How To Love God by Ella Hearrean

How to Love God

By:  Ella Hearrean

God asks us to love him with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength. How do we do that?

Unless it’s mad, passionate, extraordinary love, it’s a waste of your time. There are too many mediocre things in life. Love shouldn’t be one of them.Dream for an Insomniac¹

Most people hope for an extraordinary love. They want a head-over-heels, once-in-a-lifetime relationship that is both passionate and enduring. Hit movies, best-selling novels, and dating websites all bank on our hope for a great romance.

However, the greatest love wasn’t born in a movie or a classic novel; it was authored by God himself when he created you in his image. His singular desire has always been a passionate, enduring relationship with you. Like us, God wants nothing less than the greatest love story.

Love with Passion and Purpose

God has a single expectation for a relationship with you. He spells out his desire in the Bible: “And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.”²

He makes it very clear that he wants “all” of you. He wants all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength invested in your relationship with him. More than anything, he craves a relationship in which you are “all in.”

Anyone who has been all in knows that loving passionately is about loving purposefully. The two elements feed each other: Your passion drives your purpose. Your purpose feeds your passion.

An “all in” kind of love is the sum of the little choices we make each day. Gary Chapman, author of The Five Love Languages, said, “Our most basic emotional need is not to fall in love. It’s to be genuinely loved by another, to know a love that grows out of reason and choice, not instinct. I need to be loved by someone who chooses to love me, who sees in me something worth loving.”³

What are the daily choices you can make to love God passionately? Thankfully, because you’re a reflection of him, you can begin by simply asking yourself, How do I hope to be loved? You already have what it takes to create an extraordinary relationship with God.

Let’s look at each of the ways God wants your love.

Love with All Your Heart

Loving God with all your heart means reserving the best of your affection for him. Make time each day to build an intimate relationship with him through prayer—through conversation. He wants to know you and be known by you.

Start by sharing joys with him. Run to him first with your big news at work. Sing to him at the top of your lungs on a great day. Fill him in on your private hopes. Tell him how much you appreciate him. Boost him up to others.

But also talk to him first when you’re feeling down. Cry to him when you’re overwhelmed at home. Admit when you feel jealous. Be honest when you’re disappointed or angry—even if it’s him you’re angry with. Share your secret fears. Apologize when you’ve made a mistake. Ask him for forgiveness.

Then let him talk. He has things to say, and he wants a relationship that goes both ways. Ask for his advice and seek out his answer. Listen to his stories in the Bible. Hear out people who speak his truth. Notice the gifts he has provided for you.

Each day, set aside time to get to know God.

Love with All Your Soul

Loving God with all your soul means dedicating your life to him. Begin by asking him, “How do you want me to spend my time, energy, money, and talents? What can I do with my resources to honor you?”

Find out what God values and stay true to those things. Jesus said, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”⁴ When you invite God into all areas of your life, he will show you how to live in a way that pleases him.

He may ask you to shift your spending habits from self-indulgence to those less fortunate. He might encourage you to change your attitude toward work. He’ll probably ask you to find friends who support your relationship with him. He’ll definitely urge you to forgive and love people the way he forgives and loves you.

In every area of your life, look for ways to show your commitment to him.

Love with All Your Mind

Loving God with all your mind means backing up your passion with knowledge. Benjamin Franklin has been credited with saying, “If passion drives you, let reason hold the reins.” God understands that the mind and heart are linked. He wants you to use your reasoning to understand and love him more fully.

Begin by asking questions. Don’t be afraid to challenge him and wrestle with his commands and your beliefs. When I’ve asked tough questions, I’ve found that God welcomes genuine curiosity and dialogue. In fact, he hopes for it.

Then seek his answers. Read the Bible and find out what the words mean. Listen to the experiences of others. Take a class. Ask him for guidance. Make an effort to find out who he is. Discover what he likes and what he dislikes.

Loving God with all your mind also means directing your thoughts to valuable things. When you focus on hope and love instead of fear and hate, your heart and actions follow. Philippians 4:8 says, “Fix your thoughts on what is true and honorable and right. Think about things that are pure and lovely and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise.”

Each day, wonder about God.

Love with All Your Strength

Loving God with all your strength means persevering for him each day. To what lengths will you go for the one you love? Poet Bayard Taylor once said, “The loving are the daring.”⁵ Indeed, genuine love demands strength and courage like nothing else.

It means you must muster your resources to protect your relationship with God every single day. It means you’re willing to change and sacrifice things to have him. It means being honest, and sometimes it means doing the unpopular thing. It means listening to truth and holding yourself accountable.

Loving God strongly is walking away from gossip when you prefer to be part of the group. It’s admitting you’re wrong and making a change. It’s asking people to help you protect your relationship with God when you don’t feel like it. It’s avoiding the people and things that could take your attention and love away from him. It’s getting up and trying again after you’ve failed.

Each day, be willing to fight for your relationship with God.

Love in the Moments

Every day is made up of hundreds of little moments that are opportunities to love God. And every single opportunity matters.

When loving moments are strung together, they form days. When loving days are strung together, they become months. When loving months are strung together, they stretch into years. And over time, years of love for God make up one extraordinary love story.

