.png)
"What is love?" if this question gets asked to every one of us, we define it based on our feelings, experiences or based on our knowledge of the term 'LOVE'. Love in the Bible, as in our everyday usage, can be directed from person to person or from a person to things. When directed toward things, love means enjoying or taking pleasure in those things. Love towards persons is more complex. As with things, loving persons may mean simply enjoying them and taking pleasure in their personalities, looks, achievements, etc.
On the last article we focused on the love God has for us. Today we will see the love we give God back for loving us first. So as Christians what do we love more than anything in the world? We all would probably say 'GOD' because that's the answer we are expected to say. But what does it mean to love God?
"You can tell what a person loves by what he devotes himself to most passionately. What a person values most is reflected in his actions and motivations. " -John Piper
The bible tells us what the greatest command given by God is "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind" (Luck 10:27) and in another place Jesus defines what loving him is like by saying.
"If ye love me, keep my commandments." (John 14:15) so loving God is the root of the life we are called to live which is to live for God. And to do so we shall love him first.
Rather than choosing to run after our own desires we have got to choose to live a life of pleasuring God by doing his will if not we are sinning against God. Putting ourselves before God is like having an idol that stands between us and God.
Rather than choosing to run after our own desires we have got to choose to live a life of pleasuring God by doing his will if not we are sinning against God. Putting ourselves before God is like having an idol that stands between us and God.
"Sin is the despairing refusal to find your deepest identity in your relationship and service to God. Sin is seeking to become oneself, to get an identity apart from him. . . Most people think of sin primarily as “breaking divine rules,” but Kierkegaard knows that the very first of the Ten Commandments is to “have no other gods before me.” So, according to the Bible, the primary way to define sin is not just the doing of bad things, but the making of good things into ultimate things. It is seeking to establish a sense of self by making something else more central to your significance, purpose, and happiness than your relationship to God." - Tim Keller
Not all of us may not have experienced being loved by someone in the secular world but if we do expect the characters of love in the person, we are loved by meaning pleasure and devotion by that person in the way we are treated by them. That goes to God too. If we say we love him, we should please him in our lives.
Every morning, we have to attend a funeral, our own. we have to wake up and once again die to our desires because we chose to love him every day to show the Christ that lives in us. That's what it means to say "I LOVE YOU" to God.
Comments