Loving the LORD

Mark 12: 30

And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. This is the first commandment.

Jesus put the whole law in just two commandments. Love the Lord your God and love your neighbors as yourself. When there is mutual love - Loving and being loved - mutual trust grows. When trust grows, there is implicit obedience and complete submission. So, GOD'S love is the root of Christian life. When the love towards God grows inside of us, the rest of the things like “unshakeable trust in HIS great faithfulness” and “implicit obedience to HIS Words” follow. How can we be filled with GOD'S love?

Love has to be received from the Source of Ultimate Love(which is GOD alone) first, before it can be given to others. The love of God, which was expressed by Jesus Christ on the cross has to be received in our hearts. Without God, there is no love. When God’s love is received, it slowly grows as we get to know more of our God, more about HIS goodness and HIS great faithfulness. Once it begins to overflow from our heart, we get to the next step which Jesus calls as the second commandment - Mark 12: 31 And the second, like it, is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ This second commandment will automatically be fulfilled when the love of God overflows from our heart. So, we receive GOD'S love first, know God more and more which would increase our love for God and then we come to the point of overflowing love. When our heart is empty, we have nothing to give. But when our heart receives the divine love of God, our heart overflows with that love and our heart begins to show the love of God to the world. Just like how God loved the sinners, the heart filled with the love of God loves the sinners! With this, the love towards God and the love towards our neighbors is expressed and fulfilled. But can we love God all by ourselves? No! Always and always and always we need the HOLY Spirit, who constantly stirs that love for God in us as we ponder upon GOD'S goodness in our lives, the finished work of Christ on the cross, the faithful character of God, the Loving grace by which he has saved us (the sinners) and we spontaneously start (loving God more and more) thanking God for all that he has brought us through.

        

 As we go out to the world, let the people know that GOD'S love is within us. We need to receive and experience GOD'S love and reflect it to others and it is the HOLY Spirit, who reminds us constantly, of GOD'S love and HIS great faithfulness. It is possible to have faith and trust without love but with the love of God in our hearts, it is impossible to be without faith and trust and that's why Paul says in I Corinthians 13:13 - And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love. It is not enough if we say that we are ruled by the love of God, and that we live by the leading of the Spirit. It is by our fruits and deeds that we can prove whether we truly love God. It can be explicitly seen by the people around us, if our hearts are really filled with GOD'S love - our life would be centering around God and our first priority in whatever we do, would always be God; only with these fruits can we know if one is with the love of God or not, for God says "by their fruits you Will know them". So if we love God, if we claim to trust God and if we are truly led by the HOLY Spirit, those around us should definitely be touched by our different life - for the light of God shines upon us - and this is nothing but "reflecting the life of Christ", who lives in us.

         So we know that all that matters finally is “How much we truly love God”. What do we do to love God more? I believe that, with the help of the HOLY Spirit, we need to know more about how fabulous and awesome our God is (ponder upon God’s work in our lives), with more knowledge of HIM and HIS character every day and by knowing HIM more, which will increase our love towards HIM more and more.