How do you love God?
- Thread starter Tharseo
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yeshuaslavejeff
simple truth, martyr, disciple of Yahshua
OR Light. Exposing darkness. One little candle by itself can light up a dark room.
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yeshuaslavejeff
simple truth, martyr, disciple of Yahshua
If you told the truth then, in any previous post, re-post it - you don't seem to want the truth to be told. We can examine "the truth" and test it, to see if it is true in line with Scripture.
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aiki
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Can you provide a verse that actually says this? I know of many verses that indicate that our love for others and our obedience to God arise from a love for Him, but can't recall any verse that says what you have here, that the consequence of our love for God (obedience) is also somehow the motivation for it.
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aiki
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Hey, you're the one who insinuated a false teaching on my part. It's on you, then, to show that I actually did espouse a falsehood, which, so far, you have not. Instead, you've tried to cast a shadow on my comments by taking entirely out of context one line from what I wrote.
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aiki
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Right back at you.
My posts speak for themselves. I don't write what I believe to be false. Obviously.
I've not paid particular attention to your posts, either. Mainly because they offer little of spiritual use to people and conflict sometimes very seriously with what God has said in His word.
As I already said, you insinuated error on my part in an earlier post in this thread but gave no plain justification as to why it was in error. Usually, when a person does this, when they pot-shot a post without justifiying their criticism of it, it is because they know they can't argue successfully for their - in this case, out-of-context - insinuation.
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LightLoveHope
Jesus leads us to life
There is a real truth here. I think the answer is actually simple. How open are peoples hearts? Are they cleansed, purified, renewed or just trying to balance the books with good deeds balancing out the bad deeds?
It is easy to be a believer, go to church and hold Jesus as a spiritual equation, resolving sin, so we are heaven bound. It is much harder to ask, how to I love those around me, how do I forgive my parents, my family, my church. And if one does not ask or is even aware that no one around really knows you, there is a problem.
I have met many who deny Jesus came to purify us, to make us born again, renewed, to be remade, to become like children and learn how to relate, care, and really love others.
Is this what you are referring to? I love the song, "You are the air that I breath"
Jesus is all in all, the lover of my soul, my Saviour and my Lord.
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aiki
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There is no argument if you can show from Scripture that love of God and obedience to Him are one-and-the-same thing. I'm not trying to pick on you or stir up needless strife on this thread, but I am concerned when the result or consequence of love is confused with love itself. Love for God gives rise to obedience to Him - or it should. But obedience is no more love itself than the heat the sun gives off is the sun itself. And so, in Scripture I read things like,
John 14:15
15 "If you love Me, you will keep My commandments."
"If" is a used as a noun here, representing a condition of love for God. In other words, what the apostle John is saying here is that, when one's condition is that one loves God, the result is that one keeps His commandments. But this means that keeping God's commands and loving Him are not one-and-the-same thing. They are directly related, yes, but not identical. Love is the condition from which one obeys God. Why is this worth fussing about? Because if one thinks obedience to God is tantamount to having a love for Him, which it isn't, one may go all their life thinking they have obeyed the First and Great Commandment when they have not. And a life of obedience that has never arisen from a condition of love for God is, as Paul explained in 1 Corinthians 13:1-3 spiritually useless.
John 14:23
23 Jesus answered and said to him, " If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him, and make Our abode with him.
Same thing here. John repeats again that it is as a result of loving God that one keeps His word.
1 John 5:2
2 By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and observe His commandments.
Here, too, John distinguishes love of God from observing, or obeying, His commandments. John does not make the mistake of thinking that obedience and love are synonymous. Many Christians, though, having no desire, no passion, no heart for God, try to make up for this lack by trying to conflate obedience to God with a love for Him. They know deep down that they have no strong desire for God, no deep hunger to fellowship with Him, but recognize that they can't really call themselves Christian if they don't love Him. And so, they twist love of God to mean obedience to Him because it is possible to manufacture outward obedience to God even when their hearts are flat and grey toward Him. But the end result of this sort of living is to stand before Christ one day and hear him say, "Depart from me. I never knew you." It is from a heart of love for God that all of the Christian life is to emanate which is why the First and Great Commandment is to love God with all of one's being, not go to church, or pray, or tithe, or teach Sunday School. To get this wrong, to think obedience by itself makes up for, or can stand in for, a lack of genuine desire, a deep passion, for God, is to risk one's eternal destiny. And so, I fuss about this matter.
