Love God With All Your Heart: What to Do With Your Emotions

A scribe once asked Jesus which commandment was the most important. Jesus didn’t hesitate:

“The most important is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” (Mark 12:29-31)

Jesus is quoting Deuteronomy 6, the prayer every faithful Jew said morning and evening. He adds one word Moses didn’t have, mind, and then He attaches a second command the scribe didn’t ask for. “On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets” (Matthew 22:40).

This series takes that verse one piece at a time: heart, soul, mind, strength, and then the “+1,” the neighbor. It’s the same shape we use in Agōn, where men keep a 12:30+1 and give an account of it every day.

One thing first. Jesus isn’t handing us a diagram of human anatomy with five labeled parts. Heart, soul, mind, and strength overlap in Scripture, and together they mean all of you. Nothing held back. But it helps to take them one at a time, because most of us have a favorite and a neglected one. We’ll start with the heart.

What the Bible means by “heart”

In Scripture the heart is more than feelings. It’s the control room: where you desire, decide, and trust. “Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life” (Proverbs 4:23).

But the heart is also where your emotions live, and that’s the part of it I want to press on here. Because many men, especially men like me who grew up thinking a good Christian man was a steady, unflappable one, have quietly decided that emotions aren’t part of following Jesus. Faith is a decision. Feelings are weather. Ignore the weather.

The Bible won’t let us off that easy.

Jesus wept at His friend’s tomb (John 11:35). He was angry in the temple. He was “very sorrowful, even to death” in Gethsemane. The Psalms are a whole book of men pouring out joy, rage, grief, fear, and longing in front of God. “Trust in him at all times, O people; pour out your heart before him; God is a refuge for us” (Psalm 62:8).

Jonathan Edwards, the eighteenth-century pastor and theologian, put it bluntly: “True religion, in great part, consists in holy affections.” He didn’t mean hype or goosebumps. He meant that a man who believes true things about God, but whose heart never moves toward Him, hasn’t really believed them yet.

The problem: a heart that loves the wrong things first

So the heart is supposed to feel. The trouble is that it feels most strongly about the wrong things.

Jesus quoted Isaiah against the religious men of His day: “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me” (Matthew 15:8). They had the right words and the right practices. Their affection was somewhere else.

That’s the quiet danger for any man who’s disciplined. We can keep every box checked while our heart is busy loving comfort, reputation, a hobby, a screen, a bank balance. We don’t usually stop going through the motions. We just stop wanting God.

Every good thing in your life can be loved. The question is the order. When a good gift moves into first place, it becomes a god, and it always lets you down. (I wrote more about that in Enjoying Gifts Without Making Them Gods.)

The good news: God gives the heart He commands

Here’s the hard truth about this commandment: you can’t make yourself feel love on command. Nobody can.

And here’s the gospel inside it: God knows that. So He promises to do the heart surgery Himself. “And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh” (Ezekiel 36:26).

Jesus is the only man who ever loved God with all His heart. He did it for us, and then He died for every hour we loved something else more. And now “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Romans 5:5).

So loving God with your heart doesn’t start with trying harder to feel something. It starts with receiving. “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). The practices below aren’t ways to manufacture affection. They’re ways to put your heart where God has promised to warm it.

Ten ways to love God with your heart

1. Name what you feel, out loud, to God. Once a day, finish this sentence in prayer: “Lord, right now I feel ___ about ___.” Angry, tired, anxious, grateful. You can’t bring Him a heart you won’t look at.

2. Pray a psalm that matches your mood. Keep a short list handy: Psalm 13 for when you feel forgotten, 51 after you’ve sinned, 103 when things are good, 42 when you’re low, 4 when you can’t sleep. Let the psalmist give you words when you don’t have them.

3. Keep a short gratitude list. Three specific things, every night. Not “my family.” Something like “the way my daughter laughed at dinner.” Gratitude trains the heart to notice the Giver behind the gifts.

4. Ask, “What am I wanting right now?” When you’re irritable or restless, trace it back. Most bad moods are a desire that’s been blocked. Name the desire, then ask whether it’s sitting in first place.

5. Sing, even if you can’t. Sing in the truck. Sing in the shower. Music reaches the affections in a way reading doesn’t. That’s why God put a hymnbook in the middle of the Bible.

6. Grieve honestly. When you lose something or someone, don’t rush to “God is in control.” He is. But Jesus wept anyway. Give yourself and others permission to be sad in God’s presence.

7. Deal with anger before bed. “Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger” (Ephesians 4:26). Before you sleep, tell God who you’re angry at and why, and ask Him what, if anything, you need to do about it tomorrow.

8. Fast from one comfort to find out how much it owns you. A day without the phone, a week without the sweets, a weekend without the game. Notice what the heart does when it can’t have its favorite thing. Then take that hunger to God.

9. Tell one person how you’re really doing. Not “fine.” A brother who knows your heart can see what you can’t. That’s half of what an Agōn cohort is for.

10. Remember the cross on purpose. When your heart feels cold, don’t try to warm it up by effort. Go look at Jesus again. Read one of the crucifixion accounts slowly. Love grows back when it remembers how it was loved.

Start with one

Don’t take all ten. Pick one, maybe two, and keep them for a few weeks. If you’re in Agōn, one of these could be your Heart discipline for the season.

And if you’ve been running on duty for a long time, with the motions intact and the heart gone quiet, take this as an invitation, not a scolding. God isn’t asking you to feel more. He’s offering to give you a new heart.

Next in this series: loving God with all your soul.