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James 3:5

In the same way, the tongue is a small thing that makes grand speeches.  But a tiny spark can set a great forest on fire. (NLT) ( James 3:5 ) 

What a powerful tool each of us is blessed with: communication! 

Depending upon its delivery and timing, something as simple as a laugh has the power to make a jovial comedian radiate or cut a person to their core. Use your tongue for God's purposes by building up loved ones, teaching others about Jesus' love, or praying in difficult situations.

What Is Grace?

Christians love to throw around the word “grace.” What does that mean?

The film Saving Private Ryan, set during World War II, tells the story of how one soldier—Private James Ryan—is rescued from behind enemy lines in Normandy.¹

The mission is extremely perilous; immediately it begins claiming the lives of the men on the rescue team, one after another. In the final battle scene, set on a heavily-shelled bridge, the captain of the rescue team whispers his last words to a dumbstruck Private Ryan: “James . . . earn this . . . earn it.”

At the end of the movie, we see an elderly James Ryan return to Normandy with his wife, children, and grandchildren. He kneels beside the grave of the captain who rescued him and, as tears fill his eyes, he says, “My family is with me today. . . . Every day I think about what you said to me that day on the bridge. I tried to live my life the best I could. I hope that was enough. I hope that, at least in your eyes, I’ve earned what all of you have done for me.”

Then, turning to his wife, he pleads with her, “Tell me I have led a good life. . . . Tell me I’m a good man.”

Never Good Enough

James Ryan has lived his entire life with the last words of his rescuer ringing in his ears. Earn this. In a way, those words have ruined him. How could his life ever be worth the deaths of those young men? Nothing would ever be truly good enough. But he’s driven to keep trying.

Perhaps you feel something of that in your own life. Are you driven to try to earn approval from your parents, your peers, your spouse, your friends, your God? Do you try to get that sense of being “good enough” from the job you do, the relationship you have, the home you live in, the family you’re raising, the money you earn, the charity you give to, the ethical choices you make, the church you go to? Do you sometimes feel that it’s just never “enough”?

We Can’t Earn It

It’s not only religious people who are driven to try to be “good enough.” The motivation for this endeavor is rooted in something real. The Bible says each of us has a very serious problem, which separates us from our Maker.

It’s called “sin”. Sin isn’t so much the bad things we do—although those are symptoms of the deeper problem we have. Sin occurs when we exchange the real God for false gods.² Instead of living for the real God—the one who created us and gives us every good thing we enjoy—we live for ourselves, or for our career, or for our spouse, or for material things.  

The result of doing this is catastrophic. The “gods” we choose to serve are merciless slave-drivers. They are gaping mouths that never seem to be satisfied—and they can never satisfy us in a lasting way. The Bible refers to them as “broken cisterns that cannot hold water.”³

When we treat the God who made us in this way, we deserve every bit of his condemnation and judgment. Jesus is uncomfortably clear that because we sin against God in this way, we deserve hell.⁴

Putting Things Right

The Christian understanding of God reveals that he takes no pleasure in our endless attempts to make ourselves acceptable to him. The book of Acts says, “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else.”⁵

In other words, nothing we can do for God can make us acceptable to him, because a) he doesn’t need anything we have to offer, and b) anything we offer him is something that he made in the first place.

So . . . we deserve God’s condemnation and cannot earn God’s acceptance. What hope is there?

Grace

The Bible claims that Jesus is our only hope.

He, too, died as part of a rescue mission—God’s rescue mission for humanity. But the words Jesus cried out just before he died weren’t “Earn it.” He said plainly, “It is finished.”⁶

That simple statement is an expression of the fact that Jesus “earned” forgiveness and freedom for us. In Christian understanding, Jesus lived a uniquely sinless life in which he loved God perfectly. And then, having lived that perfect life, he died the perfect death.

On the cross, he bore the punishment that you and I deserve for our sins. He took on our sins; died in our place; and rose again, conquering death and sin and opening the way for all to have a personal relationship with God. And we—if we put our trust in him—are credited with and redeemed by his perfect obedience. This is what Christians mean when they say things like “Jesus paid it all.”

Second Corinthians 5:21 puts it like this: “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

This is grace—a word you may hear a lot of Christians throw around. It is by grace that God freely, lavishly sets his love on an undeserving people. It’s all made possible because of Jesus’ life and death.

One of the clearest expressions of this stunning truth comes in the book of Ephesians. The Apostle Paul, one of the New Testament writers, says this to those who believe in Jesus: “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast.”⁷

In other words, we can’t earn salvation by the things we do. If we could, we would be proud and arrogant. Instead, we are saved through faith and trust in what Jesus has done for us. And even that faith is a gift from God.

How Should We Respond?

When someone understands God’s grace and embraces it, it transforms them wonderfully and irrevocably.

James Ryan felt he had to “earn it,” and so his life became weighed down by joylessness and anxiety about whether or not he had done enough. But those who put their trust in Jesus know that he has already earned it for them.

As a result, they are freed from the enslavement of trying to earn it. They are freed to love and serve God—and others—as they revel in the joy of a restored relationship with him.