In this post, my topic will be loving God, and I'll be drawing from my daily quiet times in Deuteronomy 6.
In
Deuteronomy 6:5, Moses instructs the Israelites to love the LORD their
God with all their hearts, with all their souls, and with all their
might. What is loving God? There are some who believe that love for
God is an emotion. You see in Pentecostal, charismatic, and a number of
evangelical circles an emotional and sentimental love for God, as those
particular Christians feel a deep affection for God on account of God's
love for them. By contrast, my religious background----by which I mean
the religion in which I was raised----tended to scoff at religious
emotionalism and sentimentalism, preferring a business-like approach to
God. My impression was that it equated loving God with obedience to
God's commands (a la, to cite one verse of Scripture, II John 1:6). How
do you love God? You obey God's commandments! Or so I was told.
Which
is right? I'd say that they both are, to a certain extent. I
seriously doubt that the authors of the Bible wanted for our love for
God to lack any emotional component or affection for God whatsoever, for
Deuteronomy 6:5 instructs the Israelites to love God with their entire
hearts and minds. Moreover, you see a lot of enthusiasm in the Book of
Psalms about God's good deeds for Israel. You see admiration for God's
attributes. But, on the other hand, obeying God's commands is also
important, for one way that you can show that you appreciate God's
attributes of love and forgiveness is to love and to forgive others, as
well as to cultivate your relationship with God by worshiping God only,
by avoiding idols, by setting aside time to spend with God, and by
honoring God's name. Obedience to God's commands is a concrete way that
you can show your love to God.
Of course, one problem today is
that many people try to have one without the other. You have some
people who have a deep emotional affection for God, yet their lives are
not particularly godly: they are unkind and impatient towards others,
they commit adultery, etc. I can think back to times when I was on a
religious high, and yet I wasn't particularly kind to others. That kind
of invalidates my religious high, doesn't it? Or at least it convicts
me that I should bring my affection towards God into the realm of real
life, as I allow it to saturate how I regard and treat others! On the
other hand, it's also possible for one to mechanically obey God's
commands, without a deep affection for God, and it's hard for me to call
that loving God. I once heard a sermon in which the preacher asked,
"How would you married men feel if your wife told you that she'd cook
and clean, but that she did not love you?" The preacher was talking
about the church of Ephesus in Revelation 2:1-7, which was doing a lot
of commendable deeds, yet it had forgotten its first love. In my opinion, I should try to combine an emotional affection for God with obedience towards God's commands.
At
the same time, I don't want to judge others. There are Christians who
enjoy nitpicking others over whether or not they are emotional enough in
their worship of God. And there are Christians who chastise those who
are introverts because the introverts supposedly do not obey God's
command to "love" other people. But it's important to remember that
people are different. Some may not be inclined to cry and lift up their
hands in worship and to talk about the Lord all the time, for they
prefer a quiet appreciation of God and God's attributes. Some may not
be bubbly and social and yet they help people in other ways, ways that
may be invisible to others. In my opinion, how people love God is between them and God, not them, God, and judgmental Christian busy-bodies.