Loving God With All Our Hearts?
Loving God boils down to keeping his commands/instructions. Faith requires action with entry into His kingdom being evident in the simplicty. Follow Him!
Pharisees and scribes tried many times to tempt Jesus with various questions. Others again were asking genuinely, seeking answers. There is one question which was tested on two occasions by different people, one who wanted to learn and one to tempt. It is the question of which commandment is the greatest of all—loving God with all your heart.
Let’s read the related passages:
And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. "Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?" And he said to him, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment."
And one of the scribes came up and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, asked him, "Which commandment is the most important of all?" Jesus answered, "The most important is, 'Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. And 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.'"
What it means, Loving God
As we read, loving God with all our hearts is the most important commandment. But what does it mean? Unfortunately, we are living in an age where the word love has ended up meaning just a feeling. Loving somebody is confused to mean “feeling good about them”. However, “feeling good about” somebody does not necessarily constitute love in biblical terms. For in biblical terms, love is tightly connected to doing, and specifically of loving God to doing what God wants i.e. His commandments, His will.
Jesus made this very plain when He said:
If you love me, keep my commandments.
"Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him." Judas (not Iscariot) said to him, "Lord, how is it that you will manifest yourself to us, and not to the world?" Jesus answered him, "If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him. Whoever does not love me does not keep my words."
You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them; for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.
See also Exodus 20:5-6.
Loving God and keeping His commandments, the Word of God, are things inseparable from each other. Jesus made it absolutely clear. The one who loves Him keeps the Word of God, and the one who does not keep the Word of God does not love Him. Loving God then, the highest commandment does not mean I feel nice sitting in my pew on a Sunday morning. It means doing what pleases God, which in turn makes Him happy. And this is a daily matter.
John's writings contains further passages that hammer out what it means to love God.
We love because he first loved us. If anyone says, "I love God," and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother.
By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments. For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome.
And whatever we ask we receive from him, because we keep his commandments and do what pleases him. And this is his commandment, that we believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us.
Various fallacies are going around in today’s Christianity. One very serious is the false idea that God does not care about whether we will be doing or not His commandments, His will. According to this fallacy, all that matters for God is that moment we started in the “faith”. “Faith” and “loving God” have been separated from practical matters and are considered theoretical notions, mind states, which can exist separately from how one lives. But faith means to be faithful. You have to BE something if you have faith. And what you have to be is faithful. And the faithful one cares to please the one to whom He is faithful, i.e. he cares to do His will, His commandments.
Something else that becomes apparent from the above is that the favour and love of God are not unconditional, as some would have us believe. This we see in the above passages too.
So in John's writings we read:
Jesus answered him, "If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.
And whatever we ask we receive from him, because we keep his commandments and do what pleases him.
And in Deuteronomy:
You shall not bow down to them or serve them; for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.
In John 14:23, there is an “if” and an “and”.
If anyone loves Jesus, he will keep His Word, AND, as a result, the Father will love him, and He, together with His Son, will come and make their home in him. Also, in 1 John, we receive whatever we ask from Him because we keep His commandments and do what pleases Him. Also, in Deuteronomy, the steadfast love of God is shown to the ones who love Him and keep His commandments. There is a clear link then between the love and favour of God and the doing of the will of God.
Let's not think that disobeying God, neglecting His Word and His commandments, does not matter because God loves us anyway. Also, let us not think that because we say we love God, we, in fact, love Him. I think whether we love God or not is shown by the answer to the following simple question: Do we do what pleases Him, His Word, His commandments? If the answer is yes, then we love God. If the answer is no, then we do not love Him.
It is as simple as that.
If anyone loves me, he will keep my word... Whoever does not love me does not keep my words.
John 14:23-24
The case of the two brothers
“But I don’t feel doing the will of God” or “I will say that I will do God's will, but I won't”.
Another area of confusion when it comes to doing the will of God is the idea that we should do the will of God only if we feel like doing it. But if we don’t feel doing it then we are excused, for God wouldn’t want us to do something if we don’t feel like it.
But do you go to work always because you feel it?
Do you wake in the morning and think about whether you feel like going to work, and depending on how you feel, you pull yourself out of bed or snuggle deeper under the blankets? Is this how your life works? I don’t think so! You DO your work regardless of how you feel about it! But when it comes to doing God's will, we have given feelings too much place. Of course, God wants us to do His will AND be inclined to do it, but even if we do not feel like doing it, it is far better to do it anyway than not doing it at all!
To use an example from what the Lord told us, He said: “And if your eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away…” (Matthew 18:9). He did not say, if your eye causes you to sin, and you feel like tearing it out, then do it, but if you don’t feel tearing it out, then you are excused. You can leave it there to continue causing you to sin—the rotten eye has to be plucked out irrespective of whether we have the feeling or not. So also with the will of God: it is the best to do it and feel doing it, but if you don’t feel doing it, do it anyway, instead of disobeying Him.
