“Be very careful, therefore, to love the Lord your God.” – Joshua 23:11
“My weight is my love. Wherever I am carried, my love is carrying me.” – Augustine, Confessions
In this chapter, Joshua speaks his last words to the leaders of Israel: he looks back and he looks forward, much as we do this time of year. Not one word has failed of all the good promises God made to us, he says of the past. And do you want to know the single most important factor in determining whether your future will be good or bad? How careful you are to love God.
This verse has six different words in the Hebrew: m’od shamar shamar nephesh ahab Yehovah Elohim. Shamar means to keep watch or guard, and is repeated twice for emphasis. What do we guard? Our nephesh, our souls, our whole selves, a word which doesn’t explicitly make it into the ESV translation. Ahab is a comprehensive word for love, though it literally means “to desire, breathe after,” getting at a sense of longing, delight, and affection. Yehovah elohim are personal and universal names for God.
But the word that strikes me most is m’od. It is an intensifier which means “exceedingly, diligently” and comes from a root word that refers to a wooden poker, the kind used to rake embers and stir a fire. What an interesting word picture: that there is, within my soul, the embers of love. The need to desire after something. As James K. A. Smith writes, “To be human is to be on the move, pursuing something, after something. We are like existential sharks: we have to move to live.” And that desire is powerful, like a conflagration that grows easily out of control, that drives and consumes us: because we are what we love; we become what we worship. We are defined not by what we know, but by what we desire. It is what we desire that drives how we live.
The person who realizes this, who realizes the importance and power of his or her desires, is the one who holds the fire poker, the one who tends the embers. Because love is not, as popular culture likes to think, something we are seized by, or fall into, or stumble upon. It is a choice, but I think this picture goes beyond choice: it introduces a sense of diligence and habit. The point of the fire poker is to adjust the wood so that the flow of oxygen, availability of fuel, and proximity of nearby embers either make the fire grow or force it to die out. It takes constant attention and some amount of practice. The same is true of our desires: they grow, or die out, depending on the kind of attention and practice we give them. Love as it is lived out in our lives is, in this sense, not so much a conscious choice as a baseline orientation. And we reorient our desires not by acquiring information, but through practices that inform the habits of how and what we love, through rituals, routines, rhythms, done over and over again.
Learning to love God takes practice. It takes understanding the pyrotechnics of the soul, the workings of desire. It takes choosing to suffocate unhealthy appetites or idolatries in our lives by ruthlessly cutting off whatever habits tend to feed them. It takes repetitive, daily exposure to God in his Word. It takes various spiritual practices that nurse our loves, and there are many very good ones, many worth exploring until we find a good rule of life for the season we are in. This new year, this new decade, what are the loves that are being lived out in your life? What habits do you have in place to train your dispositions, to form, teach and affect your desires?
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