- Image by Parvin ?( OFF for a while ) via Flickr
Jesus replied: ”love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment.
Matthew 22: 37-38
What does it mean to love the Lord this way? How do I know I love God?
I have been married long enough to know that Love isn’t just the passionate romantic high that Hollywood likes to show as true love in the movies. Lasting love is more about walking side-by-side day in and day out. Doing the things that I know will make him (both God and my husband) happy. When we see this kind of love and unselfishness in the movies, it is being mocked as outdated or unrealistic (e.g. The Stepford Wives).
From the beginning of creation, in the Garden of Eden, God didn’t obedience out of necessity. He gave Adam and Eve the choice to love Him and trust Him and obey Him or to reject him and eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
The Bible defines loving God as obeying Him.
Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me. He who loves me will be loved by my father, and I too will love him and show myself to him.
–John 14:21
This is love for God: to obey his commands. And his commands are not burdensome.
–1 John 5:3
This is probably what James was talking about in James 2:17 when he said, “Faith without action is dead.”
If loving God means obeying His commands, I know that I do not love God as well as I should, and I never can love God as well as He deserves. This is where God’s grace and Jesus’ sacrifice come into play. Even though Jesus has paid the price, and I don’t have to earn eternal life, I obey God’s commands as best I know how because I love Him. I study to learn and understand His commands because i want to become more and more like Jesus.
The more I love God, the more I obey God, the more I realize my own sinfulness, the more I long for the day when I can love Him perfectly.
