Hosanna Restoration Church

Most people know that the first and great commandment is to love the Lord with all our heart, soul, and mind. Other scriptures say to love Him with all our might as well. The truth is that at times we have to fight in order to love God as we should, so it takes all the resources that we can muster to get it done. This is because loving God involves such a broad spectrum of things that we often prefer not to do, so we attempt to separate what is loving God and what is not loving God according to standards that we set, rather that the ones that God sets.

Have you ever considered how important loving God really is? I thought I had until recently, when I suddenly realized that it was the most important thing that anyone can ever do! I know this sounds silly, and that everyone knows it is important to love God, but it is just so amazing when a person really meditates on what it means. It is one thing to say we love God, but I wondered if we really considered what all it means.

Do you realize that loving God is the foundation of every part of the life that is in Christ? Just because we come to believe in His Son and accept His salvation, does not necessarily mean that we love Him. Jesus said that if we loved Him we would keep His commandments, the greatest of those being to love God with all our being.

Loving God is the source of all God’s blessings. Loving God is what opens the doors and secures the promises. Loving God puts the blessings and the promises in their proper place. They are great and wonderful, but they are really secondary when we love God. It is a lack of love for God that allows the blessings and the promises to rise above God in importance.

Trusting, asking, seeking, and knocking are all evidence of believing God, but they really do not necessarily reveal our love. Face it, people ask for things because they want things from people that they may not even particularly like. I asked God for things before I ever really knew Him. I was pretty much offended when someone first suggested that I should love God more than I loved my own parents. It just sounded crazy to me.

Now I understand that loving God is what completes me. It completes me because it completes the love cycle. He started it by loving me. If I only love the way He loves me, then I do not really love Him, I love what I can get from Him. I love all that He does and all that He gives, but only loving Him back really satisfies my soul.

When we love God, the answers we receive to our prayers do not affect our faith in Him. He is always the same and our love remains the same. If we falter when the results are not what we expected, it is probably because our love was focused somewhere other than upon God. Lord, teach us to love you the way that we must.