Loving God

Welcome to my first post. I have been looking to do this for a while but somehow could not. I hope to keep it simple - write small posts on things I read, discover and think about in God's word.

The greatest command

For our first post, we will start from the very top and explore (what I feel) one of the most important verses in the Bible from Matthew 22 -

35 One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question:
36 “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”
37 Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’
38 This is the first and greatest commandment.
39 And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’
40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

What I love about these verses is their simplicity. God does not have a huge list of requirements or commands for us to follow. All of the commands basically boil down to these two - Love God and love others. Let us look a bit deeper into each of them.

Love God

One can see this as a very loaded command. What does it mean to love God? Is it possible to love God? How can one love God? To be honest, as a beginner in Christ I do not know all these answers. But from my very limited human perspective, loving anyone means -

  • Getting to know them, not just on first name basis but in a deeper relationship
  • Spending time with each other
  • Trust them, all love is based on trust
  • Value them, not just for any personal gain but for who they just are

There are of-course many things which I can write about love, some of them can be found in 1 Corinthians 13. God in His kindness also told us what loving Him could mean in John 14:15 -

15 If you love me, keep my commandments.

A similar thing is mentioned in 1 John 5

3 For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments: and his commandments are not burdensome.

So for a programmer like me, this seems like a recursive solution - God's command is to love Him but how do we love Him? We love Him by following His commands. This is of course hard to understand for all of us and I hope I have better answers as I grow in Christ.

It also does not mean that if I blindly follow all commands of God, that equates to loving God. I can also do that out of fear or reverence but love is something much more and different.

All I can say for now as a mere human is, to love God is to know Him, value Him deeply, trust Him at all times and always stay true to Him. So let us all start here.

Love others

This is easier to understand. In fact, one can be deceived by it's simiplicity. We can easily say - "Hey, I am always kind to others". I think that is a good start but not the end. We need to treat others as we want to be treated. We even need to even love our enemies, as stated in Matthew 5:44. Loving others is hard, people are divided by thousands of things and there can be many reasons to hate anyone (specially on the internet) but God calls us to love others. So let's make a start here by treating everyone with great respect, being kind to them, helping whenever we can and being honest in our day-to-day dealings.

So that concludes my first post, it might feel like too much or too little but I hope to keep posting and keep learning from God's word. May the peace of Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen.