Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment.

Matthew 22:37-38

I had been a Christian about three years when I became terribly convicted about one particular thing: I did not love God.

I was grateful to Him, so very thankful for my salvation and the positive changes in my life because of Jesus Christ. But I kept stumbling over what Jesus said to the teacher who asked Him to name the greatest commandment of all.

I later learned that many Christians struggle with loving God, much less keeping the Ten Commandments and being “a good Christian.”

The idea of loving God with the whole heart, soul and mind seems beyond reach for many.

Especially with an invisible God. After all, we struggle to do this with people we can see and touch!

This commandment speaks of a love for God that possesses and motivates your whole being. This is the kind of true passion and devotion you don’t just talk yourself into. The kind of love can’t be faked.

So how does this kind of wholehearted love come?

Normally it comes only one way: by getting to know someone who touches your soul so deeply that genuine love is awakened and gradually fills up your whole heart. Devotion just naturally follows, as your life — your thoughts, choices and values — becomes a reflex of that consuming love.

Again, normally we would say you cannot love someone you do not know.

However, where God is concerned, the process is reversed. The faith by which we live demands that we first make the choice to love Him. Once we do that — by obeying His commands — the Lord shows Himself to us. This begins the process of getting to know Him. Jesus affirmed this when he said in John 14:

Whoever has my commands and keeps them is the one who loves me. The one who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love them and show myself to them.

Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching. My Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them. Anyone who does not love me will not obey my teaching.

John 14:21, 23-24

Here is a saying for your refrigerator:

Like many of you, I didn’t know that at first.

The story of how the Spirit helped me make the journey from love (through obedience) to knowing God is told in my book, Rooted & Established In Love, but here is the bullet point version:

• In obedience to the command, I decided to love God with all my being.
• Having to face my inability to love God like that, I cried out for help. God’s answer was to send the Holy Spirit to walk with me daily.
• Once He moved in, the Spirit took the smoldering coal of my desire to love God, and blew it into a flame.
• The Spirit filled me daily with fresh faith and strength to live by the goal of loving God; and gave me insight in the moment as to what that would look like.
• The Spirit showed me the pattern in John Chapter 14: the more I obeyed the Lord, the more He made Himself at home and revealed Himself to me. The more I got to know God, the more I loved him.

The choice to love turned into genuine, all-encompassing love.

The best thing I ever did was confess my struggle to love Him, and cry out for help to obey His greatest commandment.

He answered my prayer, and still answers it every day.

Though I remain an imperfect Christian, I do love my Lord now. I need His presence in my life, and can’t imagine life without Him. I know God now in ways I would have never known Him otherwise. While that “knowing” is probably only a small percent of what is possible, it is enough for Him to captivate my heart and make devotion to Him the normal reflex of my being.

And here’s the pinnacle point:

My struggle to love God sent me on a quest, and I’m so very glad it did! Because through it I learned the most important lesson of my Christian life: that living by the motive to love God with all one’s heart is the key to the greatest rewards of being God’s covenant child.

In fact, loving God with all my being turned out to be the best gift I have ever given myself.

It makes me grin to think that, by His command, Jesus kind of tricked me into choosing the only path that could have led to the abundant life He promised. Kind of like a bait and switch, only the best kind!

Loving God is the gift that keeps on giving.

Loving God does so much more for us than it could possibly do for Him.