Let’s examine another example from Matthew. In Matthew 21, Jesus was questioned again by the chief priests and the elders of the people. To answer one of their questions, He gave them the following parable:
"What do you think? A man had two sons. And he went to the first and said, 'Son, go and work in the vineyard today.' And he answered, 'I will not,' but afterward he changed his mind and went. And he went to the other son and said the same. And he answered, 'I go, sir,' but did not go. Which of the two did the will of his father?" They said, "The first."
Their answer was correct. The first son did not feel like doing the will of his father. He plainly said, "I will not go to the vineyard today". But then he thought about it and changed his mind. Who knows what caused this change. My guess: his care for his father. He heard his father calling him to do his will, but he didn’t feel like doing it. He wanted to sleep more, drink coffee slowly and perhaps go out with his friends. So his first reaction, probably while lying in bed, was to scream, “I will not go”. But then he thought of his father, and because he loved the father, he changed his mind, pulled himself out of bed, and did what his father wanted him to do!
On the other hand, the second son told his father, perhaps while lying in bed, “I will go, dad”, But then he didn’t! Maybe he went back to sleep or called a friend to meet up and proceeded to pursue his own desires. He may have “felt” like doing his father's will at that moment, but feelings are fleeting. So this “feeling” of doing the will of God was replaced by another “feeling” of something different, and then he didn’t go!
Which of these two sons did the will of the father?
The one who didn’t feel it in the beginning but he did it anyway, or the one who felt like doing it in the beginning but then didn’t do it? The answer is obvious. Now, we saw previously that loving the Father means doing His will. We could therefore also ask the following: “Which of the two loved the Father?” or “with which of the two was the Father pleased?” With the one that told Him that will do His will but didn’t do it or with the one that actually did it? Again, the answer is the same: with the one who did the His will.
Do the will of God, regardless of feelings! Even if the first response is “I will not do it”, “I don’t feel like doing it!”. Yes, it is far better to do the will of God and delight in doing it. Still, between not doing the will of the Father and doing it without intensely wanting to do it, the option to be chosen is: I’ll do the will of my Father anyway because I love my Father.
The night in Gethsemane
What has been said up to this point does not mean that we cannot or should not speak to our Father and ask Him for other possible options. Our relationship with the Father is a real RELATIONSHIP. The Lord wants the communication channels with His children—servants always open. What happened in Gethsemane the night Jesus was delivered to be crucified is characteristic. Jesus was in the garden with his disciples, and Judas, the traitor, came together with the servants of the chief priests and the elders to arrest and crucify Him. Jesus was in agony. He would rather have this cup removed from him so He asked the Father about it:
“And he withdrew from them about a stone's throw, and knelt down and prayed, saying, "Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done." And there appeared to him an angel from heaven, strengthening him. And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly; and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground.”
There is nothing wrong in asking the Father if there is a way out. There is nothing wrong in asking the Father whether you can stay home today and not go to the vineyard! What is wrong is to stay at home anyway without asking Him! This is disobedience. But it is not wrong to ask Him for an exception or another way. If there is no other way, you may get a special encouragement in moving forward and doing His will. Jesus got support in his time of distress: “And there appeared to Him an angel strengthening Him”.
Jesus would rather have the cup removed from Him, BUT only if this was the will of God. And in that case, it was not. And Jesus accepted this. As He said to Peter after Judas with his company of guards arrived:
“So Jesus said to Peter, "Put your sword into its sheath; shall I not drink the cup that the Father has given me?”
Jesus always did what pleased the Father, even if He didn’t feel like doing it. And because He always did what pleased the Father, the Father never left Him alone.
“And he who sent me is with me. He has not left me alone, for I always do the things that are pleasing to him.”
He is our example, as apostle Paul also tells us in Philippians:
Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
Jesus humbled Himself. He said, “not my will but yours be done”. Jesus OBEYED! Likewise, we should possess the same mind of obedience, which says not my will, but yours be done.
As Paul continues:
Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.
“Therefore my beloved”, i.e. because we have such a great example of obedience, Jesus Christ our Lord, let us obey too, working out our salvation with fear and trembling for God is working in us both to will and to do for His good pleasure.
And as James says:
Therefore it says, "God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble." Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Be wretched and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.
Conclusion
Loving God with all our hearts is the most important commandment. But loving God is not a state of mind, where we “feel nice” about God. Loving God is the same as doing what God wills. There is no such thing as loving God while at the same time being disobedient to Him! There is no such thing as having faith but not being faithful to God!
Faith is not a state of mind.
Faith in God and His Word equals being faithful to God and His Word.
Let’s not believe the fallacy which tries to separate one from the other.
The love of God and His favour comes back to those who love Him, i.e., those who do what pleases Him—His will. Furthermore, we also saw that it is better to go ahead and do the will of God even if you don’t feel like doing it than to disobey God. This does not make us robots without feelings.
We can (should) always speak to the Lord and ask Him for another way if we feel His will is too difficult for us to do and we should take His reply as it is.
If there is another way, He will provide it.
He is the most wonderful Master and Father, gracious and good to all His children. And if there is no other way, He will encourage us in doing what may seem too difficult to us, exactly as He did to Jesus that night.
Credit: This post was shared from the "Daily Bible Study" app.