more impressive ways to tell Him that I love Him. It is allowing the relationship to leave the prayer room with me. The God I worship in private comes with me into how I speak. The God I study comes with me into my decisions. The God I thank for providing comes with me into what I do with what He provided. The God whose forgiveness I celebrate comes with me when somebody needs forgiveness from me.

This is where I have to be careful because I could easily turn this discovery into another impossible standard. I could wake up tomorrow determined never to forget God for a single moment, and by breakfast I would probably discover that my mind had wandered somewhere else. That cannot be the point. Love is not measured by whether I maintained uninterrupted conscious awareness of God every second of the day. The question is whether I am learning to live a life where He is welcome everywhere.

There will be days when I do this better than others. There will be moments when my flesh wins. There will be decisions I make too quickly. There will probably be rooms I still do not realize are locked. But now I know what to do when one is discovered. I do not have to run away in shame. I can open it. I can tell Him what is there. I can say, “Lord, I did not realize how tightly I was holding this. Come into this too.”

That brings me back to the experience that started this journey fifteen years ago. I was telling God how much I loved Him, and the question came: “Do you really love Him?” The answer was no. What I find so beautiful about that moment now is that God did not demand that I immediately produce the missing love. The message I understood was, “Of course you don’t love Me, because you don’t know Me. Now we can start working on that.”

The words “we can start working on that” mean even more to me today. I did not have to solve the problem before approaching Him. The relationship itself became the place where the problem could be changed. I began asking questions because I wanted to know Him. The more I learned, the more my understanding changed. The more my understanding changed, the more I trusted Him. And perhaps now that trust is beginning to ask something more of me: if you know Me, will you live with Me?

Maybe that is what God has been doing all along. He was never merely giving me information about Himself. He was building relationship. Every question, correction, discovery, failure, repentance, answered prayer, unanswered prayer, season of certainty, and season of confusion became another place where I had an opportunity to know Him. The destination was not simply better theology. The destination was trust.

And trust is what makes “all” possible. I will never willingly open every room to someone I do not trust. If I believe God is waiting to destroy everything I enjoy, I will hide things from Him. If I believe He is arbitrary, I will fear surrender. If I believe He does not understand me, I will protect myself from Him. But the more I come to know His character, the more I can begin saying, “I may not understand what You are doing here, but I know enough about You to let You into this.”

Perhaps that is why the greatest commandment begins with love rather than fear. God does not merely demand access to every room. He wants relationship with the person living inside the house. As that relationship deepens, doors begin opening that rules alone could never open. I stop asking only, “Am I allowed to do this?” and begin asking, “Does this belong inside the life I am living with Him?”

That is a very different way to live Christianity. Instead of constantly searching for the boundary between permitted and forbidden, I begin thinking relationally. Can I bring Him here? Can I thank Him here? Can I listen to Him here? Can I treat this person the way I would if I remembered that God is standing beside both of us? Can I make this decision without needing Him to wait outside?

And when the answer is no, perhaps I have found something more valuable than condemnation. I have found the next room. I have discovered another place where love can grow. The answer is not pretending the room does not exist. The answer is opening the door.

Maybe this is what I needed to understand when I began asking how to love God more. I thought perhaps I needed to generate stronger feelings. I wondered whether my flesh was preventing me from accomplishing the commandment. I wondered what I was supposed to do if God is the One who says He will transform me. Now I think the answer may be simpler. I cannot manufacture love, but I can remain. I can respond. I can be honest. I can stop hiding. I can keep opening doors.

Fifteen years ago, I learned to say, “Lord, I don’t love You.” That honesty began the journey of knowing Him. Today, perhaps the next stage of that journey is learning to say, “Lord, I don’t want to visit You anymore. I want to live with You.” I want the God I meet in prayer to be the God I remember in the argument. I want the God I study in Scripture to be present in my business decisions. I want the God I thank when life is good to remain with me when life is painful. I want the God I say I love to be welcome in the places where my flesh still says “mine.”

