Jesus replied: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind." This is the first and greatest commandment.
-Matthew 22:37 (NIV)
Can we be commanded to love God? It would seem that being commanded to love is like being forced to love. We all know from human experience that true love can't be coerced. So why does God command us to love him with our whole being? Shouldn't love be freely given and not demanded?
The reality is that in our natural state we would choose not to love God. Even if He were to suddenly appear before us we still wouldn't love him. In Romans 1:18-32, Paul says that God has made himself known plainly to man ever since the creation of the world. Man considered God and judged that God is unworthy to be loved.
We do this in two ways :
1. We do not honor God as God nor worship Him. (Romans 1:21)
2. We exchanged the truth for the lie and worshipped the glory of the creation over the the glory of the Creator (Romans 1:25). We would rather love the world, ourselves, or a god of our own making.
So we have to recognize that this command reveals that human nature is fallen. We cannot just decide one day to flip an inner switch and start loving God. We don't have that capacity in our natural state.
The thing is God knows this. We can never obey this command unless our nature is radically transformed. The apostle John said that everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God and conversely, whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love (1 John 4:7-8). The work that God makes in the new life that is received through faith in Jesus Christ makes it possible for us to love God (and also love others) with all our our heart, soul, and mind.
How?
We do this in two ways :
1. We do not honor God as God nor worship Him. (Romans 1:21)
2. We exchanged the truth for the lie and worshipped the glory of the creation over the the glory of the Creator (Romans 1:25). We would rather love the world, ourselves, or a god of our own making.
So we have to recognize that this command reveals that human nature is fallen. We cannot just decide one day to flip an inner switch and start loving God. We don't have that capacity in our natural state.
The thing is God knows this. We can never obey this command unless our nature is radically transformed. The apostle John said that everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God and conversely, whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love (1 John 4:7-8). The work that God makes in the new life that is received through faith in Jesus Christ makes it possible for us to love God (and also love others) with all our our heart, soul, and mind.
How?
John Piper explains,
"The most immediate and decisive work of God in the new birth is that the new life he creates sees the superior value of Jesus over all else (2 Corinthians 4:4-6). And with no lapse of time at all, this spiritual sight of the superior value of Jesus results in receiving Jesus as the Treasure that he is. That is faith: receiving Jesus for all that he is because our eyes have been opened to see his truth and beauty and worth."
That's the key. We cannot see the truth about God. We cannot see the infinite value and beauty of Jesus Christ. God has to do something in us so that we will see that loving Jesus is better than loving the world, better than loving ourselves, and better than worshipping our man-made gods. We are able to love God because God first loved us. We cannot love him without his love being poured into our hearts (Romans 5:5) and without his mercy that looked beyond our fault (Ephesians 2:4-5).
So we are not forced to love God, rather because God's love is in us, it is now in our nature to love God. Because now we see Christ as the precious treasure that he is, loving God with all our heart, mind, and soul becomes our passion and our delightful duty.
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