The Love of God: A fundamental orientation toward life

Jesus tells us that the most important command is to love God with everything that we have. This is a command that first came from Moses when he was relaying the words of God to the Hebrew people in the wilderness. 

Think about it: as a people, the Hebrews had been languishing in Egypt for 400 years. They had been rescued by their God but soon would be fighting for their lives in the wilderness and the "promised land." As a people, they would know famine, defeat, exile, and every kind of evil as well as harvest, victory, conquest and joy, and in the middle of it all, they are being told that the most important thing that they can do is to love God with everything that they are.

We are supposed to love our Creator. We look at the world and our own lives, and our fundamental position should be that we are in love with the One who made it all. This orientation of our lives to the love of the God who makes and control all that we can see and all that we don't see has profound consequences. It puts us in a position of constant wonder and gratitude.

I know that love is expressed in our obedience. The one who obeys God is the One who loves him. That is a fundamental truth that must not be ignored. However, I think that I can forget to love God "with all my heart, soul, mind and strength." To understand this, read the psalms with their passionate embrace of God, and then consider all the great men of God who loved their Creator passionately. They would consider who he is and what he has done and the way that he takes care of man and beast, countries and creation. The ones we love, we think about; we consider their good qualities, we wonder at their goodness and beauty. This is part of our love for God. The time we spend loving God in this way will reorient our lives.  Who knows? Our anxieties and struggles might begin to look differently in the light of love. In fact, they might - at least for a little while - seem to disappear altogether.