Maybe tomorrow I will discover another locked room. Maybe next year I will discover one I cannot even see today. That no longer frightens me the way it once might have. If God has spent fifteen years teaching me who He is, then perhaps discovering another unsurrendered place is not evidence that the journey failed. It may simply mean the relationship has reached another door.

So I do not need to promise God tonight that I will never fail again. I do not need to promise that every thought tomorrow will be spiritual or that I will perfectly understand what loving Him with “all” means. I can simply give Him the truth that I have today. “Lord, I want to love You more. I want to know You more. I know my flesh still gets in the way, and I know there are probably parts of me I have not given You yet. When You show them to me, help me open them.”

And when I wake up tomorrow, I can begin again with the simplest prayer this entire investigation has given me. I do not want to visit You and then return to my life, because my life is the very place where I want to know You. Teach me to recognize Your presence in the ordinary things. Teach me to follow when You lead somewhere I did not expect. Teach me to stop when I am heading somewhere You are not leading. Teach me to love the people You place in front of me, because loving You cannot remain separated from loving them.

After fifteen years of asking, “Who are You?” perhaps I am finally beginning to understand the next question: “How do I live with You?” Maybe the answer will take the rest of my life to learn. But I know where I can begin. Wherever I go from here, whatever tomorrow brings, whatever room You uncover next, I can open the door and say, “Come with me, Lord.”

Conclusion — No More Locked Rooms

When I began this investigation, I thought I was trying to answer a fairly simple question: how do I love God more? Jesus said the greatest commandment is to love the Lord our God with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind, and all our strength. I knew the desire was there. I knew I wanted to love Him. What I could not understand was how to make that love grow. You can command an action, but how do you command love?

The answer took me back fifteen years to the night when I discovered that I had been confusing gratitude with love. My business was doing well. My family was doing well. I was sober. Life seemed fair, and I had so much to thank God for. While I was telling Him how much I loved Him, that question came into my mind: “Do you really love Him?” When I finally became honest with myself, I admitted, “Lord, I don’t love You.”

I expected anger, but what I experienced was celebration. Then came the message that changed my life: “There you are. We have been waiting for this moment for a long time. Of course you don’t love Me, because you don’t know Me. Now we can start working on that because you were finally honest with yourself.” I understand those words differently today than I did then. God did not tell me to try harder to love Him. The answer was relationship. If I wanted to love Him, I needed to know Him.

That is what I have spent the last fifteen years trying to do. I asked questions. I investigated things I did not understand. I challenged things I had been taught when they did not seem consistent with what I was discovering about God’s character. I studied Scripture. I changed my mind about things. I discovered places where I had been wrong. Underneath all of it was the same desire that began that night: if I am going to tell God that I love Him, I want to know who He actually is.

But now I realize that knowing God was not the end of the journey. Knowing creates the possibility of trust, and trust makes something else possible: surrender. I cannot willingly give my whole life to someone I do not trust. Perhaps that is why God did not begin by demanding that I somehow manufacture perfect devotion. He began by inviting me to know Him.

Then that little word “all” began bothering me. All my heart. All my soul. All my mind. All my strength. I originally heard those words almost like four impossible measurements. Do I have enough love in my heart? Am I using enough of my mind? Have I given enough strength? But after looking at the command in Deuteronomy and watching how it moves immediately into sitting at home, walking along the way, lying down, rising up, and teaching our children, I began seeing something different. Maybe “all” is not primarily measuring the intensity of my religious feelings. Maybe “all” is describing the reach of the relationship.

That would mean God does not merely want the religious part of my life. He does not want to be someone I visit during prayer, visit while reading Scripture, visit on Sunday, and visit when something goes wrong. He wants to be present when I sit down, when I get up, when I work, when I rest, when I succeed, when I fail, when I make decisions, when I am tempted, when I am angry, and when absolutely nothing remarkable is happening.

