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. Continue reading “Loving God the Most: Making God the Baseline of Our Lives”