Heart, Soul,and Strength

Deuteronomy 6:5-7
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you lie down and when you get up.”
God’s commandments are pretty good; they have carried value for years and generations. More recently I looked at this verse in a different way. I asked myself how I can live this out. What would it look like to really be this verse? Since I’m a former professional athlete and many followers of this blog are current (both amateur and professional) athletes, I came up with this powerful conclusion.
We can control 3 things that ultimately affect how we feel and how we perform, not just in sports but in life (stay with me here). We can control what we Focus on, the Meaning we give our circumstances (both past, current, and future), and we can control our Physiology (the way we carry ourselves, swagger, body language, whatever term makes sense to you). Examples would be: Focus – focus on good thoughts then you feel good, bad thoughts you feel bad. Meaning – if you strike out you’re either closer to getting a hit or you’ve lost the ability to hit. Physiology- slouch over and put your head down (feel crummy) pull your shoulders back and smile (I bet you’ll feel a lot better).
Hopefully you can see and understand the differences I’ve laid out there. The power that each of us has when being able to control these three things is unbelievable. Now when you put Jesus at the center or make Him the focus/motivation of these it creates a serious force. When you can step outside your selfish thoughts and focus on the goodness of God or the love of our Lord Jesus, how good does that feel? When I’m knee deep in worship (focusing on Jesus) I feel unstoppable, like nothing in this world can keep me down. Think of how much time we’ve all wasted in self pity because we feel our circumstances are unfair or unbearable? If we were able to snap out of that focus and put it on how fortunate we are to have a Savior, wouldn’t that look different? You might be reading this saying, ya ya, what about baseball or how does this pertain to my job. Here you go…
We know how good we feel when we’re doing well. In those times what are you focusing on, what meaning are you assigning to your life or job or value, and what does your Physiology look like (aka body language)? Really think about it, see it in your mind. Now ask yourself this what if you were to Focus on those successful at bats or scoreless innings or big deals you closed? What if you visualized them and made them feel real again? What if you put a positive Meaning to your current situation or your next outing, asking yourself empowering questions that force your mind to anticipate success in your next opportunity? What if you put a smile on because you were focused on all of your blessings as opposed to your failures, what if you pulled your shoulders back and felt the power at your finger tips that has been developed from all those tough days in the gym or in class? How do you think you would perform? Do you think you would be in a peak state, a state of preparedness that was primed for dominance?
So here is the tie in. Heart, Soul, and Strength could equal Focus, Meaning, and Physiology. Focus (what’s on your heart tend to be your focus), Meaning (what’s in your soul tends to be the subconscious meaning that you give things and studies show that our subconscious mind is much more powerful than our conscious mind), and Physiology or body language, that’s pretty straight forward. Driving it home is that focusing on good things means focusing on all that God is and if we do these three things (essentially all we have) then I think we can dominate for the Kingdom. I’m pretty sure God wants us to succeed in whatever he has us doing. I hope you felt this message, like I did.