How can we love God?

Our love towards God
1 JOHN 4:7-21

How can we show God that we love Him? When you truly love someone, you want to show it to them right? You want to prove to them that you do love them.

• We love because He first loved us. 1 John 4:19 This is the only reason we can love God. He loved us first so now we have the power to love Him back and the power to love others.

The first step is: Through relationship: the first step is to accept Jesus Christ into your heart.

If you have not done that, I encourage you to say this quick prayer with me:

Lord Jesus, for too long I’ve kept you out of my life. I know that I am a sinner and that I cannot save myself. No longer will I close the door when I hear you knocking. By faith I gratefully receive your gift of salvation. I am ready to trust you as my Lord and Savior. Thank you, Lord Jesus, for coming to earth. I believe you are the Son of God who died on the cross for my sins and rose from the dead on the third day. Thank you for bearing my sins and giving me the gift of eternal life. I believe your words are true. Come into my heart, Lord Jesus, and be my Savior. Amen.

Mark 12:30 New Living Translation (NLT)
“And you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength.”

Briefly speaking, this verse means that God wants us to love Him with our whole being.

God is and should have the supreme place in Mans life!

So what is our whole being?
1 Thessalonians 5:23 shows us all three parts of our being, saying, “And the God of peace Himself sanctify you wholly, and may your spirit and soul and body be preserved complete, without blame, at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Our spirit is the innermost part of our being, the part we use to receive God and contact Him. When we received the Lord Jesus as our Savior, this is where He came to live in us. In our spirit, we can have fellowship with the Lord and spend time in His presence.

Our soul is made up of our mind, our emotion, and our will. It is our person, our psychological part.

Our body, of course, is our physical part, with which we contact physical things through our five senses and express our inward parts.

Let’s take a look at how we love God wholly and absolutely with each of the parts of our being.

1. Love God with your heart.
Why does God require for us to love Him with our hearts?

We may think of our heart simply as the seat of our emotions. But in the Bible our heart is more than that; it’s composed of our emotions, yes, but also of our mind, our will, and our conscience. The heart holds a lot in it. God created us to love Him with our heart. Sometimes we feel an emptiness inside. Like we need something more. When our hearts aren’t fully satisfied is because we have been looking for love in the wrong places. ONLY GOD CAN FILL OUR HEARTS. Too often we go chasing after things, and we begin to fill our hearts with things that do not matter. God tells us to love Him with all of our heart because He knows how evil it can be without His love. You ever heard a saying that says “follow your heart” I like to say “follow the spirit of God and His word” The heart can be tricky and many times if we aren’t careful, it can lead us the wrong way. The word of God tells us in Jeremiah 17:9 “The human heart is the most deceitful of all things, and desperately wicked. Who really knows how bad it is? The heart can deceive us? What? Yes it can, especially if we don’t have the love of God in it! This is why God tells us to love Him with our hearts. It’s important that we give Him our hearts, so He can mold it into the heart He wants. That we can have a heart after Gods’ heart.

2. Love God with your soul
What does it mean to love God with your soul?

We love God with our inner person when we allow him to speak to and form our inner desires. You see when God is forming our inner desires, our soul begins to desire more of Him! Loving God with our souls will show an expression of our love towards Him. It is giving Him our identity so that He can mold it more and more each day into His identity.

We love the Lord with all our soul by living a life of faithfulness to all that the Lord has required of us. While loving the Lord with all our heart has to do with affection, loving the Lord with all our soul has to do with devotion.

The soul is the part of us that defines who we are. The essence of the biblical definition of the soul means life, personality, the inner self and our identity. It’s where we make our decisions and choices that ultimately decide our lifestyle and behavior. Think of the soul as the “core you.”

To love the Lord with all your soul means to love Him in the way we live, in the choices we make, and in the behavior and lifestyle we adopt. Its loving God with our personalities.

3. Love God with your mind
Loving God with your mind means having the mind of Christ.

In 1 Corinthians 2:14-16 it says this
“But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. 15 But he who is spiritual judges all things, yet he himself is rightly judged by no one. 16 For “who has known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct Him?”[a] But we have the mind of Christ.”

Having the mind of Christ means sharing the plans, purpose, and perspective of Christ!
Paul here is simply explaining that people who do not have the spirit of God cannot understand the spiritual things, but those who are walking in the spirit and are being led by the spirit can rightly discern the word of God. So that’s why its so important to love God with our minds! We cannot discern and dissect the word of God without loving God with our mind first. If we begin to try to dissect the word of God without first loving Him, we will be in error and can lead others astray because we are using our own intellect instead of being led by His spirit. You see the importance of loving God with our minds!
Romans 12:2 it says “And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God”.
Philippians 2:5 says “Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus.”

4. Love God with your strength
Our strength refers to our physical strength. When we turn our heart to the Lord, express Him in our soul, and set our mind on Him, our body will follow. We formerly used our strength to serve ourselves or the world, but as love for the Lord pervades all our inward parts, our outward actions will begin to change. Things that used to occupy our time and energy will give way because what we love has changed. We have a new aim, a new goal, a new pursuit. Our physical strength is now for His purpose.
We begin to outwardly express our love for Him. The way we speak about Him, the way we worship Him.
In more practical terms it means we are to love Him 100%. To go all-out. To give it your best shot. If we fall down, to pick ourselves back up and keep going forward. To love Him with all our might.

Loving Him with all our strength is to love with our resources, our abilities and our time. To fully love Him with what we find our hands to do, our eyes to see, our ears to hear, our feet to go, and our mouths to speak.
Do you know that’s one of the ways to show we love God? How we worship God in song, with our hands and voices. That’s a great opportunity to express outwardly how we love Him and appreciate Him.

2 Corinthians 12:9-10 New Living Translation (NLT)
9 Each time he said, “My grace is all you need. My power works best in weakness.” So now I am glad to boast about my weaknesses so that the power of Christ can work through me. 10 That’s why I take pleasure in my weaknesses, and in the insults, hardships, persecutions, and troubles that I suffer for Christ. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

Even in our times of physical weakness, we love Him. We continue going forward no matter what. Loving God with our strength is not giving up with things get hard but its continuing in this journey in spite of how we may feel.