THE LOVING LORD: NOT EASY IN TODAY’S WORLD

“…If a man love me, he will keep my words; and my Father will love him, and we will come to him….” (JOHN 14:23).

The gravest question any of us face is whether we do or do not love the Lord!

 

Too much hinges on the answer to pass the matter off lightly, and it is a question that no one can answer for another. Not even the Bible can tell the individual man that he loves the Lord; it can only tell him how he can know whether or not he does. It can and does tell us how to test our hearts for love as a man might test ore for the presence of uranium, but we must do the testing.

 

If we lived in a spiritual Utopia where every wind blew toward heaven and every man was a friend of God, we Christians could take everything for granted, counting on the new life within us to cause us to do the will of God without effort and more or less unconsciously. Unfortunately, we have opposing us the lusts of the flesh, the attraction of the world and the temptations of the devil. These complicate our lives and require us often to make determined moral decisions on the side of Christ and His commandments.

 

When with honesty and serious minds we ask ourselves, “Do I love the Lord, or no?”, there will likely be any number of personal workers standing by to quote convenient texts to prove that we do.

 

But our Lord told His disciples that love, and obedience were organically united, that the keeping of His sayings would prove that we love Him. This is the true test of love, and we will be wise to face up to it!

W. Tozer