The relationship God has always sought to establish with His people is a relationship of love. God never intended for His people to have a relationship of cruelty or one where man is kept at a distance. What does this mean? It means that this dimension of love that we experience in the new birth of God is not something new,
A scholar of the law came to Jesus with a vital question. He asked what was the greatest commandment of all. Note that this question was important because they had developed a system of 613 commandments. These commandments were divided into two categories: positive commandments and negative commandments. Given the difficulty of keeping track of them all, they were constantly trying to deduce the essentials, which was no easy task.
Jesus' answer is instructive.
“The first is: Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.[c] The second is: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these.” Mark 12:29-31
The man nodded, impressed, and recognized the accuracy of what Jesus had said. He recognized that loving God with all one's heart, mind, soul, and strength, and loving one's neighbor as oneself, is greater than all sacrifices and offerings—in other words, greater than anything prescribed in the law. What this lawyer said is truly extraordinary. Perhaps it doesn't mean the same thing to us because we're not used to offering sacrifices. But in the old covenant, they had to offer multiple sacrifices. And in the book of Leviticus, we see a vast system of sacrifices to be offered for the sins of the people, for thanksgiving, and so on. And he claims that these two commandments alone surpass all those laws and sacrifices.
So Jesus clearly presents to us here the major expectation of God, the fundamental thing that God expects of human beings. When we love Him, we seek His presence. When we love Him with all our heart, we will seek to do what pleases Him, to serve Him, to give ourselves to Him. Love gives, gives, and gives again. And love gives itself. What determines our relationship with God is not God's love for us, it is our love for Him because God's love for us is constant, and our willingness to give ourselves.
At my conversion, I discovered a powerful love relationship with God. I could easily say that I loved the Lord. However, a few years later, He began to make me understand that I needed to enter more deeply into His love and intimacy. This began to bother me, and with the honesty that characterizes my relationship with Him, I began to wonder if by maintaining constant communion with God, I was not on the verge of becoming a fanatic.
Mind you, I had been born again for years, I loved the Lord, and I was more zealous than most Christians I knew. I never missed my morning prayer time because at my conversion, I was taught that I should spend time with God every day, and that stayed with me. I actually loved to pray, but the idea of maintaining a conversation and an awareness of Him all day long by pouring my love out on Him was new; I said, “Now I’m going to become a fanatic.” The Lord showed me that He wanted it all, total love, and for me, that level of surrender was strange, that total gift of self. And it completely changed my life and my relationship with Him.
In reality, many people have a relationship with God where they approach Him when it suits them, but the rest of the time, they do things their own way. Jesus states that we are supposed to love God with all our being, with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength. In this video, I explain in detail these different dimensions of the love we should have for the Lord.
Let us love the Lord. In the Church, we are obsessed with the idea of whether God loves us. But we need to be more obsessed with the idea of whether we love Him, because God's love is something that never changes. Our love is very unpredictable, and that's what we need to work on. God doesn't ask himself if He loves us; He knows that He loves us. He has already loved us and He will always love us. What will change your relationship with God is the evolution of your love for Him.
When people love, it is difficult to make them doubt the other party's love because the fact that they love leads them to assume that the other party loves them too. When you love the Lord, you will not wonder if He loves you. His love is not lacking; it is the deficit of our love that makes us feel unloved. Let us accept the commandment Jesus gives us and love the Lord our God.
Prayers
Lord, we ask You again for the grace to love You as we are meant to love You; the grace to love You with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind. We want to honor Your thought more than anything in this generation that mocks Your thought, to recognize the value of Your thought, to remain within Your logic.
We want to love You with all our strength, all the abilities You have given us, to resist everything that wants to come before You, relationships, connections, ambitions, careers; everything that wants to position itself in preference to You. You have told us that we must love nothing and no one more than You. Lord Jesus, we want to love You above all else. We have understood that this is the essential thing, this is the thing that You ask of human beings.
You ask us to love You with our whole being, that is life in God, everything else comes in that context, in that framework. If we love You, we will follow You; if we love You, we will honor You; if we love You, we will not wallow in sin. If we love You, it influences the way we speak, think, dress, organize ourselves, and live each day because we share Your values and Your thoughts.
We will love You with all that we are, with all that we have, and ask for Your grace to love You like never before. Father, I thank You because we are the light of the world; we do not embrace the darkness of the world, but we illuminate the darkness of the world.
Father, we thank You for giving us the ability to see the darkness and not confuse it with light, but to see that we ourselves carry that light and can illuminate those around us. Father, we thank You, thank You for Your kindness and Your favor in the mighty name of Jesus.
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