The greatest commandment, Jesus tells us, is; “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” (Matthew 22:37).
This is the essence of true worship; if we put anything in our lives before this we are kidding ourselves.
But what is love? Hollywood teaches us that love is a feeling, it is an emotion felt; but love is more than that. After all, God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son and that sacrifice can hardly have been an emotional response or feeling towards sinful man.
Biblically speaking, love is a principle; it is something that comes from the will; it is an active verb, something we do, rather than a noun, something we feel. Interestingly enough, although this is a command of Jesus, the verb is not in the imperative mood; it is in the future indicative active and almost contains the suggestion of a promise to His people; “You WILL love the Lord your God with all your heart……”.
Love in the human heart is capable of almost infinite degrees; it may begin so modestly so as to be hardly perceptible, yet go on to be a raging torrent which sweeps all before it. Our response to the command of Jesus must be to seek that love by meditation on the person of Christ Jesus, and by asking Him to fill us with that love which God demands. This divine love is not a natural thing; if it were, we would not have to seek His help; the natural thing is for man to love himself.
The love that Jesus talks of is agape, the same love that God has. It is not eros, sexual love, or philos, brotherly love or storge¸ family love. These are all types of love that come naturally to the natural man. The love Jesus demands is divine love, the same as that of which Jude wrote;
“keep yourselves in the love of God…..” (Jude 21).
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