1 John 5:1-5

Love comes naturally, for some people. When it comes to some people in our lives, we don’t have to be told to love them. When a mom or dad first sees their little baby, born just seconds ago, no one is telling them to remember to love that baby. When Gwyneth was born, Matt and Amy loved her from the very beginning. They loved her even before she was born. They didn’t have to be told. Love comes naturally.

In fact, for a parent to be told to love their child is kind of offensive. If I came up to you, after the service, and I drew you aside and said, “I just want to remind you, I just want to tell you that it’s really a good idea that you love your son, that you love your daughter,” you would look at me strange, and probably be a little hurt. You would wonder what you did to make me think that you didn’t love your child. How could that possibly be? You can’t NOT love your child. Nothing could change that love.

And yet, when it comes to loving God, we need to be told. Love your God. Love the Lord. Love the Lord with all of your heart and soul and mind and strength. In Matthew 22, a Pharisee once asked, from this long list of commandments that God has given us, which one is at the top of the list. Which command is the most important? What is the greatest command? And Jesus didn’t answer, “The first commandment, You shall have no other gods before Me.” And He didn’t answer, “All of the commands are equally important.” No, Jesus answered,

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.

Why would Jesus pick this command to be the greatest? He’s quoting from Deuteronomy 6:5. That’s where we find this command. But why didn’t He choose Deuteronomy 6:13?

Fear the LORD your God

Why is loving the Lord our God the greatest command, not fearing the Lord our God?

Because love, more than fear, makes us obey. Love, more than fear, drives us to do what God wants us to do. Love, more effectively than fear, motivates us to live the way He wants us to live.

For the next month, we’ll be hearing what God wants us to do, how He wants us to live. We’re going to see what it means to be a disciple of Jesus. To be a disciple of Jesus means to follow Him, to move as He moves and talk as He talks. To look, for anyone who might be watching, to look like Jesus. To remind them an awfully lot like our Lord.

And what that looks like is this: We will love the Lord our God with all of our hearts and souls and minds and strength. We will leave our neighbors, as much as we love ourselves. We will love ourselves, which might be the hardest one for some of us. And we will go out into all the world and make more copies of Jesus, more disciples. In our bulletins this morning, we read about a tool that helps us to become better disciples, the Discipleship Roadmap inventory.

And today, we begin with the first and greatest, loving God. Loving God with all of our hearts and souls and minds and strength. To love God. But first, we have to face this question, as embarrassing as it is, as awkward as it makes us feel: Why do we need to be told? Why do we need to be commanded to love Him? Why do we love our children and husband and wife and parents and friends without being told to, and we have to be commanded, commanded to love God?

Sometimes, we don’t love God because we fear God. And sometimes, that fear even looks holy. To love God, to have affection for Him, to be drawn to Him, to love God seems wrong. It’s like we’re bringing God down too low. To love God with our hearts and souls makes God seem too human, and that’s wrong. To fear God, to have some dread, some trepidation, that seems to lift God up. Fearing God seems more righteous. Fearing God seems more holy. But fearing God is not the first and greatest command. Loving God is.

But maybe it’s not fear and trepidation that keeps us from loving God. Sometimes, we don’t love because we don’t know God. Sometimes, our relationship with God goes no further than this book. God is the information we find on these pages. God is a subject to be debated. God is a topic that divides. God is a concept, an idea, an issue for discussion. And how do we love that? How do we love a topic? How do we love a page?

We will love God, we will love God with all of our hearts and souls and minds and strength, when we know God. And we will know God when we believe in Jesus. 1 John 5 connects the dots for us. Verse 1:

Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God, and everyone who loves the father loves his child as well.

First, if we believe that Jesus is the Christ, then we’re children of God. If we believe that Jesus is the one that everyone was expecting, the one who would put this world back right again, the one who would die to kill death, who would come back to life, then God is our Father, we are born of God.

And if God is our Father, if we are His children, of course we love Him. The love comes naturally, when Jesus is our Savior. The love doesn’t even need to be commanded, when we’ve given our lives to Him. Believers in Jesus are children of God, and what child doesn’t love their parents? Even in families where there is abuse, children still love. That’s what makes the abuse so much more painful. And as God’s children, children of the perfect God, of course we love Him. How could we not?

