“What God Loves Is Right to Love”: What We Love When We Love God (part 10)
REVIEW
What we love when we say we love, must include ourselves. We ourselves and our lives exist within the things we love about God—His heart, His world, His works, His ways. We are His own. And, as we looked at last week, what we love when we love God, is all that God loves. And that includes you, which is, whatever-all that you are.
The point to all these things, again, is that we can learn how to love our neighbors well, by learning how to love ourselves properly, within our love for God.
Last week we saw that one of the things God loves is us. And so, if we love God, we ought to love what God love for what God loves is part of God’s excellencies and glories, for which we love Him.
Let’s pause on this subject.
Paul prays for the Ephesian believers “to be strengthened with power through God’s Spirit in your inner being… to comprehend what is the breadth, length, height, and depth of the love of Christ.” (Eph 3:16-19 He prays over the Thessalonian church: “May the LORD direct your hearts to the love of God and to the steadfastness of Christ.” (2Thess 3:5) So we are in good company, and answering Spirit-inspired prayers, when we slow down and reflect further on God’s love for us.
How does God feel about you?
A lot of Christians wonder about precisely this point! Is God mad? Does He dislike me? Is He disappointed? Like, He had high hopes for us, but then here we are?
Let us correct this error with the plain statement of Scripture. What does the Bible say? Over and over and over again? God loves us. God loves you. God loves me. God loves them.
God loves us.
And not just “loves” us in some generic sense. Think about how Scripture describes God’s love. He is jealous for us. He wants us to be His own, to be His. He wants us to be with Him; He wants to be with us. He wants our eyes fixed on Him; He has fixed His attention on us. He wants us to be like Him, to learn from Him, to follow Him, to lean on Him, to rest in Him, to listen to Him and trust Him. He promises to carry us and care for us and hold us in His heart. He wants to bless us and to keep us.
This is not a generic love! This is not love like rain that falls on everyone, but love as a special, personal, thing, like those specific chocolates you get your friend or loved one.
When the Bible says things like, “The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases, His mercies never come to an end but they are new every morning…” It is not speaking about God as a gumball machine—like, there He is, always full of that stuff, if you need it. No, but His steadfast love to us never ceases to us. His mercies to us never come to an end to us but to us are new every morning we awaken.
God loves us. Not because He just loves things. And not because He just loves humans (the way every person sees small dogs and says, “Puppies!”). His steadfast love is a promise of personal love to each one of us who has receive Him.
APPROPRIATE
So now, having established that God actually loves the actual you, let us consider what it means that God loves something.
If God loves something, He loves it for good reason, right? God alone truly loves what ought to be truly loved. He does all things right, and this includes what He sets His affections on, what He loves.
So to love what God loves, is right. In fact, to love what God loves is one of the objects the Holy Spirit is working in us to accomplish. We must understand that it is appropriate to love, with God, what He loves.
And—here’s the kicker—one of the things God loves? You.
It may be that all this “You Must Love Thyself!” talk makes you uncomfortable. (I get it. This idea has been grossly abused in our culture.) But, properly understood, it’s entirely appropriate. What’s more, it’s right and good. What’s more, if we do not love what God loves as He loves it, our “loves” are out-of-whack—we are out of alignment with what is right.
Consider your “neighbor.” How do you feel about your “neighbor”? God says, “Love your neighbor.”
Why are we supposed to love our “neighbor”? We have all these great theological reasons—like, My “neighbor” is made in God’s image, God loves my “neighbor,” Jesus died to save my “neighbor,” God wants my “neighbor” to know Him better, God wants my “neighbor” to glorify God.
We’d say, “Yes, those are all right and good reasons for why I ought to love my neighbor--because of God’s work and for God’s glory. God clearly loves my neighbor, and so should I love my neighbor.”
But then, of course, each one of those is true of you and I as well. “Because of God’s work and for God’s glory, I can see God clearly loves me and so should I love me too in the way God does and for those reasons.” [Note: We will get to how to love ourselves and neighbors. Just not now.]
God loves you. What you are, He loves. And we who say we love God ought to love what He loves with Him. Which, interestingly enough, includes you.
Within our love for God, we can learn to love ourselves, truly, properly, appropriately. And only in this way will we learn how to love our neighbors, as Christ commands, “as ourselves.”
Prayer
Father God, “Worthy are You, our LORD and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for You created all things [included me and my life], and by Your will they existed and were created.” [Including me and my life.]
“The LORD is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. The LORD is good to all, and His mercy is over all that He has made. All Your works shall give thanks to You, O LORD, and all Your devoted people will praise You.”
Lord, when I squint my mind, I can see that Your grace, patience, love, goodness, mercy, are where I and my life have come from and what I and my life exist within. You have made me—all that that is; You have loved me—wholly and completely.
So I give You thanks, O LORD, with my whole being, and I will praise You.
Help me grow so that gratitude and praise fill my whole self, more and more. And where this is a mystery to me, or too hard just now, hold me tight and direct my heart to Your love, and to Christ. In His Name, Amen.
(Rev 4:11; Psa 145:8-10; 2Thes 3:5)
Photo by Nikhilesh Boppana on Unsplash