When Jesus was asked, “Master, which is the great commandment in the law?” (Matt. 22:36), He said “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.” He went on to add that the “second” is to love others as ourselves (verses 37-39).
The “first and great commandment” is probably among the best-known and least-practiced of our Lord’s commands. God did not leave it up to us to decide how to “love” Him. He defines for us what genuine love for Him is.
1 John 5:3 says “For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments: and His commandments are not grievous.” The verse before says “by this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God, and keep His commandments.” In John 14:15, Jesus said “If ye love me, keep my commandments.”
In other words, the love God demands from us involves surrendering our will to His, so that His instruction becomes the guide of our lives. It involves shaping our lives around what pleases Him rather than what pleases self. It demands change, sacrifice, and hard work.
The apostle Paul expressed true love for God in Galatians 2:20, when he said, “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me.”
This is much more demanding than the superficial view of loving God that is more about “serving” Him however we’d like.
Yet, it is the only appropriate way to respond to what He has done for us. When we consider the great “mercies of God,” how can we respond any other way but to present our “bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God” (Rom. 12:1)?
Surrendering wholeheartedly to Him will never “earn” the salvation He offers by His grace. But such wholehearted surrender is the reasonable way to answer the Gospel message, which centers on the love God has shown us by sending His Son to die (Rom. 5:8). We must give our lives to the One who gave His life for us (cf. 2 Cor. 5:15). This is what love for God is all about. Understanding this sheds much light on why our Lord said, “This is the first and great commandment.”
– Michael Hickox