"The ancient Greeks knew, as every society and almost every individual learns, that responding as a total person in one's encounter with life requires an intensity and disciplined openness of consciousness which is not easy to sustain."-Rollo May
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God wants all of us. God wants a relationship with all of our sides, not just our spiritual side or our mental side. Because of this, our faith grows by becoming more whole. A person gives more to God as a way to develop faith. Our faith does not grow by simply knowing more knowledge, on the one hand, or following a path of enlightenment, on the other. Faith develops through all activities of a person. It grows by generating love for God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength. It is through intentionally striving after all four that we mature in our relationship with God.
All four parts of life are important. It is not a coincidence that the Great Commandment that Jesus quotes, taken from Deuteronomy, has four elements to it. Four is the natural number of perfection, completeness. Human beings see things in fours. Examples are the four cardinal directions, temperaments, seasons, and lunar phases. It is how people understand the world and how they express themselves in art and in music. It is not unusual that the ancient civilizations use the number four to represent the totality of life. Something is seen as being complete, to the world's ancestors, when it has all four parts. The ancient Israelites express the sacredness of the number throughout scripture. There are four winds (Ezek 37:9; Dan 8:8; 11:4), four corners of the earth (Isa 11:12), and four primeval rivers (Gen 2:10), just to name a few.
Jesus himself is seen in countless pieces of art as having four parts. He is the ultimate symbol of perfection. And Jesus, the sign of wholeness to the world, calls Christians to be perfect. Perhaps this is what Jesus means when he says, "Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect." The command to be perfect can sound pretty difficult in our modern era. Can Jesus be pushing his followers to do everything right? Is Jesus hoping that they will never make a mistake? Jesus cannot be that foolish. He knows that human beings will fall down steps and spill milk at times. Jesus Christ is aware of human fallibility. What Jesus means is that he wants his disciples to be complete. He wants them to have a faith that is whole. The ancient understanding of perfection is totality and not the lack of failing. It is the combination of all four parts that make a whole.
To love God completely means using all four aspects of life. The great command of the Old Testament and confirmed by Jesus calls for a complete giving of self; a complete giving of one's love. And with it, there is an assumption that an individual is capable of loving God with less that 'all' of self because the emphasis of the command is for 'all.' The key to growing one's faith is through loving God with 'all' of one's heart, soul, mind, and strength.
Each of us has a less than 'all' faith. We wind up loving God with our own unique combination of heart, soul, mind, and strength. It is our faith fingerprint. It is our Faith Individuality Type, or FIT for short. A FIT is the main way a person relates to God. It is quite natural that each individual relates to God differently. The goal, of course, is to have a whole faith using all four parts. Some people relate to God more with their spiritual nature and some with their rational side. Some people relate to God more with their actions and some with their emotions. Why do people relate to God differently? It may be human personality or it may be a gift of the Spirit. For whatever reason, each individual takes on one of the four FITs: Heat, Soul, Mind, and Strength. Each of us finds it easier to invest one of the four kinds of love in a relationship with God than all four. We grow in our experience of God when we become willing to stretch our ability to love God with all of our faith and not just with our faith individuality type.
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