Tag Archives: love

How’s your love life??

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Questions are everywhere. Online surveys abound, not to mention all those questionnaires circulated by your friends to get to know you better. (Has one of them has recently asked you, “How’s your love life?”). Perhaps the greatest, the most important question asked, raises that very issue. It put to Jesus and recorded in the New Testament, in MATTHEW 22:37 — 

36 “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?”

I call this the greatest question because of the answer Jesus gave — asserting that this one thing is the greatest duty laid upon human beings:

37 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. 38 This is the great and first commandment.”

heart-sketch-web1The greatest commandment is to love God. Do you love Him? Do you see how Jesus was concerned that we love God with more than a passing affection — and with more than mere feelings? Every faculty of a person (heart, soul, mind) is summoned to love the Lord your God. And this is to be without reserve, without limit (“all your heart, all your soul and with all your mind…”).

Examine your heart, my friend. This is no small thing to gloss over or ignore. It is the very reason you were created — to know and love the Lord your God (and then, love others in His name).

Get time with God — in His Word, the Bible, and on your knees in prayer. Gather with others who love Him dearly. I pray for you what Paul prayed (Eph. 3:17-19),

…that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith — that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

pdb

Why does God love us?

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Thanks to my friend Tony for spotting this quote for us (and for the fine illustration):

In a sermon on John 3:16 (“God so loved, that he gave…”), Puritan Thomas Manton makes the following point on God’s indescribable love towards sinners in sending His Son:

“Love is at the bottom of all. We may give a reason of other things, but we cannot give a reason of his love, God showed his wisdom, power, justice, and holiness in our redemption by Christ. If you ask, Why he made so much ado about a worthless creature, raised out of the dust of the ground at first, and had now disordered himself, and could be of no use to him? We have an answer at hand, Because he loved us. If you continue to ask, But why did he love us? We have no other answer but because he loved us; for beyond the first rise of things we cannot go.

And the same reason is given by Moses, Deuteronomy 7:7-8: ‘The Lord did not set his love upon you, nor choose you, because you were more in number than any people, for ye were the fewest of all people; but because the Lord loved you…’ That is, in short, he loved you because he loved you. All came from his free and undeserved mercy; higher we cannot go in seeking after the causes of what is done for our salvation.”

humbled by the truth,
pdb