This does not mean that every moment has to become a religious ceremony. I do not have to turn dinner into a sermon. I do not have to pray over every minor choice until I am afraid to make decisions. I do not have to think consciously about God every second to prove that I love Him. That would turn relationship into another form of bondage. I think the question is much simpler: is there anywhere in my life where I deliberately do not want Him?

That question exposes the locked rooms. My money can become one. My business can become one. My entertainment can become one. My anger can become one. My ambitions can become one. My relationships can become one. My opinions can become one. Even my theology can become one if I become more interested in defending what I already believe than allowing God to correct me.

I also learned something important about the flesh. The fact that my flesh fights me does not necessarily mean the desire to love God is false. Jesus told His disciples that the spirit was willing while the flesh was weak. Paul described the conflict between flesh and Spirit. Peter sincerely believed he would remain faithful to Jesus and then discovered a weakness inside himself that he did not know was there. The Christian life is not pretending that conflict has disappeared. It is learning what to do when the conflict appears.

Maybe that is another reason honesty matters so much. Fifteen years ago, I did not solve my lack of love before bringing it to God. I brought Him the lack of love. Today, if there is something in me that does not want to surrender, perhaps I can bring Him that too. “Lord, I know what You are asking, but I don’t want to do it.” That may not sound like a beautiful prayer, but it is a truthful one. And if my relationship with God began when I stopped pretending, I see no reason to start pretending now.

I have also come to understand my part differently. Scripture says salvation is by grace, not works, yet the same Scripture tells me to follow, abide, walk, obey, forgive, repent, seek, and love. I do not think those things contradict one another anymore. God does what I cannot do, and I respond to what He is doing. I cannot manufacture the life of the vine. I can remain in the vine. I cannot manufacture the fruit of the Spirit. I can walk in the Spirit. I cannot save myself. I can follow the One who saved me.

Perhaps the desire itself is part of His work. Paul says that God works in us “both to will and to do of his good pleasure.” So when I say, “Lord, I want to love You more,” maybe I should not immediately become discouraged because I have not arrived. Maybe the wanting is evidence that something is already happening. Instead of staring constantly at how far I still have to go, I can respond to the next thing He places in front of me.

The people I looked at throughout this investigation did not become people without weaknesses. Abraham struggled. Moses resisted. David failed. Peter collapsed under fear. Paul had to discover that the direction he thought was righteous was actually opposing Christ. Yet their lives kept returning to the same pattern. God called, and they responded. God corrected, and they turned. God revealed another step, and eventually they took it. Their love became visible not because they never struggled, but because the relationship kept reaching farther into their lives.

And perhaps that is what “all” looks like over a lifetime. I may not know every locked room today. God may show me something five years from now that I cannot see in myself tonight. That does not necessarily mean everything before it was false. It means another door has been found. The question is what I do when I see it.

Maybe God has never expected me to hand Him a perfect finished house. Maybe He has been walking through it with me, opening one door at a time. Some doors opened easily. Others took years. Some rooms were filled with things I was ashamed of. Some contained things I thought were good but had quietly become more important to me than Him. And perhaps there are still doors I walk past every day without realizing they are locked.

That no longer makes me want to run from Him. It makes me want to know Him enough to trust Him with the key.

And this is where the second greatest commandment suddenly makes even more sense. Jesus said to love God first and then to love our neighbor as ourselves. Maybe these commandments cannot remain separated because the God I invite into every part of my life is eventually going to ask me how I treat the people who share that life with me. I cannot say, “Come with me, Lord,” and then expect Him to remain silent while I destroy someone with my words. I cannot invite Him into my business and expect Him not to care how I treat people. I cannot invite Him into my home and expect Him not to care how I love my family.

Perhaps loving my neighbor is one of the places where loving God becomes visible. Peter told Jesus that he loved Him, and Jesus answered, “Feed my sheep.” Love Me? Then care about what I care about. Love Me? Then look at the person standing in front of you. Love Me? Then let the love you have received begin moving through you toward someone else.

So I think I finally have an answer to the question that started this episode. How do I love God more? I get to know Him. I remain with Him. I respond when He moves. I tell Him the truth. I stop hiding the parts of myself that are struggling. I allow Him into another room. Then another. Then another. Not to earn His love, but because I am learning to trust the One who loved me first.

Fifteen years ago, perhaps the most important prayer I could pray was, “Lord, I don’t love You.” It was ugly, frightening, and honest. But that honesty opened a door. Since then, I have been asking, “Who are You?” Now I think another question has begun: “How do I live with You?”

Maybe that question will take the rest of my life to answer, and maybe that is the point. A relationship is not something I finish. I live it. Tomorrow there will be another decision, another conversation, another temptation, another joy, another disappointment, another person to love, and perhaps another locked door I did not know existed. I do not need to know tonight what every one of those moments will require. I only need to know what I want to do when they arrive.

I don’t want to visit God anymore and then return to a life I call mine. I want Him in the ordinary moments. I want Him in the questions. I want Him in the successes and the failures. I want Him there when my spirit is willing and when my flesh is weak. I want Him there when I understand and when I do not. I want to know Him well enough that when He says, “Come with Me,” I trust Him enough to go.

Maybe loving God with all my heart, all my soul, all my mind, and all my strength begins there. Not with an enormous promise about everything I will do tomorrow, but with an open door today. Not with pretending that every room already belongs completely to Him, but with refusing to lock the next one when He reaches for the handle.

So tonight, I think my prayer is very different from the prayer I prayed fifteen years ago. I can finally say, “Lord, I do love You. I know You more than I did then, and I want to know You more than I do now. I know there are places in me that still say ‘mine.’ When You show them to me, help me open them. I don’t want You to be someone I visit. I want to live my life with You. And wherever tomorrow takes me, come with me, Lord. But more importantly, wherever You are going, teach me to come with You.”

Bibliography

• The Holy Bible. King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982.
• Brown, Francis, S. R. Driver, and Charles A. Briggs. The Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1996.
• Koehler, Ludwig, Walter Baumgartner, and Johann Jakob Stamm. The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament. Translated and edited under the supervision of M. E. J. Richardson. 5 vols. Leiden: Brill, 1994–2000.
• Liddell, Henry George, Robert Scott, Henry Stuart Jones, and Roderick McKenzie. A Greek-English Lexicon. 9th ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.
• Mishnah. Berakhot 9:5. In The Mishnah: A New Translation. Translated by Jacob Neusner. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988.
• The New Brown, Driver, Briggs, Gesenius Hebrew and English Lexicon. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1979.
• Whittaker, Colin C. Seven Pentecostal Pioneers. Basingstoke, England: Marshall Pickering, 1983.

