What would you think if you walked into a home and there in the living was a large plaque that read, “You shall love your wife as Christ loves the church”? Then, when you ask the couple why the plaque is there, the wife responded, “Oh, I hung that there to remind my husband every day that he has to love me.”
I don’t know about you but I would think that couple is in serious trouble. Loving someone out of obligation is impossible. No one has ever succeeded in forcing someone to love them. It just doesn’t work that way.
Wait a minute. Isn’t that what God has done with us? Hasn’t God “hung a plaque in the living room” that demands, “You have to love me”?
Yes, He has. In fact, it’s even worse than that. The plaque actually reads, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.”1
Think about this for a moment. There is nothing undesirable about God. There is nothing evil about God, only goodness. There is nothing lacking about God, only fullness. There is nothing ugly about God, only beauty. There is nothing boring about God, only fascinating creativity. There is nothing weak about God, only overwhelming power. God is utterly desirable and valuable beyond description. And God is everywhere, ready to be loved at a moment’s notice.
There is every reason for us to love God. And yet God feels the need to command us to love him, knowing full well that we don’t and never will love him…on our own.
The command, then, to love God – “the greatest commandment” – is actually a measure of our own depravity: there is no reason why God should not be loved, and yet he has to command us to do so. Thus, the greatest commandment is also the saddest commandment.
What this means is that we can live quite moral lives and yet, by ignoring God because we feel like we’re being forced to love him, be guilty of the greatest sin in all the world: snubbing God’s love. Like a husband who resents the plaque in the living room and just puts up with his wife, we too can simply put up with God.
Fortunately, there’s another side to God that the greatest commandment doesn’t reveal: God, in actual fact, loves us with all of his heart, with all of his soul, and with all of his mind, even though we ourselves haven’t done so with him. There is no quid pro quo with God: “I will love you if you love me first.” He has proved this by sacrificing his one and only son, Jesus Christ, when we were loveless toward him, even hateful of him.
Now, through faith in Jesus, we are free to love God for who he is and what he has done for us, not because of what he rightly expects from us. And in the process, our love for God becomes natural. We love God because he loved us first.
This post first appeared in NewCommandment.org.
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