How Do You Love God With All the Heart, Soul, and Mind? | Salvation in Full Color: Love to God

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Another question he answers in the early part of the sermon is, what is it about God, exactly, that draws the soul in love toward him?

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Yeah, so really everything about God, but to break it into some kind of parts, we can think about God's attributes or His perfections, any one of them that you look at, you know, so you stop and consider

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His omniscience, His immutability, His holiness, all of those things are perfect, and as we look at those perfections, they should stir our hearts.

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His works, His actions, the things that He's accomplished and done are things that we are to praise

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Him for and give Him glory for. We delight in His Word because it is

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His Word to us and His revelation of Himself to us. And we delight in His laws that express

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His, demonstrate His character and are ways that we're able to then express our love back to Him.

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But we see Him most clearly in the person of His Son, and so we look there and we marvel and our hearts are drawn to love

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Him. The more we know Christ, the more we are drawn to love the Father. Yeah, and he follows that up in his next point with saying this, he says, this love to God is drawn forth by a believing view of God, and then he mentions those things.

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So it's not merely that we are aware of the facts, even the specifics, but it is a very believing grasp of those things.

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So in a sense, faith lays hold of the perfections and the actions and the

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Word and the law of God most clearly displayed in our Redeemer, and faith laying hold of those things, the heart is, it's as if love is drawn out of us constantly toward Him.

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He does mention that if we are ignorant of something, if we have no knowledge of something, we cannot have any real love of something.

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And, you know, we see this in negative ways with the issue of covetousness with the internet, we can get on the internet and maybe we're searching for a book for somebody and we find some other thing on the internet that we didn't even know existed.

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And now that we see it, it appeals to us and we say, this is something I really need for happiness.

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It would really benefit me. But five minutes ago, I had no desire for it at all because of ignorance. Another way to illustrate this would be to say that sometimes you see something on the internet and it looks very bright and shiny and promises happiness, and you suddenly find that you have a desire for it.

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But when you read reviews about it, you find that other people who have bought it said, it's actually not what it looks like.

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It's a cheap product. Don't do it. It's a lemon. And so your desire for it ebbs away.

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Or think of a friendship. You meet a person and you find their company really enjoyable. But the more you get to know the person, the less enjoyable you find their company.

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With God, an infinite goodness and only goodness means that the more the

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Christian knows the specifics of God's perfections and works and word and law and all of that portrayed in Christ, the more the

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Christian's heart will be drawn to love him. Yeah, you really can't look too long or too deeply into the subject of God.

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And you don't have to ever fear coming away and being disappointed that you reached the end or there was this sour note in what was otherwise perfections.

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Yeah, yeah. Another question he tries to answer in his second major point is, what does the

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Bible mean when it says we're to love him with all of our heart, soul and mind? So he kind of divides this up over a number of sub points.

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We're going to kind of throw them together. Basically says, this is a sincere love. So it's heartily that we're loving

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God. So we're not just wearing a mask. It comes from the heart. He says, this is a love that is connected.

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There's an integrity there. And that is, it's a love that kind of unifies the heart.

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We don't have two masters and God gets a little more than second master gets. That obviously is impossible.

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Christ made that clear. You cannot love two masters. It's not just that, you know, you can't do it very well.

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You just can't do it at all. You end up loving one master and hating the other. Would you include here also that you can't, you know, kind of divide the life and say, you know,

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God, I love you in these areas. But, you know, I kind of have this area to myself. Yeah, so like compartmentalizing the life into like sacred and secular.

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Okay, so I love God on Sunday mornings a lot. And I love God during my quiet times.

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But other parts of the day, I'm supposed to be loving other people. So, yeah, you kind of think of those as compartmentalized, which would be the opposite of what he says here with a united heart.

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He says we are to love God wholly. And that is in a way that rises above every other.

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And he mentions this statement where Christ says that we're to love him more than father and mother and wife and children, even to the degree that it looks like we hate them.

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So having said all that, we want to ask this question. When a Christian is commanded to love

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God with all of our heart and all of our soul and all of our mind, but we're also commanded to love a lot of other people, love our neighbor, love our wife as Christ, love the church, love our children, love our parents, you know, love the

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Christian. I mean, John goes so far to say, if you can't love a Christian that you can see you, why do you think you love that Christian's heavenly father who you can't see?

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So how do we take all these commands? Maybe we could say secondary commands to love.

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How do we mesh that with the primary command to love? Because I think sometimes that the

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Puritans and those that follow the Puritans, like the 18th century men, I think sometimes their answer isn't as biblical as I wish it would be.

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And I love the Puritans, but here's what I mean. The Puritans often warn us not to love the creature, the created thing, the created person too much, because then we would be loving them more than we love the creator.

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But I don't think the question really is one of degree, but of manner. So I don't ever wake up in the morning and worry that I'm going to love my wife too much.

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I mean, Christ loved the church. And if I'm to love my wife, like I love the church, I just can't imagine that there's a place where, you know, there's a certain degree where God would stop you and say, actually, if you love a little more than what you're doing, you're actually loving her too much.

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You've outpaced Christ in loving the church. So you've gone beyond. So I don't think it's a matter of degree. I love my wife too much.

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I love my kids too much. I love the Christian next to me too much. And therefore I'm not loving God supremely.

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I think it is more how we do that. So, Chuck, what would you advise to someone that says,

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I'm supposed to love a lot of things or a lot of people in different categories, and yet I'm supposed to love

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God wholeheartedly. So how do I keep there from being a competition? I think that you have to consider how you love all of those people or things, that the love to them flows from the fact that you do love

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God. And so as you look at the various relationships that you have, you ask the question, what does love to God and love to them, what does love to them, because I love

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God, demand in whatever given situation? So if it is rebuking sin, that's sometimes the loving thing to do.

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And to not do that may appear to others watching and even to the person being rebuked to be more loving, not to be rebuked.

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But if you do that, then if you fail to do that, if you don't rebuke them, then you may be loving them more than you love

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God in that situation. And so in each situation, what does love to God and love to this person require in this moment?