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How do you love God with all your heart, soul, strength and mind?

It's not obvious.

For instance, you're supposed to have this love for a God often described as "unseen" (Matthew 6:6, and John 1:18 for a very different take on the same hidden-ness).

This seems somewhat challenging. I know many people claim to love God with all their heart, but the task isn't to claim it, it's to do it, and, as Jesus said, if you loved Him, you'd follow His commandments, and I think it's visibly apparent this isn't a priority among the high-confidence crowd (at least on an aggregate level -- exceptions do pop up quite a lot and deserve praise -- see below).

For instance, I could ask you to love flibbersniffy with all your heart. And you might ask, what's flibbersniffy? Who? And I'd respond, well, it's secret and unseen, but terribly important, and I could list the praises of flibbersniffy all day.

You might (quite reasonably!) claim that aesthetic testimony requires first hand experience with the objects of that testimony. That you might say something is morally good based on a description, or indeed describe any property of it as you'd like, but to provide aesthetic testimony specifically requires you be familiar. Love is, at least partially, and aesthetic act. And Jesus assures you, you are not familiar.

This difficulty does not go un-appreciated. See 1 John 4:20 -- if you can't love your brother, of whom you have aesthetic testimony, how can you love God, who you've never seen?

Of course, love is not the exact same thing as aesthetic testimony. But to love with all your heart and soul, not just mind and strength, sure sounds like it includes aesthetic testimony. It requires you see the beauty in something.

We could claim a (parasocial) love of God through appreciation of the beauty of His works -- but that has it's own challenges. For instance, consider Matthew 13:26-28&37-39. Bad things are in the world, not fault of the Son of Man but of the devil. Or, in case simply look around does not suffice, consider the moments in the bible where inequity is discussed directly: Ecclesiastes 4:1-3 takes a pretty dim view of the earth, Matthew 7:21-23 suggests many people, even those who would self-rate pretty highly, are workers of inequity, and Matthew 7:11 just flatly says the audience of the Sermon on the Mount is evil. That's the material we are working with, when we want to make the claim that we can offer a love based solely on the works of God.

It's important to remember I'm not trying to be impolite here -- Ecc. 4:3 pretty explicitly says you'd be better off not being born, so merely saying, "existence alone is blessing enough" are taking an anti-biblical approach to weighing the world's good and bad.

The sons of the kingdom are the fruits of God, and they're plenty visible. We could try and center our testimony of God on how nice those people are, and how thankful we are to have them around. This seems reasonable, and necessary to do. I am thankful!

But you can understand how I'm a bit confused about this. It happens exceptionally rarely -- I've heard far more church time spent on mourning the loss of a local high school football coach who, while sociable, was not particularly religious, nor showed up to the church in question even once, to my knowledge. I think the sons of the kingdom we see directly (and can have aesthetic testimony of) might well motivate a love of God, but if that's so, I've not seen any religious tradition include this at all, if there would be any way to instead praise those who are dead (for long enough that direct aesthetic testimony of the living is impossible), popular, of great esteem, famous in some way, or, if possible, wealthy. You don't have to pitch me on "almost all American 'Christianity' is woefully wrong about what we ought to do", but you'd have to explain why even the prominently featured people in the Old Testament are painted in such rich shades of grey, and little is said about what the world would be for their absence.

Very few people in the bible receive compliments, is the heart of my objection. If the children of the kingdom aren't worthy of praise, they cannot be the cause of loving their creator with all your heart. If I cannot summon a nice word to say about a movie, I will not describe a director as beloved for having made it.

There is a lot to love, but being precise about what that is seems essential to the practice of the first great commandment, and I just don't have the answers I'd like.