Love the Lord Your God

How do we love God? According to Jesus, loving God is the most important commandment, but it seems a vague idea that most of us never contemplate. What does it mean to love God and how do we do that? He isn’t a physical person here, like a child or friend, who we can do things for or even hug.

Mark 12:29-31 New American Standard Bible (NASB)

Jesus answered, “The foremost is, ‘Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God is one Lord; 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.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”

Here, Jesus is quoting Deuteronomy when Moses gave the Law to the people after they were freed from slavery in Egypt. The reason these are the two greatest commandments is because all of the Law is based on them. If we love God and love others, we will automatically keep the Law.

The first part of obeying the Law and loving God is acknowledging Him as the One True God. In Jewish tradition, the first of the Ten Commandments is “I AM the Lord Your God.” We must accept Him as our Lord in order to keep the Law; and we cannot be right with God, no matter how good we are, if we do not. That is prerequisite to loving God. It seems redundant and unnecessary to stress that we have to acknowledge God as our Lord before we can love Him, but it is not as intuitive as one would think.

To have God as our Lord is more than just a vague admittance that “Yes He is my God” and leaving it at that. We must submit to Him in everything; to do our best to live as He commands in His Word, repent when we fall and acknowledge our sin before Him, seek His ways and will above our own, and be willing to sacrifice our lives and what we want for Him. That is tantamount to and a requirement for loving God. We cannot say we love Him if He does not hold the proper place in our lives and that goes beyond hypothetical words. In order to be our Savior, He must first be our Lord. If we don’t accept all of Him and His place in our lives, He cannot save us. He has no power to save us if He is not also Lord, and if we reject His Lordship, we reject His power and authority.

There are 4 facets to our beings: mental, emotional, spiritual and physical. Loving God is meant to encompass all of that. Over the next month, we will talk more about the different aspects of loving God; with all of our hearts, souls, minds and strength.

In the mean time, consider the place God has in your life. Does He sit on the throne of your life, or does He just hold an honorary title while you make all the decisions? In what areas are you unwilling to submit to His will and rule? Will you ask Him to help you make Him the Lord of your life, to make you willing to surrender all to Him?