“And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment.” {Mark 12:30}
“Wherefore the Lord said, Forasmuch as this people draw near me with their mouth, and with their lips do honour me, but have removed their heart far from me, and their fear toward me is taught by the precept of men.” {Isaiah 29:13}
Loving God with all of our hearts means getting our emotions involved. You can’t love someone if you don’t feel something for them. We love because we feel it. It’s hard to please God or love Him without feeling it. He is an emotional God. He wants to feel what we’re saying and what we’re doing for Him. If we love Him only because we know what we are taught growing up in church, of what is right and wrong, and we have no connection to God at all emotionally we’re going to fail in loving Him. Sooner or later we’re going to backslide. How many marriages and relationships out there fail because one way or another the other person “fell out” of love? They’ll tell you, “I just don’t feel it anymore…I feel dead…I have no feelings for him (or her) anymore.” Try as you might you can’t drum up that feeling up to love that person and you want to walk away.
When our feelings aren’t involved with that person anymore, we don’t want to be a part of that intimate relationship. Even with friends, when we stop caring for a person because they’ve turned us off or they’ve hurt us so badly, we want to stop hanging out with that friend. Even if they shower us with gifts or they do other stuff for us, if we don’t like them anymore and we don’t feel the love we used to feel for them, that’s it, we’re through. We don’t want to be with them anymore. We want out.
With God, He is looking for the same thing. We can’t serve and love God just based on intellect or our knowledge of Him that has been taught us through the Bible. He wants us to actually truly feel Him. He wants us to love Him with all of our hearts. That means, with all of our emotions. And if you don’t feel that at all – you are not “in love” with God, then it’s time to be honest with Him. You’ve got to tell Him that. You’ve got to do it. You’ve got to tell Him that you’re not in love with Him as you should be, that your heart is far away from Him, and that you just don’t feel Him. It’s time to be honest with Him about what we’re feeling because we have to love Him with all of our hearts, our soul, and our minds. If we don’t, we’re lying to Him when we come and talk to Him and even worship and praise Him, when our hearts are dead to Him. We can’t love Him just based on our knowledge of Him alone. He’s an emotional God and He wants to feel our love for Him. Whatever we feel, He feels too because He’s an all powerful, all knowing God. He not only knows our feelings for Him, He can feel it too.
We can’t love Him just because it’s the right thing to do. It’s a good start. But we must also learn to love Him with all of our hearts and soul. That means we have to feel it. We have to come to Him with our emotions all transferred to Him in love and adoration of Him.
When someone is a God of Love it means all He is – is love. It means emotions come with it – gazillions of them. That’s why He was able to go through what He went through for us, to be a human being. A baby first, then a young son, then finally a man. Then dying for us. That takes a lot of love to be a “nobody” when you’re the King of the Universe, and be abused by mere humans like us and be crucified at the cross. God loves us so much. That love is not just based on intellect. That love is based on a lot of emotions. God is a very emotional God. He loves with all of His heart and soul and His whole being. And that’s what He’s looking for from us. He wants us to love Him with everything that we are, body, mind, soul, and spirit – with our whole being feeling after Him and being so in love with Him.
How would you like to be in a relationship with your heart not into it? Like I mentioned before it’s not going to be possible. Unless you bring your emotions back to it and your feelings back to that relationship, it’s not possible to continue in that relationship. The other way is also true, you don’t want to be with someone who doesn’t feel in love with you either. It’s miserable to be in a relationship where a person you care and love for doesn’t feel the same way for you. It’s terrible. That hurts. You’re going to end up wanting to get out.
God has made us in His image. We are who we are because God made us that way, the way He is emotionally and intellectually. Who we are is who God is. God is very simple like us. It’s us who makes Him complicated. If we are made in His image it means God is like us. As much as we wouldn’t want to be in a dead relationship, where the person doesn’t feel the same way we feel, and love us as passionately as we love them, God doesn’t want that either.
That’s why He said what He said in Isaiah 29:13 regarding His people that were called by Him, but have backslid in their hearts away from Him. He said, “Forasmuch as this people draw near me with their mouth, and with their lips do honour me, but have removed their heart far from me, and their fear toward me is taught by the precept of men.” Basically, He’s saying, “They might love Me with their mouths…they might come to church and sing their songs to Me and listen to My word, but in truth their minds are somewhere else…in truth their hearts are far from Me. They do not really love Me. They only do these things they do because they were taught to do this, but in truth they don’t really care for who I am. They do not know Me and do not love Me. Their hearts are far from Me.”
God wants our heart and soul to belong to Him. He doesn’t want us to be in a dead relationship with Him. If you feel that way about Him it’s time to start confessing and coming to Him with all your heart. Don’t worry, it’s okay to be this honest with God because that will actually please Him rather than continue to pretend that we love Him. He wants us to be honest with Him because then we can let Him in and give Him the power to help us love Him. Loving God is not always easy because it takes faith. So many of us can’t love someone we can’t see or feel. That’s why so many long distance relationships don’t last, because if that relationship is not nurtured with fellowship and touch it will die. So God understands completely that we need help in loving Him. We need His help in loving Him.
Fortunately for us God is more than willing to help us feel after Him and feel in love with Him. More than anything He wants us to be so in love with Him, so He’s going to help us! All we need to do is ask Him. Tell Him exactly what we want for Him to do for us. Be brutally honest with Him about how we feel about Him. Tell Him, “Jesus, I want to be in love with you. Please help me to be in love with you. I want to feel you, I want to touch you with my feelings and my emotions, I want you Jesus to belong to my heart and soul and feel you through and through. Will you please help me?” And He will. If you are honest with Him with your feelings about Him He will help you. The Bible states that He hasn’t come to condemn us but to save us. He wants to work out His relationship with us because He loves us so much and wants to have a true relationship with us.
But we have to talk to Him about it. We can’t have a relationship with Him if we’re not talking to Him. I mean, can you have a relationship with someone if you don’t talk to that person? You can’t really. If a marriage is dead it’s because the couple doesn’t talk to one another. If all you do in a marriage is take care of the house things and immediate things that comes up in day to day living, and you don’t talk to your spouse when something else is eating you up or you don’t work your misunderstandings out by talking about it, forget it, you will soon not have a marriage. You will soon become discontent. You wouldn’t want to be in that relationship anymore. Likewise, with God, He is looking for a true relationship with us where we talk things out with Him, whatever is eating us up or whatever we’re going through in our lives. He wants us to fully belong to Him and be a part of Him. He doesn’t want us withholding anything from Him. He wants us to be true and honest with Him. So we need to tell Him what kind of relationship we want with Him. Tell Him everything you desire that you would like to have with Him. Don’t settle for less. Don’t be afraid to tell Him you want to feel in love with Him because more than anything that’s what He wants too.
Loving God with all of our hearts and our soul means we love Him with all of our emotions and our feelings. It means we come and worship Him with our thoughts, our minds, our imaginations, our feelings fired up for Him. We don’t come and worship with just our lips. We come with all of our being – our emotions – poured out to Him. We come with all our heart and soul withholding nothing.
“I will bless the Lord at all times: his praise shall continually be in my mouth. My soul shall make her boast in the Lord: the humble shall hear thereof, and be glad.” {Psalm 34:1-2}
“And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart.” {Jeremiah 29:13}
“Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.” {Matthew 16:25}
“But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth: for the Father seeketh such to worship him.” {John 4:23}