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aiki
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God brought me to the place where I saw that all of my obedience to His commands was not out of love for Him, out of a deep passion to know and walk with Him, but out of fidelity to a belief system. What was worse, I knew I couldn't force myself to love Him. Love, after all, is not love if it is coerced. But how was I going to change my heart in this regard? Surely, if mere knowledge of God's love was the key to loving Him, I should have been a great lover of God. But I wasn't. What was wrong? Was I even saved? I wondered seriously if I was. Eventually, God helped me to understand that the love He wanted from me He had to first give to me. My human love was too selfish, too contingent, too compromised by sin, to be of any interest to Him. No, God wants His perfect, holy, faithful agape love from me, not my own human love. And so, I began to pray and ask God to give His love to me, to make me a lover of Him. Being a kind Heavenly Father, He showed me that He had already answered my prayer when I was born-again by the Holy Spirit. In the Spirit, I had received from God His perfect, holy, faithful love. I had only to yield to the Spirit manifesting his love in me for my prayer to be answered.
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You never actually said whether or not you do love Him.
Nor have you proven that He acknowledges the difference you think you see.
Or that it makes a difference.
I would argue that understanding and doing God's perfoect will (see Romans 12) requires loving him and that the clauses of John 14:15 are reflexive: If you must love Him to obey His commands, and if you obey His commands, them you love Him.
If you have convinced yourself otherwise, that's your personal problem, because it's not supported by scripture that obedience is separate from love.
Nor is there any operational difference.
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aiki
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Yes, I do. Very much. And more and more as the days pass.
Proven? To who? You? And what difference, exactly?
Well, clearly, I disagree.
I didn't say obedience was separate from love. In fact, I've said in this thread that they are directly related. But obedience and love are not identical things and the latter gives rise to the former. Also, I gave scriptural reasoning for my views. If you don't accept them, so be it. But, so far, you've offered nothing that defeats my views.
Again, I disagree. See my earlier posts in this thread.
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I don't find my case similar to this. It is true that I was not loving God at that time, but I do constantly experience the love of God. He works wonders in me and gives me what I asked for, whether I asked for the fruit of the Spirit or I asked God to help people I loved. The love of God is very clear to me, and it drives me to ask for more of it, and it drives me to love others. I do love others because God loves me.
The problem is, I was "using" the love of God for my own desire, even if my desires are some spiritual things. When I prayed for the benefit of others, it is me who want to love. I will still call this love, because it actually helped me to understand what is the meaning to love God. If I have never loved others like how I described, I would never come close to understand what "love" actually means. Sure I have read 1 Corinthians 13 at that time, but they were words to me and I really did not understand until I love other people.
Thank you. Now I understand what happened to the Church in Ephesus. They have did a lot of things right, but did so without loving God.
I don't consider my case a complete failure, however, nor the church in Ephesus. Jesus still praises the church of their good things they have, and is certainly not in vain. But when the time comes, they will have to realize that what they did is wrong. Maybe God wants to teach us these things one step at a time, I don't know.
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See, it is so easy to get into theological debates.
But I think my own experience said it all, at least to me alone. No theology can even come close to give me my undestanding I have now. Theology is just a bunch of theories that you can never prove without seeing it in reality.
I think scientists are so much more wiser than Christians, because they prove their theories with experiments. And all scientists know that experiments are more important than theories.
I encourage you all to go ahead and apply the knowledge of what you have right now, and you will see whether your love to God results in ths same thing as what the Bible described.
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I do not say that the following things applies to you two, but I am using them as examples to explain a common phenomenon among Christians.
They are what I call jargons, which really didn't say anything. Lawyers provide definitions to each term they use, but unfortunately Christians don't have the same mindset.
For example, what do you mean "love consistently"? Should I serve God without going to sleep? Or should I keep it as a feeling in my heart all day? What do you mean "love unexpectedly"? Should I love a person without expecting he/she is to be helped? Should I expect nothing from God, and so should I not pray?
How do we keep his cammandments? Should I keep it like the Pharisees? Or should I keep it in my "heart", that my actions don't really matter?
Jargons really kill people, because people think they understand when they are able to spell it out, but in reality, they don't understand the true meaning of them.
Again, I am not saying you do not understand it. Maybe you did not write your understanding down here. But I hope you do understand how they should be applied in real life.
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I didn't say "consistently and unexpectedly."
I said "consistently unexpectedly."
We should love those who we are unexpected to love, and we should do that not on rare occasions, but as a matter of commonality.
Christ told us who to love, which includes loving God--who by our nature is also difficult to love or obey.
It's a matter of merely following instructions.
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"wiser" means their attitute towards theories is better, and "scientists" means true scientists who think scientifically. Sometimes there is no need to get into too much details into a parable I made.
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