How Do I Love God?

How do I love God?

I was recently asked this question by one of my children, shortly before I was asked to speak at a Valentine’s Brunch. A few days later I was asked to speak in our school’s elementary chapel. With this question in my head and Valentine’s Day right around the corner, I definitely knew my topic.

We talk about love a lot in our home. On the wall of our old home, we had Deuteronomy 6:5-7 as a wall decal, visible right as we walked in the front door and right before we could walk up the stairs to our bedrooms:

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.

We want the love of God to be the primary focus as we do everything we do as a family. This focus on loving God governs how we deal with sibling squabbles as well. We remind them of what the two most important commandments were, as Jesus answered the lawyer in Matthew 22:37-39:

And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

Thus, we ask our kids if they were loving their sibling when they did {whatever unkind act or word}. No. Our follow-up question is always, Then were you loving God?

All that to say, this brings up a lot of conversation about loving God when you live in a home with 4 kids (and 2 sinful adults as well!). So, when my child asked me this question, my first thought was to send her to the book of 1 John.

This letter was written by the apostle John, who also wrote the Gospel of John, along with 2 & 3 John. In his Gospel, John calls himself 5 times the apostle “whom Jesus loved.” What better person to write to others about loving God than the one who had experience firsthand the love of Jesus! He saw Jesus, touched Jesus, and heard the message Jesus proclaimed. He had fellowship with Jesus, and he wanted his readers to know the same love, message, and fellowship. I love reading this book, because I feel like John was talking like I do to my kids begging them to love God, encouraging them to look to Christ, and exhorting them to obey.

Without delving too deeply into the entire book, here are a couple of points, highlighting what John says about loving God.

We Must Know Who God Is.

God is Light.

This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all (1 John 1:5).

Darkness is the opposite of light. In the next few verses, John describes what it means for people who claim to walk in the light, but actually walk in darkness. He describes them as liars who do not walk in the truth. He describes those who walk in the light as being cleansed from all sin.

So, in context, God’s being light is his sinless perfection. There is no darkness or sin in him at all. The first step in our loving God is recognizing the sinlessness of God. John places God’s light, his sinlessness, in stark contrast with our sin. In recognizing the sinlessness of God, we also must acknowledge our own sinfulness.

To deny our sinfulness is to deceive ourselves and to call God a liar—quite the opposite of loving him. To deny our sinfulness also in reality denies our need for a Savior, the very essence of how God showed his love for us.

God is Love.

Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins (1 John 4:8-10).

If someone is struggling with love for others and love for God, the real cause is that person’s lack of knowing God and knowing God’s love.

What John is calling people to do is to acknowledge their sin and the wrath that God has against it. As we do so, we can recognize the greatness of God’s love in sending his only Son to die for us so we can live (instead of die in our sins as our just punishment). Jesus gave himself up to be the propitiation—the appeasement of God’s wrath—for our sins. Herein is love!

If we know who God is—his sinless “light” and his sacrificial love—and if we believe that he died to take the penalty for the sin that we acknowledge is deserving of God’s wrath, how can we love him back?

We Must Obey Him.

See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are (1 John 3:1).

In loving us savingly, God makes us his children. Children should look like their Father. John exhorts believers to obey and not to sin repeatedly throughout the book. In fact, this is one of John’s very purposes in writing:

My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin (1 John 2:1a).

But in the same breath (and same verse), he points us to hope for when we do sin:

But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous (1 John 2:1b).

In chapter 3, when he tells believers that they—the loved of God—are children of God, he calls us to make a practice of righteousness, like our advocate Jesus Christ the righteous. Again, he gives us hope for our failures:

Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is. And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure (1 John 3:2-3).

We are going to fail in our obedience and our love; we are not now going to look like our Father as we should. But one day, when we do see him face to face, we will be like him. This very hope spurs us to purify ourselves.

This passage reminds me so much of my pleas with my own children. The encouragement and hope we have in Christ are mixed with the strong exhortations to persevere and obey:

You know that he appeared in order to take away sins, and in him there is no sin. No one who abides in him keeps on sinning; no one who keeps on sinning has either seen him or known him. Little children, let no one deceive you. Whoever practices righteousness is righteous, as he is righteous. Whoever makes a practice of sinning is of the devil, for the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil. No one born of God makes a practice of sinning, for God’s seed abides in him; and he cannot keep on sinning, because he has been born of God. By this it is evident who are the children of God, and who are the children of the devil: whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor is the one who does not love his brother (1 John 3:5-10).

John moves from this obedient practice of righteousness as evidence for knowing and loving God to another related evidence, loving other believers.

We Must Love Others.

John reminds his beloved readers that the message that we should love one another is nothing new. Cain is the prime example of lack of love for his own brother, and Cain showed his hatred by murdering his brother. John is very strong on this point.

We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brothers. Whoever does not love abides in death. Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him (1 John 3:14-15).

To not love is to hate, and to hate is to be on the same level as a murderer. There is no middle ground. In contrast to the negative example of Cain and his hatred that led to taking a brother’s life, John gives us the positive example of Jesus and his love that led to giving up his own life for his brothers’.

By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers (1 John 3:16).

We must love our brothers to the point of death if need be. But as John so practically explains, love is often seen in simply giving of the world’s good that you have to a brother in need (cf. 1 John 3:17). This is how we love others and show God’s love to them. This is how we show the tangible love of an invisible God (cf. 1 John 4:12).

John calls us on us to love one another, because love is from God. If we struggle with loving others, it’s because we don’t know God (cf. 1 John 4:7-8). Or perhaps it’s because we’ve momentarily forgotten the extent of God’s love for us. When we are struggling to love others, we need to be motivated not by the worthiness of the person we are trying to love, but by the love of God for us:

In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him.

In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.

Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another (1 John 4:9-11, emphasis added).

Knowing God. Believing in the saving work of Jesus Christ. Obeying God. Loving others. This is how we love God. May we better know the love of God for us in Christ Jesus so that we may love him better and love others like he loved us.

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Holly Huffstutler serves with her husband David, the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Troy in Troy, MI. She has a master’s degree in Biblical Ministries and blogs with him here where this post first appeared. Holly is a homemaker, raising and putting her four children through school.

Image by Franz Bachinger from Pixabay