But what does this love look like? How do we show our love? What does it mean to God that we love Him? God makes that clear, He spells it out, in verse 3:

This is love for God: to obey his commands.

Love leads to action. Affection for God means doing for God. When we love our Father, we look like we love our Father, we talk like we love our Father, we live like we love our Father.

But sometimes, we talk and act and live like we love our Lord, but we’re not actually loving our Lord. We went back to the fear. We obey out of obligation. Service becomes a duty. Purity is forced. Listen to verse 3 again:

This is love for God: to obey his commands. And his commands are not burdensome

If love is just a feeling, just gushy emotions, then we just sit there, loving God, but doing nothing. Our hearts may be in the right place, but our hands and feet and bodies aren’t doing the right things. Some of us need to put our love into action.

For others of us, obedience is just that, obedience. We obey because we’re supposed to obey. We try to act holy, because the rules tell us to act holy. We do what God wants us to do out of a sense of duty, or maybe even out of a sense of fear. For some of us, the question that drives us to obey is, “What if I don’t obey? What if I don’t do the right thing? What will God do to me then?”

If this is our idea of obedience to God, we’re not really obeying. If our obedience is from any other motive than love, then it’s not really obedience. God wants us, and if He has to, He’ll command us, to love Him. To love Him.

Because loving is so much more effective for obedience than fear. Loving makes us more holy than duty. When we love God, we want to act holy. Instead of holiness, fear breeds hypocrisy. When fear drives us, we want a way out. We hope for relief from obedience. We wonder if we can get away with NOT obeying. Fear brings obedience, but only grudging obedience. Fear generates forced holiness, not genuine holiness.

When our love for God is greater than our love for anything else, then our lives are becoming holy. Jesus told us to love God more than we love our father or mother, more than we love our wife or husband, more than we love our children. And when our love for God is that strong, when it comes that naturally, when our God is our hearts desire, then no temptation is strong enough to beat us. We love God more than our own needs, more than whatever is tempting us. We love God more than any distraction that leads us away. We love God so much, that there is no fear big enough to overwhelm us. No enemy is fierce enough to conquer. Follow the dots. If we believe that Jesus is our Savior, then we are born of God. If we are born of God, we love Him. If we love Him, we obey, and if we obey, we win. Verse 4:

for everyone born of God overcomes the world.

So if we want to obey God more, then we need to love God more.

And we love God more when God teaches us to love Him more. We can’t generate a love for Him. We can’t force ourselves to love Him more. But there are some practices, some actions that God can use to cause us to love Him more. We talked about three of them for the past month, spending time in silence and solitude. Fasting from something that we might love more than God. Meditating on God and what He has done and what He has said. These practices lead us to love Him more. There are others. Worship, like we’re doing right now, hopefully ends with us loving God more at 10:30 than we did at 9:30. Studying, whether in a group or by ourselves, reveals more of who God is, and the more we see of Him, the more we love Him. Acknowledging any fear, any resistance we may have to loving God. Is there any false theology that tells us that fearing God is more holy than loving God? It’s time to confess that, to root it out. Just talking with other Christians about how much you love God, and how much they love God, generates more love in everyone involved. And more than anything, spending time thinking, dwelling on Jesus sacrifice on the cross shows the love of God in a startling, shocking, horrifying, wonderful way.

The Lord wants us to love Him, to love Him willingly, naturally, even without being commanded to. And the Lord will work in us to create that natural, willing, genuine, affectionate love. So that, each year, we are loving God more, every week, we’re growing in our amazement and wonder and awe and love for God. God promises to do that work in us. We just need to let Him. God made a promise to Gwyneth this morning. God promised to bring her up, not in fear and trembling, but in love. We didn’t hear threats this morning, God threatening Gwyneth. We heard promises, promises of God’s faithfulness. That is what will draw Gwyneth to love God, and that is what draws us. If He has to, He’ll command us. But He’d rather that we want to serve Him. He’d rather that we want to obey. He’d rather that we be holy because love God with all of our heart, and we love God with all of our souls, and we love God with all of our minds and all of our strength. Of course we obey Him. We love Him.