Endnotes

1. Matthew 22:35–40. Jesus identifies the love of God as the first and greatest commandment and joins it directly to the command to love one’s neighbor.
2. Mark 12:28–31. Mark records the command with the fourfold wording used throughout this episode: heart, soul, mind, and strength.
3. Luke 10:25–28. Luke likewise records heart, soul, strength, and mind in connection with loving God and immediately leads into the question of who constitutes one’s neighbor.
4. Deuteronomy 6:4–9. Jesus’ answer draws from the Shema, particularly Deuteronomy 6:5: “And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.” The surrounding verses place this devotion within ordinary daily life: sitting at home, walking, lying down, rising, and teaching one’s children.
5. 1 Thessalonians 5:23. Paul’s reference to “spirit and soul and body” provides the comparison discussed in Part 3. The episode distinguishes this language from the heart-soul-mind-strength language of the greatest commandment rather than treating either passage as a complete technical anatomy of the human person.
6. Genesis 2:7. The Hebrew nephesh underlies the language traditionally translated “living soul.” The passage describes the human being becoming a living nephesh after God breathes the breath of life into him.
7. Francis Brown, S. R. Driver, and Charles A. Briggs, The Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1996), entries for lev/levav, nephesh, and me’od. These lexical resources provide background for the discussion of heart, soul, and might in Deuteronomy 6:5.
8. Ludwig Koehler, Walter Baumgartner, and Johann Jakob Stamm, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, trans. and ed. M. E. J. Richardson, 5 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1994–2000), entries concerning the Hebrew terminology of Deuteronomy 6:5. Of particular importance is me’od, whose semantic range is broader than the modern English idea of muscular “strength.”
9. Mishnah Berakhot 9:5, in The Mishnah: A New Translation, trans. Jacob Neusner (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988). The traditional interpretation associates loving God with “all your heart” with both inclinations, “all your soul” even with the giving of life, and “all your might” with one’s wealth or circumstances.
10. Matthew 6:19–21. Jesus connects treasure and heart: “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” This supports the episode’s argument that biblical “heart” involves more than emotional affection.
11. John 17:3. Jesus describes eternal life in relational terms: knowing “the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.” This passage forms an important foundation for the distinction between knowing information about God and knowing God.
12. John 14:8–11. Jesus’ response to Philip, including “he that hath seen me hath seen the Father,” provides the basis for looking to Christ when asking what God’s character is like.
13. 1 John 4:19. “We love him, because he first loved us.” This passage supports the episode’s repeated emphasis that Christian love begins as a response to God’s prior love rather than as an emotion manufactured by human effort.
14. John 15:13. Jesus connects love with self-giving: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”
15. Exodus 33:12–18. Moses asks God, “Shew me now thy way, that I may know thee,” insists upon God’s presence, and asks to see His glory. This passage became central to the episode’s distinction between merely receiving direction from God and actually wanting God to accompany the journey.
16. Job 1:8–11; 2:3–5. The adversary’s accusation against Job raises the question of whether Job’s devotion depends upon protection and blessing, providing the background for the episode’s question about loving God rather than merely loving what God provides.
17. Matthew 26:36–46; Mark 14:32–42. In Gethsemane Jesus tells the disciples, “the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.” The episode uses this distinction to explore sincere spiritual desire existing alongside human weakness.
18. Luke 22:39–46. Jesus’ prayer, “nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done,” provides the episode’s central example of surrender. Surrender is presented not as the absence of another desire but as placing that desire beneath the Father’s will.
19. Romans 7:15–25. Paul describes the conflict between willing what is good and finding another force at work within him. The episode acknowledges the differing theological interpretations of Romans 7 while using Paul’s language to illustrate the recognizable conflict between desire and action.
20. Galatians 5:16–25. Paul describes the flesh and Spirit as opposed to one another, commands believers to “walk in the Spirit,” and identifies love as the first listed fruit of the Spirit.
21. Philippians 2:12–13. Paul places human response and divine action beside one another: believers are instructed to “work out” their salvation while being reminded that “it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.”
22. Ephesians 2:8–10. Salvation is explicitly described as being by grace through faith and “not of works,” while believers are simultaneously described as God’s workmanship, “created in Christ Jesus unto good works.” This distinction is foundational to Part 6.
23. John 15:1–11. Jesus’ vine-and-branches teaching supplies one of the episode’s central images. The branch does not create the life that produces fruit; it is commanded to abide in the vine. Jesus’ statement “without me ye can do nothing” underscores dependence upon Him.
