Can heaven look down and say that I am making progress in loving God with everything I’ve got?

30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.' 31  The second is this: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no commandment greater than these."

INSIGHT:  I used to believe the best way I could show God love was through my emotional expression during praise and worship.  I see many people, including myself for years, who can express deep emotion during worship service, but then be walking comfortably in sin, just hours later.  God sees all that worship as false love, because it is not matched with righteous living.  I even saw a popular pastor teach in his book that God’s love language is worship.  That is only partly true; because he didn’t mention obedience (99% of the truth is the biggest lie).  The Bible teaches that God’s primary love language is obedience (1 Kings 3:3, John 14:15, 1 John 5:3).   If we don’t know this, we will hear, “You honored me with your lips, but your hearts were far from me.”

Near the start of my ministry, the Lord had been prompting me, for many months, to memorize large amounts of Scripture.  It was very hard for me, and my brain wanted to drift to anything but memorizing.  I felt great pressure because I love Him so much, and I wanted to please Him by obeying Him (John 14:31). 

One day, I was headed to the prayer trail, and I caught the tail end of a radio broadcast by the late Dr. Chuck Missler.  I had met Chuck briefly at a conference years ago, and I had walked away saying, “I think I just met the smartest Christian man that has ever lived.”  He had likely forgotten more than I had ever known.  It’s quite odd to see someone with a brain like his, who also loves Jesus so much.  I arrived at the trail, and just a few minutes into my prayer walk, I was again talking to the Lord about the difficulty I was having in obeying Him in memorizing.   I was passionately reminding Him how much I loved Him, but also reminding Him that He didn’t make me an intellect, like He did Chuck.

In a very playful moment, I looked up and loudly said, “Remember Lord, be patient with me on this because you made me more emotional than intellectual, and just look how much affection I feel and express toward you…I bet Chucky doesn’t give you this kind of love does he?  It was such a tender and funny moment.  I sensed the Lord smiling at my silly human reasoning, but it still didn’t get me off the hook from obeying Him in this.

What I realized, in that moment, was a richer meaning of Mark 12:30 and what it means to distinctly love God with all our heart (I’m good at this part), our soul (this part too), our mind (not so much), and with all our strength.  God wants us to love Him with everything we have, and some of that comes as easily as breathing to us, while the other areas require great sacrifice and dependence on His grace.  Praise God, I memorized more Scripture than I ever thought possible, as His power was made complete in my weakness.

Regarding v. 31, the second greatest commandment, I discovered something astonishing the first time I organized all Christ’s teachings into categories.  Did you know Jesus gave twice as many teachings about loving God, than loving others?  There is a lesson here.

When my 2nd spouse went apostate, I still loved her as commanded by God, and desperately wanted to see her better off, but when she asked me to believe or do things that were against God’s truth and my conscience, I stood my ground, loving God, the greatest commandment, over loving her, the 2nd greatest, and so I let her go.  We should never compromise by loving someone else, at the expense of loving God.  God will not honor that kind of love.  I have lost several people in my life because I was not willing to “love” them while they remained steadfast in their sin, their unbelief, their deception, or their counterfeit Christianity, at the expense of loving God and His truth.  Are you loving others, desiring to see them better off, but making certain that you always give God your highest loyalty and love?