Loving God – Sunday, October 11, 1981
Seeing what love God has bestowed on us, His children, should create in us a sense of obligation, a duty to return in kind the divine and personal affection we receive from our Father in Heaven.
Indeed, the first and great commandment is to love God “with all (our) hearts, and with all (our) souls, and with all (our) minds.”1
As the supreme commandment, this principle reveals the most important aspect of the gospel of Jesus Christ; it is the central theme of all that has been written in the law and spoken by the prophets.
Well, loving God sounds like an easy task. To love a Being whose only concern is for our temporal and spiritual welfare should not be too difficult.
But perhaps there are a couple of reasons why loving God is not as easy as it sounds. First, if we love God, we will keep his commandments. And second, we cannot love God without also loving our fellow man.
Love is a verb of action. We cannot demonstrate affection to Deity with pure adoration alone. No, if we love, we must also act. To love God, then, is to love the truth which is found in His precepts and commandments. In this sense, love and obedience are synonymous. If we love God, it follows as the heat of the fire, we must keep His commandments.
It is also impossible to love God without loving all of humanity. For that reason, the second commandment, that we should love our neighbor, is similar to the first, that we should love God. The two are co-existent. To endeavor to love God while despising the man next door, or on the next street, or in a foreign country, would be the same as an attempt to utilize the solar energy contained in moonlight; the process would yield very little light and no heat at all. So too, the love we send to God must be as pure and direct as sunlight; it must not be contaminated or diluted by hate and prejudice.
And finally, we should suggest that loving God is not only a commandment; it is also a natural response to that tender care we receive from a devoted father; it is a response which can only take the form of our obedience to His commandments and our unconditional love to His children.
1The New Testament, Matthew 22:37
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October 11, 1981
Broadcast Number 2,721