Hosanna Restoration Church

What’s not to love? I just love this. I just love you. Don’t you love ice cream? I know you will just love this book, movie, show, or person. We say we love a lot of things and a lot of people, but do we? What kind of love are we talking about? How can we best love?

I would love to say I have the answer to all these questions, but that would not be true. I do know that we must love God and that loving God was not meant to be confusing or difficult. We are told that we love because He first loved us. It is important to know that you are loved by God. It is just that simple. His love covers all things including our sins. If we know we have sinned, then His love is great news. Great news produces a response. God loves me and I love Him; at least I am learning to love Him! Yes, after 38 years, I am still learning to love Him.

Every day provides a new opportunity to love God; a new opportunity to see how loving Him changes us. We learn to love how He does things in us and through us. How do we measure whether or not we love Him more or enough or at all? First of all, let Him do the measuring and you just do the loving. Measuring messes things up! Scripture says that when we try to do the comparing and the measuring bad things happen.

We might measure ourselves to be less that we are or greater than we are and in either case we are in a wrong place. We belong in Christ. I may fail to measure up perfectly, but I will not fail to love God. God has perfect love; we have love that is being perfected.

My wife reminded me that I said there is no reason that we cannot have joy or be happy and that she was using that as a tool in her handling of things. This week I have been being reminded to love God. In the middle of the night Holy Spirit said, “Love God.” I thought I did! I know I do, but the thought just keeps rolling over and over in my mind, so I am rolling it your way.

Jesus said that He gave us the keys to the Kingdom. Obviously, this is one of the keys. God spoke from the beginning about loving Him. Loving God is good for us! I did not love God when He first saved me. I was glad, but I had no idea about how to love Him. I did not know Him. I was grateful, that is for sure. I needed Him to keep doing whatever He did. I wanted to stay as close as I could. An early song said, “For so long I lived without You. Now all I do is think about you. Father won’t you please use me.” I had no idea what I was really saying, but Holy Spirit did!

I thought about Him. I tried to figure things out. I knew there was more to Him than I knew, but somewhere in there I began to love Him, and that changed everything. Now as the Elvis song said, “I will spend my whole life through loving you God, just loving you. Love God!