He can recite it and he cannot get past it.
Thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.
He hears it as three columns and a total, and he runs the total most days without meaning to. Heart: divided, obviously, because he thinks about work at the wrong moments. Soul: he could not define the category, which he finds worrying in itself. Might: he is fifty and there is not much of it left after the day.
So the sentence that is meant to be the center of everything arrives, for him, as the first line of an audit he has never once passed.
And it has done something quiet and serious over about fifteen years. He has moved his practical religion elsewhere. He is generous, he is dependable, he turns up, and all of that he can do. The love command he has filed under things he is failing and does not discuss.
Here is the sentence he has never said out loud.
He has come to think of God as somebody he is permanently short with, in the way a man is short with a creditor he is paying but not fast enough.
Read the sentence before it
There is a line immediately before the command, and almost nobody reads them together, and they were never separated in the original.
Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD: And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.Deuteronomy 6:4-5
Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God is one LORD.
The command does not open with an instruction. It opens with a fact, and the fact is about Him rather than about you. He is one. He is not divided, not competing with Himself, not one thing on a good day and another on a bad one.
And then the and. The loving follows the hearing, and it follows what was heard, which was a statement about God's own wholeness rather than a demand for yours.
And look at who it was given to. Not to spiritual athletes. To a nation of ex-slaves who had spent forty years failing at almost everything and who were about to fail at more. Nobody handed that sentence to people it flattered.
Your loving follows what He is rather than measures what you are, and Deuteronomy 6:4 puts His oneness in front of the command by design. That is what the word actually arranges, not softening I am doing, and the Holy Spirit is the One who lets a fifty year old man hear the first half before the second.
The audit was never in the text
Now the plain thing, and it is about a habit of reading rather than a fault of loving.
You've been reading all as a percentage. All heart, all soul, all might, tallied and found short.
But that word in that sentence is not a measurement. It is a way of saying nothing held back and nothing kept in reserve for a rival, which is why the whole passage that follows is about the God who has no rivals rather than about the intensity of anybody's feeling. It is language about direction and about undividedness, not about output.
And the fifteen years have cost you something specific. Not your obedience, which is intact and visible to everybody. Your affection, which has quietly gone somewhere else because a man cannot go on being fond of a creditor.
And nothing about fifteen years of failing an audit has ever made you short with Him. Scripture puts the command after a statement about His wholeness and not after a scoreboard, and the Holy Spirit is not standing over you with a total.
Read the four verses first
Here is the practical piece, and it is a change in order rather than in effort.
This week, read verses four to nine out loud, and read them in that sequence, and do not stop at five.
Because what follows is not a scheme for producing feeling. It is a set of instructions about where the words go: in your heart, on your children, spoken in the house and on the road, on your hands and on your doorposts.
That is a description of a life saturated with something rather than a person straining to feel something, and if you've been trying to generate an emotion for fifteen years you've been working at the one thing the passage never asks for.
You are able to receive this as a gift rather than sit an examination, and the order was in the text from the beginning. Deuteronomy 6:4 says hear first and love second, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes a familiar sentence land differently in a man's own courtyard.
So here is the turn, and it is this week, out loud.
Read the whole thing.
Not to try harder at the loving. Trying harder is what you've done for fifteen years, and it has moved your affection out of the room rather than into it.
Read the whole thing because the command sits inside a passage about a God who is one and a life the words go into, and you have been holding a single verse up on its own like a bill.
You are able to hear this as an invitation today, and the audit was never in the sentence. Deuteronomy 6:4 stands in front of the command with a statement about Him, and the Holy Spirit is with a man who has been short with God for fifteen years.
Now the honest half. Nothing here promises the feeling arrives this week, and it may be that your affection returns slowly over years, or in a way you notice only afterwards. However He answers, the outcome is His and not ours to sell, and fifteen years of feeling short are never evidence against you. What is settled is what stands in front of the command.
Fifteen years and an audit nobody set. Go and read the four verses first.
Declare this over yourself
Say them out loud. The standing to speak them is yours because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and the authority is not your own: it is His, delegated and carried in His Name, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes the word live in a tired man's mouth. However He answers, and whether or not anything feels different, the outcome is His, and fifteen years of coming up short are never evidence against you.
- Reading that turns this command into an audit, you are a measuring tape and it was never handed to you. Deuteronomy 6:4 puts His oneness in front of the loving and the whole passage is about a God with no rivals. You are not reverence, and you are a bill I have been holding up.
- Habit of being short with God the way a man is short with a creditor, get out in the name of Jesus. You have taken fifteen years of a generous man's affection out of the room, and God has never once handed that sentence to people it flattered. It went to a nation of ex-slaves.
- Lord, hear O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord, and Scripture says that before it says anything about my heart. That order was in the text from the beginning and it is not mine to reverse, and the Holy Spirit is making it land in my own courtyard. I am reading the whole passage out loud this week, and I am starting at verse four.
Deuteronomy 6:5
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