What does it mean to love God?
This is one of the most important questions we can ask as those who want to be followers of Jesus for He tells us that it is the first and greatest commandment in the Bible and in many ways, with the second greatest, sums up the entire Old Testament. Loving God is our greatest need and the greatest demand on our lives.
We talk about loving God a lot, and yet often discuss it without understanding it. Charles Colson wrote the book, Loving God, and in his introduction shares that in a brief survey of evangelicals very few could answer the question, “what does it mean to love God?”. If you were asked that question, how would you answer it? His survey left him believing that a very small percentage of evangelicals know what the Bible teaches it means to love God.
Take the time to think through your answer and then check it with what God’s Word teaches on this G.O.A.T. question.
What does it mean to love God according to the Bible?
1. Loving God Is Contingent.
1 John 4:19 We love because he first loved us.
This seems like such a strange place to start, and yet the Bible is clear that we know what love is by looking to Jesus and we can love by experiencing His love (1 John 4:10). If we want to know what it is to love God and to have the grace to pursue this with the passion it requires we must first experience the love of God in Jesus.
This is through faith, and then an ongoing pursuit and experience (Ephesians 3:14-21). The best way to love God the way the great command requires, really the only way, is to experience God’s love richly and deeply.
This love is displayed in the Gospel and when we realize that nothing can separate us from the love of God, it is one that will give us strength and motive to love richly (Romans 8:32-29).
You cannot love God until you have believed the Gospel and in that faith experienced through the power of the Holy Spirit and the glory of grace, the richness of His love! This is the starting point for understanding what obeying the great commandment requires, and really as we shall see next week the place of greatest power for growing in this obedience.
The love of God compels us to live for Him (2 Corinthians 5:14). It changes us.
The love of God shows us what authentic love is (1 John 4:10-12, Romans 5:6-11). It gives us the opportunity to know what true love is.
The love of God helps us to experience His grace so richly that we will then choose to walk in that love (Ephesians 5:1-2). It is our experience and model, and as an overflow of this intimacy, our mandate.
Loving God always begins with an experience of His grace and love. It is contingent.
2. Loving God Is Obedience.
John 14:15 “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”
That is pretty simple and pretty profound. If you love God you will seek to know His Word and obey it (John 14:21).
If you say you love God and disobey His Word you are displaying with your choices a lack of authenticity in your claim.
Choosing to love God always is an overflow of His love and always leads to a passion to obey Him in every area of our lives.
If you love God, when given the choice, you will seek to obey Him.
3. Loving God Is Hateful.
Psalm 97:10 “O you who love the LORD, hate evil!”
You can tell what a person loves by what He hates. If we love God our affections will match His and we will love what He loves and hate what He hates.
This is why God’s Word calls for His followers to feel about evil the way that He does. When we love God our feelings align with His, and we seek to deepen our intimacy with Him so that this alignment is closer every day.
Proverbs develops this in terms of the fear of the LORD, which is a requirement for wisdom and defined in 8:13 as the hatred of evil. To love God mean to align our hatred of evil with His.
Loving God is contingent, it is obedient, it is hateful,
4. Loving God Is Relational.
Revelation 2:4 But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first.
This should be obvious, but sometimes the danger of religion can slip the fixation of the follower of Jesus away from His beauty and onto works or wandering. Loving God includes the treasuring of Him above all else, of longing for Him personally and relationally.
It is this pursuit of first love devotion that He is after, as He defines it and we pursue it. Loving God is relational and is to be the priority of our lives. He should be what we think about first in the morning and last at night and align our passionate pursuit with.
Now, how would you define what it means to LOVE GOD from a biblical perspective? I hope when you are asked you now know God’s Word and how it calls for us to pursue this.
How are you doing at obeying the GOAT command?
Remember as you pursue this with passion, not only the strong command, but the grace in which we must pursue obedience to this command…you will not be perfect, but in the power of the Spirit you will grow in this all defining love for God.
You might be asking, how can I grow in my love for God?
Check in next week for ways we can authentically live lives that are marked by obedience to the first and greatest command.
Pastor Rob Godard