“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” 

The verse taken from Deuteronomy 6:4-5 is an essential and central verse in the entire book of Deuteronomy as well as the Old Testament. It forms the Shema prayer, a daily prayer for ancient Israelites and still recited by Jewish people today daily in the morning and evening. This prayer has been one of the most influential traditions in the Jewish history, functioning both as the Jewish pledge of allegiance and a hymn of praise. 

The prayer gets its name from the first Hebrew word of the prayer “Hear”, a translation of the Hebrew word, shema. This word does not only mean to allow for sound to enter into our ears, but also to allow the word to sink into our hearts to form understanding, and ultimately allowing for a response. In shema, hearing and responding are the same thing. 

Moses calls out to the people of Israel to shema, to listen and to respond in obedience to God. They are called to love the Lord our God with all their hearts, all their soul and all their might. God calls his people to love him wholeheartedly, without any reservations. He calls them to go ALL IN with Him. In the New Testament, Jesus says that the greatest commandment is to love God ALL IN. (Mark 12:29-30, Matthew 22:37-38, Luke 10:27). In the same note, when the rich young man asked Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life? Jesus told him that he must obey the ten commandments, and to sell everything and follow Him. Jesus not only wants piety, He desires us to surrender everything that captures our heart. 

In the classic “Pineapple Story” by missionary Otto Koning, he shared of his humorous and yet profound story of his hard earned lessons he learned in Papua New Guinea about surrendering rights and conquering anger. He was angry with the unreached people there who were stealing his pineapples. As he surrendered the pineapple field to God, he faced new found anger with the people who went further to steal things from inside his house. It was a story of a man surrendering more of himself as he gave up the external material things to the internal desires of his heart as embarked on the journey to love God wholeheartedly. 

Dear brothers and sisters, what captures your heart and prevents you from loving God wholeheartedly today? We live in such a materialistic and competitive environment in Singapore where there are so much anxiety and fear. We are anxious that we cannot catch up with people, and we are fearful that there will not be enough for ourselves. We enter into rat races in school, at work, for our children, looking for successes apart from Christ. We still love and serve God, we really do, but on a normal day, God has to share our attention with the world because of our fears and anxieties. “Surely, we love God, but still, we need to go on to find daily bread, don’t we? The deep reality is that sometimes we don’t trust God enough to surrender our lives fully to Him, to love Him all in. We leave space “in case” God fails. 

The scripture tells us that God is one! He is one and only and there is no one like him. He is a powerful God that has existed since the beginning of time, continues to be here and forevermore. In fact, God is not bound by time, space and matter. God is one, and He NEVER FAILS! He is also a faithful God. He is the God of our fathers, He is our God, and He continues to be the God of our sons and our son’s son. Our God is one! He is unique because there is no one like Him. He calls us to love Him wholeheartedly, ALL IN, because in Him, we have more than enough. Dear brothers, would you go all in for Him?  

Prayer: Dear God, would you help me to trust you more and more on this journey of surrender, until the day I become so amazed and captured by you that I am willing to go ALL in for you. Help me today to love you with all my heart and with all my soul and with all my might. In Jesus’ name I pray, amen.