24. John 14:15. “If ye love me, keep my commandments.” The episode interprets obedience not as payment for Christ’s love but as one way love becomes visible within relationship.
25. James 2:14–26. James’ discussion of faith and works provides the basis for distinguishing works as evidence and expression of living faith from works as a means of purchasing salvation.
26. Genesis 12:1–9; 15:1–6; 22:1–18. Abraham’s story illustrates progressive trust: leaving what was familiar, believing God’s promise, waiting, and eventually facing the test involving Isaac.
27. Exodus 3:1–4:17. Moses’ repeated objections to God’s call demonstrate that a person can struggle, hesitate, question, and even resist before learning deeper trust and obedience.
28. Psalm 51. David’s prayer following the exposure of his sin provides one of Scripture’s clearest examples of honest confession, repentance, and return to God.
29. 2 Samuel 12:1–13. Nathan’s confrontation of David culminates in David’s admission, “I have sinned against the LORD,” illustrating the importance of ceasing self-protection when truth exposes sin.
30. Daniel 6:10. Daniel continues his established practice of prayer after the royal decree is signed. His response illustrates a relationship with God already incorporated into ordinary routine before the crisis arrives.
31. Luke 10:38–42; John 12:1–8. Mary of Bethany provides two important pictures used in the episode: sitting at Jesus’ feet to listen and later offering something costly to Him.
32. Luke 22:31–34, 54–62; John 21:15–19. Peter confidently promises faithfulness, denies Jesus, and is later restored. Jesus’ repeated question “Lovest thou me?” is followed by the instruction to care for His sheep, directly connecting love for Christ with responsibility toward others.
33. Acts 9:1–22; Galatians 2:20. Paul’s encounter with Christ changes the direction of his life, while his later statement “Christ liveth in me” expresses a life no longer understood as independent from Christ.
34. 1 Corinthians 10:31. “Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God.” The ordinary examples of eating and drinking are central to the episode’s argument that life with God extends beyond explicitly religious activities.
35. Colossians 3:17. Paul similarly writes that “whatsoever ye do in word or deed” should be done in the name of the Lord Jesus, reinforcing the integration of devotion and ordinary life.
36. 1 Corinthians 6:19–20. Paul’s statement “ye are not your own” and “ye are bought with a price” provides biblical grounding for the episode’s discussion of ownership and the repeated human claim, “mine.”
37. 1 John 4:20–21. John refuses to separate love for God from love for other people, arguing that a person cannot credibly claim love for the unseen God while hating the brother he can see.
38. Luke 10:25–37. The parable of the Good Samaritan follows the discussion of loving God and neighbor and places love into an ordinary, costly situation involving compassion, time, physical effort, inconvenience, and money.
39. Mark 6:30–32. Jesus tells His disciples, “Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest a while.” The passage supports the episode’s point that life with God includes appropriate rest rather than constant religious productivity.
40. Colin C. Whittaker, Seven Pentecostal Pioneers (Basingstoke, England: Marshall Pickering, 1983). Whittaker’s portraits of Smith Wigglesworth, Stephen Jeffreys, Donald Gee, Howard Carter, Harold Horton, William F. P. Burton, and Teddy Hodgson were used as later Christian examples of prayer, obedience, surrender, perseverance, teaching, evangelism, and missionary service. 
41. Whittaker’s introductory recollections concerning William F. P. Burton include Burton’s desire to share Communion even when the church where he was scheduled to preach was not observing Communion that Sunday. The episode uses this small incident as an example of devotion expressed through consistent ordinary practice rather than only dramatic ministry. 
42. Whittaker also recounts Robert Cook’s long period of prayer concerning the spiritual work he believed God had promised in Luton. The episode uses the account specifically as an illustration of persistence in prayer, without requiring acceptance of every interpretation surrounding the event. 
43. Whittaker’s account of Teddy Hodgson describes his successful furniture-restoration business and his struggle over missionary service in the Congo. Hodgson initially reasoned that he might remain home and financially support missions before recognizing that his reasons for remaining were becoming excuses. His story is used to illustrate that surrender sometimes concerns good and legitimate things rather than obviously sinful ones. 
44. The recurring phrase “Come with me, Lord” is not presented in the episode as a direct biblical quotation. It is a practical expression developed from the biblical themes of abiding in Christ, walking with God, walking in the Spirit, doing all things to God’s glory, and Moses’ insistence that he did not want to continue the journey without God’s presence.
45. The episode’s final development of the phrase deliberately returns to Jesus’ actual command, “Follow me.” “Come with me, Lord” begins as a desire not to exclude God from ordinary life, but mature surrender ultimately recognizes that the believer is not asking Christ merely to accompany his chosen direction. The deeper movement is toward following Christ wherever He leads.

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