HOW CAN I NOT LOVE & OBEY?

“Hear O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord.  You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.”

Deuteronomy 6: 4,5

The Christian life is not an easy walk.  It involves obedience, sacrifice, and suffering.  These elements can only be fulfilled out of love; there’s no other way these things make sense.  I can’t do anything right without the Source of love within me.  God is love and loves me.  When that is the focal point of my heart, mind, and soul, I must love Him in return.  Out of that love will flow obedience.  It will not be a duty; it will be a delight.  Sacrifice will be a willing service and suffering will be absorbed by the love.

God doesn’t demand love from me like a military commander demands loyalty from his troops.  It was three months before God revealed His plan to make the slaves of Egypt His treasured possession; three months before He revealed the covenant He would make with them that would require commandments, laws, and principles as a framework for that covenant.  Military methods include Boot Camp, where the will of the individual is beaten into submission by hard work so the loyalty will be to the Service of the Commanders.  These Israelites entered into the desert but rather than beat their wills into submission, God performed miraculous signs and provided for their every need.  He listened to their grumbling, complaining, and demands cared for them as they were making their transformation from slaves to free people; God’s treasured possession. 

Eventually God gathered them together in the wilderness of the Sinai and began to make His covenant with them as His people.  He reminds them of how He destroyed the Egyptians to free them, and then cared for them and brought them to Himself and was going to continue to care for them, making them a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.

All throughout the history of these people God continually has to bring to mind what He did for them and how they had made a covenant with them.  All throughout the history of these people they forgot what God did for them and continually used their freedom to do what they wanted to do.  It continues throughout history, right up to today, this forgetting and forsaking the love that God so graciously pours out on His people, His creation.

I am learning to appreciate the liturgical seasons in the Christian life.  Lent is a time to remember and reflect on Jesus’ life and death.  It causes me to remember how faithful God has been to me, in freeing me, providing for me, and being in a covenant relationship with me.  I cannot help but respond to that overwhelming love by being more loving and obedient to Him.

God is Love.  Love is defined in I Corinthians 13: 4-8. 

Jesus is the fulfillment of God’s Law.  The Law is defined in Psalm 19:7-11.

How can I help but love and obey?