And He said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” (Matthew 22:37).
It is too easy for Christians to say that they do this; but the love demanded by God is absolute and entire. To love God because He is good to us is perfectly reasonable, yet this is not the love that God requires or deserves; after all, don’t unbelievers do the same for those who are good to them? This sort of love is a feeling deriving from our human nature, not an action deriving from a proper apprehension of God and an admiration of Him. It is what we are prepared to give God when we find the time or when something particularly good happens to us.
The love that God demands is one that leads the believer to “seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness” (Matthew 6:33).
Whoever seeks things other than God is on his own; he may obtain what he wants, but will miss out on God. The mighty God, maker of heaven and earth, will not be regarded as one of many treasures or even the chiefest of treasures; He will be all or nothing; He will not help men who strive after personal ends to obtain that which, when gained, will usurp the rightful place of Christ in the heart. Yet popular Christianity spends its energy persuading people to turn to God because He will help them get ahead in this world. What a nonsense!
Jesus promises us (Matthew 5:6) that those who hunger and thirst after righteousness will be satisfied; in Revelation 7 we have a vision of the saints in heaven and it says of them; “they shall hunger no more, neither thirst anymore”; here is the promise fulfilled.
The first and greatest commandment is to love God with every power of our entire being; where love like that exists there can be no second place.
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