There is no question that our greatest obligation as human beings is to love God above everything else. Jesus could not have been clearer: “‘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” (Mt. 22:37–38). This is what life is all about.
The statement is not controversial. If someone asked us, “What is the most important commandment?” Many of us would know the answer. Love the Lord your God. Yet, how many of us have really put effort into loving God more?
The season of Lent is an invitation to consider whether we are pursuing the love of God as our greatest objective. It is an opportunity to consider what our hearts go after in place of God. It is an occasion for reflection on the idols of our hearts that impede the love of God.
There is not question that humans are often unwilling to pursue God. However, sometimes we don’t love God because we are not sure what that even means. Loving a human being means wanting to be with them, get to know them, and help them thrive. But because God is not physically with us, it can be hard to understand what this looks like.
What does loving God really look like? Let me suggest three ways:
- Making God our chief source of comfort, love, security, and meaning.
- Spending time with God and learning to walk with Him moment by moment.
- Taking an interest in the interests of God.
Here I want to focus on # 2: learning to live in God’s presence. It is there that we learn to rely on Him as our chief source of comfort, love, security, and meaning. It is there that we learn about His interests so they can become our interests. It is there we find pleasures at His right hand forevermore (Psalm 16:11).
But what does this really look like? Obviously, we cannot literally think about God all the time, or we would not be able to do anything else because we can only think of one thing at a time.
John Mark Comer in his excellent book Practicing the Way helps us get to the bottom of this question when he asks, “What do you return to in your quiet moments? Where do you go to find solace and joy? What would it look like for you to make your home inside God?” (39). When things quiet down, where does our heart go? What is the baseline of our lives?
Julie Lane-Gray describes her experience of doing this in her book The Riches of Your Grace, (a book describing her experience of The Book of Common Prayer. She says that for her, the Apostle’s Creed is her “homepage.” She says, “Instead of living in the domain of world powers, Instagram, and worries about my kids and the planet, saying the Creed situates me in God’s foundation and in His certain hope” (22). This is the idea, living moment by moment in awareness of the Triune God. That’s where love develops. It’s a homepage that we go back to as our starting point whenever we pull back from focus on other things.
Of course, this is a goal that is not realized fully in this life. It is an aspiration that we seek to live by God’s grace. However, it is an aspiration that we can and should pursue and can make progress in. As A.W. Tozer puts it, “At the heart of the Christian message is God Himself waiting for His redeemed children to push into conscious awareness of His Presence” (cited in Comer, Practicing the Way, 43).
I think this is what the Apostle Paul meant when he said, “pray continually” (1 Thess. 5:17). Loving God means lifting up our hearts to God. We can’t literally pray all the time, but we can make prayer our default setting.
How does this work out when we have a job and kids to take care of? It has been easier for me many times in my life because my career is ministry. You can do ministry and miss God, but, if used rightly, it can draw you closer to God.
Last year, I had a pause in my ministerial work. I worked other jobs. One of those was giving tours in the Smoky Mountains. Now, this was a good place to think upon the Lord as I saw the beauty of that place every day. I would think about my heavenly Father as the Creator of all that beauty. But the job demanded giving intense attention to our clients. So, what did I do? I had short breaks where the clients would walk around at the various stops along the way. I would use those to refocus my attention on the Lord by meditating on a Scripture passage and seeking the Lord. Those moments were precious and set my heart in the right place. It taught me how you can use tiny breaks to reset your heart to a default setting of walking before the Lord. It helped me to make God the baseline of my life in the midst of my work.
It’s certainly good and right for us to focus on other things besides God such as our work, family, or friends, but I always found that it was so pleasant to come back to meditation on God and His grace. The more I did it, the more I wanted to do it. This is what the Psalmist said, “Praise the Lord, for the Lord is good; sing praise to his name, for that is pleasant” (Ps. 135:4). And, again, “How good it is to sing praises to our God, how pleasant and fitting to praise him!” (Ps. 147:1). It is fitting, pleasant, and good to lift up our hearts to the Lord.
The philosopher Epictetus found this to be true as well. He wrote, “For if we had any sense, what should we do, both in public and in private, than sing hymns and praise the deity, and recount all the favours he has conferred!” (Discourses, 1.6). This is the true destiny of the human, and it is a good and beautiful one. It is what we were made for.
For the Christian, we have all the more reason to do this because we not only know God as Creator but as Redeemer. As we think about God, we may fear that we cannot walk with Him because of our sin. Then, we remember the good news: “But if anybody does sin, we have an advocate with the Father—Jesus Christ, the Righteous One. He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world” (1 Jn. 2:1–2). We are forgiven and accepted because of the sacrifice of Jesus. We have nothing to fear from Him and every reason to love Him.
So, how are you doing at loving the Lord? Are you walking with Him moment by moment? What would keep you from pursuing this? What is the baseline of your life? Is it the Lord, or something else? Why would you want a different baseline than Him? These are questions that are worth considering in this Lenten season. That’s one reason it can be good to give up some good things that we normally rely on. It gives us an opportunity to see our hearts and learn to let go of things that we should let go of so that we can embrace what is the best thing for us—loving God.