What Love Means

The Sunday evening message given in the Gettysburg United Methodist church on May 26, 2024.  The Bible verses used are 1 John 5:1-12.

            Do you love God?

            I assume most of us would say we do.  But what, exactly does that mean?  What do we mean when we say we love God?  

            I don’t know that we talk about that very much.  We should.  After all, loving God is one of the most basic things there is about Christian faith.  In fact, it goes back long before Christ.  In Deuteronomy Chapter Six, when the early nation of Israel is being taught the basics of their faith, the first thing they are told is:  “Hear, O Israel.  The Lord our God, the Lord is one.  Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.”  The idea that we need to love the Lord our God shows up over and over again in the Old Testament.  

And then, of course, in the New Testament, Jesus himself said the most important commandment is “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.”  So, obviously, loving God is essential to our Christian faith.  But what does it mean to love God?

Or, let’s look at it another way.  If someone asked you to prove that you love God, how would you do that?  What would you say?  What would your evidence be?  How could you prove, to someone else’s satisfaction, that you love God?

Now, I’m not saying we should allow anyone else to judge our faith.  The only one who can truly judge our faith is God.  The point is that loving God cannot just be something we say.  The love of God needs to be something real in our lives.  And loving God cannot be real in our lives unless we know what it means to love God.

Luckily for us, the Apostle John, in our reading today, tells us what it means to love God.  And it turns out that it’s pretty simple.  He says, “this is love for God:  to keep his commands.”

It’s simple, and yet–there are a lot of times when we don’t want to accept it.  We’re like the guy Jesus was talking to in Matthew Nineteen.  Remember that story?  A man comes up to Jesus and asks what he needs to do to inherit eternal life.  Jesus says, keep the commandments.  And the guy says, “Which ones?”

Which ones?  You know, there may be times when we’re not really sure what God wants us to do, but that’s not really the biggest problem we have.  Most of the time, we know what God wants us to do.  It’s just that, sometimes, we really don’t want to do it.  We don’t really want to keep all of God’s commands.  Some of them are hard.  Some of them require us not to do things we’d like to do, or to do things we’d rather not do.  Some of them might make us unpopular.  So we say, can’t I love God by just keeping some of God’s commands, rather than all of them?

Well, yes and no.  I mean God’s not keeping score.  God’s not sitting in heaven watching our every move with a big red pen in his hands, waiting to give us a big check mark every time we fail to keep one of God’s commands.  God knows we cannot be perfect, and God does not expect us to be perfect.  But if we truly love God, we should do our best.  We should try to keep God’s commands–all of God’s commands–as well as we can.

Look at it this way.  Suppose you’re married, and your spouse has a list of things they want you to do.  And you look at the list, and there are some things that are going to be hard to do.  There are some things that are going to take a lot of time.  There are some things that are going to be unpleasant.  To come to the point, there are some things on that list that you really would rather not do.

But what would show more love to your spouse?  If you just choose to do some of those things?  If you just choose to do the easy things, the things that won’t take long, the things that are fun?  Or if you do all of the things your spouse wants you to do, regardless of what they are or how long they’ll take or anything else?

That’s how it is with God’s commands.  If we look at the things God wants us to do, and we decide to just do the easy things, the things that don’t take much of a commitment, the things that are going to be fun, how much love does that show to God?  It does show some, I think–I’m not saying that it shows no love for God at all.  But it does not show as much love to God as it would if we decided to try to keep all of them.  If we decided to do the hard things, the things that are not much fun, the things that do take a deep commitment.  That would show more love to God, don’t you think?

So the question is, how do we get there?  And again, luckily for us, John gives us the answer.  He tells us that God’s commands are not actually that hard at all.  Why not?  Because “everyone born of God has overcome the world.  This is the victory that has overcome the world, even our faith.  Who is it that overcomes the world?  Only the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God.”

So that’s what it comes down to.  Do we really believe that Jesus is the Son of God?  Now, again, I suspect most of us here, maybe all of us here, would say that we do.  And I believe that, to some extent, we do.  But how much do we believe that?  Do we completely and totally believe it?  Is our belief in Jesus Christ as the Son of God strong enough to overcome our reluctance to do the things God asks us to do?  Even when they’re hard?  Even when they’re not much fun?  Even when they’re not really what we want to do?

Here’s another way to say it.  When we think doing the hard things, the un-fun things, the things God wants us to do that we’d rather not do, what is it that keeps us from wanting to do them?  It’s our worldliness, right?  It’s caring more about the things of the world than the things of God?  We’re concerned about pleasing people, rather than pleasing God.  We’re concerned about having time to do the things we want to do, rather than the things God wants us to do.  We’re concerned with making sure we can provide for ourselves, rather than trusting in God to provide for us.  We’re in the position of Simon Peter when he was trying to tell Jesus what to do.  Jesus said to Peter, “You do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”

It’s easy to have those human concerns.  After all, we are human.  But that’s why we need to overcome the world.  If we overcome the world, those human concerns go away.  As John wrote, if we truly love God, we can overcome the world.  And if we overcome the world, then God’s commands are not burdensome. But the only one who can overcome the world is the one who believes in Jesus Christ as the Son of God.

So what it means to love God, really, is to believe in Jesus Christ as the Son of God.  To really believe.  To fully and completely believe.  To believe so much that our belief overcomes the world.  To believe so much that we can put our human concerns behind us, and fully focus on the concerns of God.  To believe so much that doing the things God wants us to do does not seem hard or burdensome.  To believe so much that we want to follow all of God’s commands, that we are happy to follow all of God’s commands, because there is nothing more important in our lives that showing love to God.

That kind of total belief, that kind of complete love, should be one of the goals of every Christian.  Now, that’s not say that we’re suddenly going to become perfect.  The greatest heroes of the Bible all failed sometimes.  Moses failed.  David failed.  Peter failed.  James and John failed.  If they all failed, we cannot expect that we will never fail.

But here’s the thing:  when they failed, they eventually recognized their failing.  And they repented.  And they asked God for forgiveness.  And they continued to believe.  They continued to have faith.  And they started again to follow all of God’s commands, and to allow nothing in their lives to become more important than showing love to God.

The way we show love to God is to keep His commands.  At first, that sounds like a hard thing.  But it’s really not.  Not if we truly believe in Jesus Christ as the Savior, as the Son of God.  So let’s truly believe in Jesus.  Let’s believe in Jesus so much that our belief overcomes the pull of the world.  Then God’s commands won’t seem burdensome at all.  Because there will be nothing more important in our lives than showing love to God.