Hi owenw,
I agree with you about what you've said that true faith is. It isn't the concept of having read the Scriptures and believing that you know all about this great and loving God that is portrayed within its pages. Satan knows more about God's reality than you or I or any christian probably will, this side of eternity.
On another thread the other day someone posted for me a youtube video of an 'ex-christian' giving his new testimony that there is no God. That he had been duped all of his young life and finally come to 'know' the truth. That it was all just a mind game that we play with ourselves. He spoke of how he had read the Scriptures through several times and been a youth minister and so on and so on. He seems to have been pushed into his choice as a young child by his parents. Claims to have been 'saved' at the age of five, which personally, I find near impossible.
However, throughout all of his hour and a half video, he never mentions that he loved God. He apparently had all this head knowledge and knew all the right answers to give to the questions the youth would ask him about who God is, but he himself, never loved God. So, while the Scriptures speak a lot about faith and tell us that it is a requirement to even know God, what Jesus says is the first law of working out that faith is to love the Lord your God with all that you are. It's the very first, and I believe therefore, the most important law. I believe that the second law of loving others will just naturally flow from the heart that obeys the first. Jesus himself said that by keeping the two we would keep all the laws of the law and the prophets.
Love the Lord your God. Love is a responsibility. However, we live in a world that doesn't really understand, for the most of us, what love is or how to live it out. First of all, love is for people. I cringe when I hear people say that they love chocolate ice cream. You can't love a thing. You can like it and you can enjoy it and you can desire it, but you can't love it. Love is more than just an affection. It is an obligation and a responsibility to and for someone else. It is caring about what someone else cares about. It is a commitment. God is love.
The man in the video displayed none of that. He has actually turned against the one that he may have thought that he loved in years past. He has made himself the enemy of the object of his 'claimed' love. That's not love. That's part of the problem with our current modern understanding of love. We believe that love comes and goes. I can love someone today, but not tomorrow. That's not love. Love is a commitment. A responsibility for another's happiness and well being. It's why the Scriptures tell us that the only way to end the vow of marriage is through death. Because if you said that you loved someone to marry them, then if they're still alive, you still love them, if you really loved them at all. But today, our idea of marriage commitment is that the two will be one so long as you make me happy and satisfied. When I don't feel you love me anymore, then I withdraw my offer.
God bless you,
In Christ, ted
