Jun 12, 2026 Loving God with All Your Heart – Words of Grace Blog – June 12, 2026
This summer at Grace Community Church we are thinking through the meaning of the greatest commandment (to love the Lord our God with all our heart), and the process for obeying it (to grow in love for God with all our heart).
As Christians, God has given us a new heart. Do we understand how the heart works? Do we know how to grow in love for God in our heart?
One of the most helpful ways of understanding the heart I have found is in Craig Troxel’s book, With All Your Heart. Here, Troxel builds on the thinking of the Puritans and of more recent thinkers to describe the heart as the single, unified inner self that has a threefold function. The functional aspects of the heart are the mind that thinks, the desires that love, and the will that chooses.
This understanding of the heart is helpful because it keeps us from separating what belongs together and what belongs to the heart. Too often we view the mind, desires, and will as separate parts of us, siloed and unrelated to each other. When this happens, we fail to see that to love God with all our heart, we need to love him with the mind of the heart, the desires of the heart, and the will of the heart. We also fail to see how loving God with one functional aspect of the heart can support loving him with the others.
We want to renew our minds in truth to love God. Do we understand how making decisions to act on even the smallest desire to fill our minds with God’s word is the path to mind renewal?
We want to desire good and godly things to love God. Do we understand how setting our minds on these things and making decisions for these things can reshape and support our desires for what is holy and pleasing to the lord?
We want to choose the true and right things to love God. Do we understand how thinking about what is true and right fuels desire, which empowers our will to choose it?
All this thinking, desiring, choosing is happening in one place, the heart. We are one inner self, a unity, called the heart. But there are three functional aspects of the heart: the mind of the heart, the desires of the heart, and the will of the heart. If we are going to love the Lord with all our heart, we will need to pay attention to all three functions and let them work together for obedience to the greatest command of all.
This is the theme of our Summer Study on Wednesday nights (June 10-July 1, 6:15 pm, in the Chapel). I hope you can join us as we grow in our love for the Lord together.
This Sunday at Grace, we will continue our sermon series in Galatians and consider the gospel that comes from God and not from man (Galatians 1:11-24). I look forward to seeing you then.
-Scott