Sermon Tone Analysis

Loving God

Intro

Familiar words?

Probably, Hopefully!

Hear them again – “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.”

Even though I have heard and read those words many times since becoming a Christian, I don’t think I have really understood them.

What does it really mean to love God? Do you love God?

I want you to think about that.

Love is a much misunderstood word in our culture.

Do any of you wrestle with how to define that?

Is loving God different from loving our family, wife, husband, parents, children, friends, other Christians?

We talk about love in strange ways.

We fall in love, but we also fall out of love.

People say they are in love with their things: cars, boats, and the list goes on.

Some people are in love with people they have only seen in Movies or TV programs.

I heard a song the other day while I was walking in the mall that truly astounded me.

Like many songs nowadays, there was little content, it just kept repeating, “I’m in love with your body.”

This kind of love is very superficial, fickle, and self-serving.

Bernard of Clairvaux noted that, “if it is for her beauty that he loves his wife, he will cast longing eyes after a fairer woman.

Ecclesiastes 5:10 “He who loves money will not be satisfied with money, nor he who loves abundance with its income.”

For marriage relationships we have the Five love languages for us to discover how we and our loved ones feel loved.

What about God?

We freely express our love and devotion to God in song and praise on Sunday, but what does loving God really mean?

In the opening Scripture, Jesus is responding to a question from a Pharisee who was a lawyer.

They were testing him and asked “which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

Maybe a quote from the MSG Bible

When Jesus spoke those words he had been asked by a Pharisee what the most important commandment was – Jesus says ‘its to love God with everything in you’ – and the second is like it – ‘to love your neighbour as yourself.’

The Pharisee says well done Rabbi – gives him a pat on the back!

This morning I want us to think for a while about what it means to love God – what Jesus called the most important commandment, then next week we’ll look at the second half of that command – to love one another and then the following week at LBC together we’ll be looking at another loving the world like God does.

We’ll look at the other command Jesus left us with to go and make disciples of all nations and how that works out for us here at LBC.

Loving God, loving one another and loving the world.

It’s a short description of what God wants his church to do and what he hopes for us as individuals.

That we will love him, that we will love another and that we will love the people who don’t know him.

Serious lovers of God will also be passionate followers of Jesus.

Not like Peter before he denied Christ, “following from a distance?”

After the resurrection, Jesus asked Peter 3 times, “do you love me more than these.”

This was not a command to love.

What did he mean?

first love?

Revelation?

So – Do you love God?…

My Comments: (Most of the time the answer to that question has to do with performance, how much we read, pray, study, share the gospel, serve others, etc. and that may have something to do with it, but which comes first?

Does loving God lead to doing things, or does doing things prove we love God?)

Is that a more challenging question than it first appears?

It has been for me over the last few months.

I’ve known for the last three months or so what I was going to be speaking on today and for the next two weeks which has given time to reflect on it – and quite honestly it has been a disturbing question for me.

Do I love God?

I hope today to ask you some of the same difficult questions that I feel God has been asking me over the last month or so.

Questions that have disturbed me – questions that have shown up my blind spots and failures, but questions that as I seek to answer them and as we seek to answer them, will I believe light the path to a newer, freer, richer more authentic relationship with God.

We need to Love God

So what is it then?

Is loving God an ‘order’, a duty, a command that we must obey – like a household chore?

“Gotta love God today – I’ll do it between 7.00 and 7.30am?

You’d hope not.

I want to say this morning that for us to be the people we are intended to be – for us to experience life as God intends we need to love God.

Hear that again – ‘we need to love him’.

It is part of God’s plan that we love him with everything in us and that we live out of that love.

That’s when we are fully alive – that’s when we know life to the full.

The passage of scripture we heard earlier tells us that its what we are meant to do – fully engage our hearts in love for God.

The love he speaks of is one of absolute devotion – it’s the kind of love a young engaged couple have for each other.

Having just conducted 2 weddings I’ve seen that look.

Heart, soul, mind and strength.

It is in loving God that we know him and that we discover the life we had been unconsciously seeking and trying to find thru the trivial.

Someone has written “Only God himself is completely and utterly sufficient to fulfil the will and longing of our souls.

Nothing else can.

The soul, when it is restored by grace, is made wholly sufficient to comprehend him fully by love.

He cannot be comprehended by our intellect or any other person’s -- or any angel’s for that matter.

For both we and they are created things... to the intellect, God... is forever unknowable ... to love, he is completely knowable.

(The Cloud of Unknowing)

We are made to love God – we desperately need to love God and the struggle for some of us is that our hunger for God has faded – we remember what it felt like but we don’t know how to get it back.

Some of us need a ‘hunger for a hunger for God.’

You see ‘not loving God’ raises some interesting questions – disturbing questions.

What is our worship here together if we don’t love God?

Is it just a ‘feel good singalong?’

Why do we serve if we don’t love God?

Is it self promotion with a veneer of God?

Why study the Bible?

What use is biblical knowledge without love for God?

We spoke a few weeks back of different pathways to connect with God and even in that, the danger is that we will worship and love the pathway and not God.

The real danger of not loving God is that we end up practicing religious behaviour without passion or joy – we begin to become more and more like Pharisees.

What does love for God look like?

Do you love God? Do you have a hunger for God?

Maybe you wonder… What does love for God look like?

Quickly let me highlight 4 characteristics.

Desire – Let me begin by saying that love has to do with desire – I’ve heard it said that we simply love God by keeping his commands.

Well – I reckon the verse I read says ‘If we love God… then we will respond to him by doing what he says’ Keeping the commands is a love response – its not actually loving in and of itself.

Its evidence of love.

To test that, ask the question – can you keep the commands and not love God?

I think you can.

Desire means wanting greater closeness, deeper connection, communication, oneness – manifestation of God in our lives – longing to be with.

How’s your desire for God?

Psalm 42 begins ‘As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O God. {2} My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.

When can I go and meet with God?’

That can make us feel guilty – because sometimes our desire for God grows dim – we do get satisfied with lesser things.

But the absence of desire is not permanent.

I don’t know that we can manufacture it, but we can put ourselves in a place where it has a chance to spark into flame again if we choose to.

Pleasing God – is a fair way of loving him – Paul writes in Ephesians find out what please the Lord – like you would with anyone you love.

Seek to bring them happiness – seek to do what they want.

A W Tozer, in Love’s Final Test has written ‘If we would turn from fine-spun theological speculations about grace and faith, and humbly read the New Testament with a mind to obey what we see there, we would easily find ourselves, and know for certain the answer to the question that troubled our fathers and should trouble us: ’Do we love the Lord or no?’’

A suggestion – Ask God how he wants to grow you – change and shape your character to make you more like Jesus.