“We have been designed by God to live, love, and lead with uniquely designed parts.”

Instinctively, we know this is true. However, a lot of teaching on this topic – teaching that often centers on the concept of “calling” – leads us into confusion. We’re told that we need to search and pray that God makes our calling clear to us, as if our true identity is somewhere out there.

Jesus didn’t talk that way.

In Mark 12, Jesus is questioned by one group of religious leaders after another. They’re infuriated because he’s not cozying up to them, not playing by their rules. In fact, he’s just told the parable of the wicked tenants, and “they realized that he had told this parable against them” (vs. 12). So they’re bringing the trickiest questions to him, hoping to trip him up and trap him with his own words.

A scribe witnesses these efforts and, “seeing that [Jesus] answered them well, he asked him, ‘Which commandment is the first of all?'” (vs. 28). Jesus’ answer is one of the most well-known passages in the Bible:

Jesus answered, “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; 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.” (vv. 29-31)

Within the context of this chapter, Jesus is defining what really matters. Beyond that, he’s acknowledging the four key parts of our spiritual makeup:

• we all have a heart
• we all have a soul
• we all have a mind
• we all have strength

As a whole, I like to call these four parts our spiritual anatomy. Just like our bodies are made up of systems – our nervous system, our muscular system. our circulatory system, etc. – our spiritual selves are made up of these four parts.

What spiritual maturity looks like – what it means to be a holistically-formed follower of Christ – is working to make sure that each of these parts is connected and functioning properly.

We don’t need to search far and wide for an external calling. Rather, we need to pay attention to the way God designed us. Only by doing this can we love God with our whole selves, and similarly, this is the only way we can love our neighbors as ourselves.