“And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart.” {Jeremiah 29:13}
Loving God is easy. We make it complicated. We think we have to follow every rule that’s in the Bible, proselyte people to Jesus Christ and go to mission fields, and attend every church service every time the door is open. We’ve come up with all these rules of do’s and don’ts of how to love God that at the end of the day, we can’t even meet up with all the expectations of what we think God wants from us. We end up never ever pleasing God and we are always coming short.
Let’s analyze and look at the very important commandment in the Bible: Loving God. According to Jesus Christ this is the greatest of all the commandments. There was a lawyer that came up to him one day and asked him, “Master, which is the great commandment in the law?” Then the Lord tells him, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment.” {Matthew 22:36-39} I don’t know about you, but it seems to me God has made loving him very easy. Right there he said, we love him with all of our heart, soul, and mind. We don’t even need to start anywhere else but with ourselves. We don’t even need to exert too much effort or go outside of ourselves, but simply use what he has already given to us. Since he made us and breathed life into us, we don’t need to go outside of what is plain and natural for us to do. Simply use what was already given to us by God – our heart, our mind, our soul. We think we need to go climb Mount Whatever to feel God or navigate fjords or cross rivers and oceans to find God and do great feats for him to show him that we love him. Right here it shows that we don’t need to do such things at all. He says basically use your heart, your mind, and your soul to love him. It’s that simple.
This is what the Lord has been showing to me all these years of my talking to him. I can love him just where I am if I just begin to talk to him with all my heart and soul and mind. I don’t need to try to do anything else to please him but just talk to him and love him like this. He is not asking for anything more beyond this. Anything else would be by my own effort and if I try to please him with my own effort it would be called doing my own righteousness. As I have mentioned before in my other posts doing our own righteousness will just make us feel self-righteous. This is actually a sin when we love God outside of him, meaning, without his help. It has to be his way. How would you like to be loved outside your own definition of love? Some people don’t feel loved at all no matter how much stuff you do for them. My husband for example could care less if I do the housework left and right and have the house clean and immaculate, but ignore him when he comes home at the end of the day because I’m too busy for him. He has told me, he does not feel loved that way. I feel the same way. He can work and do overtime all he likes and bring in a lot of money, but at the end of the day when he’s still not home and I still haven’t seen him, I don’t feel loved one least bit at all. I want him there, right there with me, talking to me, loving me and telling me he loves me. The same way with the Lord, he wants us to acknowledge him, to talk to him, to tell him how much he means to us, to let him know we love him. We are made in his image remember? He is not very different from us. The way we feel loved is the way he feels loved.
That’s why when I come to him and sing my songs to him with my guitar and sing to him with all of my heart and soul I end up weeping because he responds to this with such gratefulness that he fills my soul through and through with his love. I feel his love so much I can’t contain it, I end up weeping.
That’s what the Lord has been showing me all these years. He is a God of love. That means He needs love. He wants to feel loved. In a nutshell he is an emotional God. He wants what we have. He wants what we can give him with our hearts. Don’t keep all that love to yourself or to your friend or to your children and spouse, give God love too.
Do you know that when I’ve “loved him” through my singing and praise of him, telling him how wonderful he is and how much he means to me, that at the end of my communion with him, he thanks me? Yes, I hear him in my spirit tells me, “Thank you, Chin.” (Chin-Chin is my pet name given to me by my parents when I was a little girl.)
God doesn’t need a body to feel loved. We feel loved when someone holds our hands and gives us a hug. But the Lord feels loved through words – that is his love language. Words have emotions behind them. He created the world just by words coming out of his mouth. He can create anything by just speaking it. So words to him are a powerful thing. We can either make him feel loved or unloved through our words or lack thereof. See, we don’t need to go anywhere else or do anything else to make him feel loved. We make him feel loved just by us saying, “I love you, Jesus. I really appreciate you for being in my life. Thank you so much for you in my life. I love you.” The same way we can feel loved when someone tells us they love us, it’s the same way with the Lord. Use words to him. Talk to him. Don’t let him feel unloved by going through the day without acknowledging him at all with a word or two. How would you feel like if someone you love does not talk to you? It’s not even possible. How can they tell you they love you and not talk to you? That’s crazy. How would you feel like if you went to visit a friend and they don’t talk to you? You won’t feel loved would you? That’s the way with the Lord too. The Bible states that the heaven is his throne and the earth is his footstool. The way I see it is, we are all visitors in his living room, and we sure go here and there a plenty in his place. We owe him some chat. We ought to talk to him at least once in a while and acknowledge him. He is always there waiting to be acknowledged, all we have to do is say hello.
This has been my experience with him, talk to him, that’s how he feels loved. When you make him feel loved you can ask him for anything and he will give it to you. As a matter of fact the more you talk to him the more you will make him feel loved. In my experience, when he’s felt loved by me I can practically ask anything in this life and he gives it to me. I mean I have asked for people’s healing, deliverance, salvation, and solutions to my problems and he has given them all to me. But when you talk to him come to him with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. It means we don’t hide anything from him. We talk to him with all that is within us. Everything else we have to do to please him, leave it to him. Talk to him about it. If you’re struggling with some kind of addiction in your life that you can’t overcome, talk to him about it. He actually feels loved when we come to the Lord and tell him our burdens and our desires because it shows him that we trust him enough to solve our problems. You know, he loves us so much. He’s obsessed with us. He wouldn’t have died at the cross and given his life for us if he wasn’t. We are everything to him. The Bible states we are his passion. Giving his life for us was his number one mission in coming to this earth so that he can set us free from the bondage of sin and the power of Satan. In short, there is nothing he will not do for us.
When we come to the Lord first for anything that we face and struggle with in our lives, that is worship to him – that is showing him love. That is the kind of love he is looking for from us, going to him first for everything that we can ever need. We talk to him. We share with him everything that we are.
That is kind of like if your children come to you to ask you to help them, don’t you feel loved? You don’t feel like you want them to go away do you, not if you love them? Well, that’s how the Lord feels like when as soon as something is bothering us we go to him – we talk to him – we use words to let him know we want his help. This makes him feel loved.
So next time you feel like you don’t love God enough or you’re failing him, just talk to him about it. The second you are talking to the Lord and the second you are sharing with him who you are and what you are going through, in that second you are making him feel loved. You are now fulfilling his first and greatest commandment to love him with all of your heart, soul, and mind when you talk to him with everything that you are.
“For You do not delight in sacrifice, otherwise I would give it; You are not pleased with burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; A broken and a contrite heart, O God, You will not despise.” {Psalm 51:16}
“Through Jesus, therefore, let us continually offer to God a sacrifice of praise, the fruit of lips that confess His name.” {Hebrews 13:5}
“Take with you words, and turn to the LORD: say unto him, Take away all iniquity, and receive us graciously: so will we render the calves of our lips.” {Hosea 14:2}
“Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee: because he trusteth in thee.” {Isaiah 26:3}
