"The most important one", answered Jesus, "is this: Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all you mind and with all your strength."

Mark 12:29, NIV (1978)

Have you ever wondered why Jesus didn't just answer the question as to what was the most important command with a simple reply of "love God with all you have"? For that matter, why didn't God just put it that way when the command was initially given way back in Deuteronomy? Maybe the answer has to do with balance.

William Danforth, the founder of the Purina pet food empire, gave an example of the "four-square life". He talked about the need for balance in our lives and used the illustration of a square to help visualize his thoughts. Pulling from the Lord's greatest commandment, he realized that life had four main facets - namely, our religious, physical, mental and social components. He compared the heart to the social side of life, the soul to  our religious side, the mind to our mental side and the strength to our physical side. Fail to have balance in these areas, and your whole life would be out of balance.

Mr. Danforth also gave his opinion that if we over-weighted any of these areas then our entire life would suffer. I'm not sure that I agree with (or even understand) everything he had to say on this subject, but he does have a valid point. God wants our lives to have balance because that's the way He made us. We all have precious relationships that mean everything to us. This is proper, but we just need to make sure that our relationship with He and Jesus are the most important.

Further, we are spiritual beings at our core, so we must not ever forget the importance of our eternal nature. We all have a soul that is basically the essence of who we are, and that side of us will live forever. Since that is the case, we need to keep that truth at the center of everything we do. When William Danforth described the religious side of this four-square life, he insisted that this side had to be the base, or the foundation of that square. This was meant to reflect the Bible's teaching that our spiritual houses (our lives) had to be placed on the foundation of Jesus Christ. 

When Jesus spoke of the mind, He was certainly stressing the importance of thinking. God created us with brains designed to reason, and the importance of that mental aspect must not be ignored. We need to use our efforts to discover what the Bible says by reading it, and then we must go beyond that by thinking about what it says. We then need to be considering how God's instruction applies to every aspect of our daily lives, and then make wise decisions as to how to apply those truths to everything we do.

The final side involved this physical body that God has given us. With it we can earn a living as well as take part in needed recreation. We must be careful, however, for with our strength we can not only be productive, but we can be destructive. We can not only save lives, but we can also take lives. We also have an obligation to keep this physical structure that God has blessed us with physically fit, in order that we might serve Him as best as we can for as long as He sees necessary for us to fulfil our service to Him.

Again, it is vital for us to keep these four sides of our lives in balance if we are to serve the Master in the most efficient way. It is easy to get so involved with the physical that we lose sight of the spiritual, and by doing so we end up trading the temporal for the eternal. It is also tempting to spend so much time with those we love that we forget the One who loves us so. And we all know that it is very natural to slip into a pattern of habit where we just go through the motions without really thinking about what we are here for. We truly do need a "four-square" life in order for our lives to be the most effective they can be for God.

And whatever we call it, be it four-square, balance, or anything else, we must never forget that God will accept nothing less than our best efforts in each of these vital areas of our lives. It is when we have that proper perspective of a balanced service to God that our lives will have the impact that God wants is to have. We have been given many gifts, and the heart, soul, mind and strength that He has infused into each one of us are among the greatest of those gifts. If we can see that and use all four sides of our being correctly, we can then become the type of servants that God intended for us to be when he graciously gave us our lives in the first place. If we are grateful, and if we love Him, we will do nothing less than use all of ourselves in our daily service to God.

And then, there will be Heaven! 

By the way, if you are finding these daily articles helpful, you might like to visit our Common Sense Christian YouTube channel, or listen to our weekly Common Sense Christian podcasts. I will try to have at least one episode up on each Monday starting at 7:00 AM CST. As always, thanks for your kindness in taking the time to share and like these daily articles on facebook. It really helps and I sincerely appreciate your efforts in doing so.