Love God? Why?

 I have too many thoughts about the Bible's commands to love to fit into one sermon, so I'm blogging about them - today, the command to love God "with all our heart, soul, strength and mind."

The children of Israel are commanded to love God at least 6 times in the Hebrew scriptures, along with "fearing him," walking in obedience to him," and serving him, and in connection with keeping his "decrees, laws and commands, always."  See Deut 6:5, 10:12, 11:1, 30:16, 30:20; Joshua 22:5, 23:11.

And of course Jesus, asked to name the greatest commandment, easily repeats this command to love God:  Matt 22:37, Mark 12:30, Luke 10:27, quoting the Deuteronomy 6 passage as above.

But Jesus quickly adds a second greatest commandment, "love your neighbor as yourself," which comes from Leviticus 19. 

But, is "loving God" really anything like "loving your neighbor"?  

To love my neighbor as we are taught in Leviticus, I need to consider my neighbor's needs and interests as being much like my own, and as valid as my own, and make plans not to violate and even to help fulfill his or her needs and interests as much as it is up to me.  This kind of love is a call into community, to create the kind of community where we can rest knowing our neighbor does not mean to rob or lie to me, and I am also not intending to rob or lie to him/her.  

I'll talk about all this in another blog - but is that kind of love anything like "loving God"?

Does God need me to keep in mind his interests, and to imagine they are anything like my own?

A couple of days I was swimming in a community pool, and there was a young family there - Dad, Mom, a girl about 4 years old and a boy about 15 months old, I'd say.  

The dad was holding the toddler in his arms in the shallow end when the mom took the 4-year-old for a float further into the pool - and this change in distance from mom set the toddler off!  He began to scream for mom.  Clearly, to him, a distance of 20 feet from mom, in this unnatural and strange watery environment, was beyond his comfort zone.

Why?  Well, for that little guy, his mom is his original "secure base."  He has known her since before birth, and has depended on her all that time.  He knows her smell, what she sounds like, what her hands feel like - and he has found her to be the source of many things he needs and can't supply for himself, AND to be TRUSTWORTHY.

He knows he needs her and relies on her, and he trusts her to be the one he needs.  He doesn't yet know the words, but he knows she loves him, and is "for" him.  She loved him first, and he has found that good!

Does he love her?

Do we love God?

In this relationship, "loving" her is "trusting" her.  As their relationship moves forward and he discovers his own will and ability to do what he wants, he will most of the time align his will with hers BECAUSE he trusts her.  His willingness to do that will be a sign of his love.

And if we love God with everything we've got, it means we have come to rely on him and find him trustworthy, and for those reasons we will do what he instructs us to do.

Now the metaphor breaks down because that little toddler boy is meant to grow up and leave his mom behind, to develop a separate will and conscience and even to become somebody else's dad.

But in our relationship with the Father, we are not meant to grow away from him.  We are meant to grow "up" in him, to become mature in the relationship with God for which we are made.  We will learn more and more deeply what it means that God loves us and always has, and we will begin to want what God wants, even for God to have what he wants, so to speak.  

So, when God commands us to "love" him, he is not commanding us to develop warm and fuzzy feelings for him, though they may come!  He is commanding us to examine his relationship with us, to find him dependable, good and trustworthy, and then to intentionally respond with trust through doing what he says to do...living the way he calls us to live.

God shows us his love, we read in the New Testament, in Jesus.  If we want to know what God is like, we read in the Apostle Paul's letter to the Colossians, we should watch Jesus:  he is "the image of the invisible God."  Jesus came to us FROM God's love for us, to show us God's love for us, and to initiate a new relationship for us WITH God, that we would find out how much we are loved by our Father, and become those who truly can love God.

It is not a burdensome commandment; it is the most natural response to being so loved, first.