Here is the link to Matthew Chapter 22, and a portion of verse 37:
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.”
As the father of three boys, I have spent some time coaching my sons and their teammates on the basketball court and the baseball field. This quotation reminds me specifically of the way I like to talk about pitching.
When they are young, we spend lots of time working on the fundamentals of pitching mechanics. The kids learn how to grip the ball, how to drop step, pivot, and reach a high balance point, how to separate their hands and drop and glide with their lead foot, how to achieve the right arm angle and release point, and finally how to finish in a good fielding position.
All these fundamental skills are important in learning how to pitch. But inevitably you get to a point where the kids can execute these skills fairly well, but they still have trouble throwing strikes.
The problem is, they haven’t learned to focus on their target yet.
That target is not the strike zone, or even the catcher’s mitt. I want them to focus on just the webbing in the catcher’s mitt so that the target is as small as possible. (Aim small, miss small, to quote Mel Gibson in The Patriot.)
Then I tell them, “Trust your fundamentals, and take all your momentum, all your energy, your entire being, and use that to hit your target.”
Once they learn this focus, then they start throwing strikes consistently.
The point is, you could read this blog and learn all the fundamentals of prayer that I suggest. You could memorize them and repeat them back to me exactly as I wrote them, and that would be great.
But if you’re not focused on loving God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind, then your prayer experience will still be lacking.
Somehow, the basic idea of love as the environment you live in must become part of your underlying approach to life and prayer.
Because if everything you do doesn’t have love for God at its center, you will never find contentment in prayer, or in your life in general.