Are you sure you know how to love? Sure, we all love our families, our pets, but do we understand what it takes to love our neighbors? Total Strangers? How about understanding how to love God, an ethereal being we can’t see or touch? The Bible says we must love Him in spirit, so how do we go about that? If that was an easy question to answer, the simplicity of the answer would render it to be merely a rhetorical question. The fact is, of ourselves we don’t have a clue about loving in spirit – we must be gifted with God’s grace and filled with His Holy Spirit to even begin to understand what Spiritual love is. Then and only then can we begin to be able to do it.

Our very understanding of love has to be reconfigured if we are to honestly pursue the iteration of a love that can allow us to obey what a lot of people oversimplify as the commandment to love God. I don’t believe it is a commandment in our understanding of commandment, but in the sense of the old saying about respect being earned and not demanded. The order is to love God the Father with all of one’s heart, soul, mind, and strength. [Matthew 22:37]: “And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ This is the first commandment.“

Why, after all, – and how could we – love God only because we are commanded to do so? If we attempt to love God only because we are commanded to, kinda sounds like something Donald Trump or some other autocrat would “demand” of their proles, and of course, real love from the heart could never transpire only if we are commanded to do so. The way I see this commandment is that the Spiritual love we must have within us to show towards God is there as a result of His grace in that He, through His spirit, is willing to teach us how He wishes for us to love Him. If we determine that we want to love Him, and earnestly pray that the Spirit teaches us how to do so, then we can become able to do something that without His help we wouldn’t have a clue of how to do. In other words, the commandment to love God can only be fulfilled after we have been given the grace to do so, and although love in the commandment is seen as an action verb – and it is – it is also an end result of having received God’s grace to teach us what this love is and how to love Him. I don’t believe it is humanly possible to love God in spirit without having been taught by His Spirit what it means and how to do so.

Spiritual love cannot be taught by another human being. We can learn from others what the symptoms of love look like, such as doing favors for those we love, getting on our knees to show our subservience, being respectful, but the love itself cannot even be described, much less taught and practiced. It is an emotion of the highest order and if the heart that loves is pure with no hint of deception or flattery, it can actually be felt within the conscious soul. Even when we become able to practice this love, we can only love a tiny bit as compared to the love of God. How is it possible to fathom that the Creator of everything that exists is Himself described as love? God is love. [1 John 4:8]; “He who does not love does not know God, for God is love.” This verse brings us full circle back to the commandment – to love God. It also gives us a method of discerning whether or not we truly know God, for if we do not have love in our hearts, we cannot possibly know Him.

People who do not have love in their hearts for God, or for their fellow human beings are being duplicitous hypocrites when they try to claim they have a relationship with God. Look at the megachurches who teach support for genocide and you will see perfect examples of this hypocrisy. The world is full of “leaders” who profess to be Christians – or at least claim to be morally upright – yet they casually give orders that result in the massacre of entire populations of human beings – people they should love. Incredibly. such leaders have big followings of folks who like to think of themselves as believers, and they are fine with wars and with slaughtering innocent people. There is no way a person can be a follower of Jesus Christ and support murder of innocents, regardless of what the false prophet pastors of the megachurches say. Their day will come.

We must strive for the love, for the ability to love in Spirit as we are commanded. When we take the right path, the one Jesus taught, we will one day find that we do indeed love our Creator. We will see then what I’m trying to explain here – that being able to love in Spirit and in truth is itself a gift of the Spirit as opposed to something we just one day decide to do. It’s not something we can just do like turning on a water spigot. We must be gifted with the ability to love – with the same kind of love that God holds for us, just not as profound, but I believe the longer we live and the harder we pray for this precious gift, the more clearly we will see what it means and we will be more able to love as commanded.

I think the key to being graced with the ability to love as God wants us to is first desiring to love Him as we should, but we also must at all costs be willing to be totally honest with ourselves and with God. No one can expect to have a relationship with the Father if he is hiding something in his heart. You cannot deceive God. The scripture says: [Matther 5:8]: “Blessed are the pure in heart, For they shall see God.” You gotta be totally honest with God because He knows your heart anyway, but most importantly with yourself, because it’s possible to practice deception thoroughly enough that we can fool ourselves. When we do that, there’s no way to ever know God.

The commandment to love God can be seen as more of a result than an action. No one can love God unless they know how, and they cannot know how unless the Holy Spirit manifests in their heart what it means and how to do it. I firmly believe that once you have received this gift, you are required to, with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength to practice using it; if you allow a treasure of that magnitude – the greatest gift from God – to go to waste, if you bury that coin, you’re wasting something precious. If you love God and your fellow man with all sincerity, you’ll be following Jesus’ commandments.

Love as fully as you are able and keep the faith.

MK