Loving God and Loving the Bible

Probably a couple decades ago I heard a sermon in which the point was made that one way we can tell if we love God is if we love His Word, the Bible. It really began to bother me. I thought, I don't know if I love the Bible and consequently don't know if I love God. It had been bothering me for maybe a couple of weeks and I heard about an acquaintance that was in a tough situation. I started thinking about what would I say to this guy if I had a chance to encourage him.

A few Bible verses came to mind and I wrote them down on a piece of paper. Then more verses came to mind. I would write down a scripture reference and a short description of what it said or why it was important to the guy's situation. Soon I had both sides of the paper filled and at some point started using a concordance to find other verses that I was familiar with but did not know exactly where to find them. It did not take very long to have two sheets of paper filled with these Bible verses and short explanations about them.

Then I started thinking about friendship. For some reason, at that time I had heard about five or six different definitions of what a friend was. (God had worked out all of the details for this Bible lesson.)  I can't think of all of the definitions now. Some of them were, “A friend is someone who knows you better than you know yourself.” “A friend is who you enjoy spending time with.” “A friend is someone you go to talk things out with.”

Then it was like God wanted me to look back at the two pages with all of the Bible verses. I had no idea where He was headed with this. It was like He asked me to compare those Bible verses with my definitions of friends. So one by one I remembered each definition and compared it to that list of Bible verses. A friend is someone that knows you better than you know yourself. I thought of that verse in James that says the Word is like a mirror that shows you who you are. (James 1:22 – 23). Yes, God's word not only knows me, but better than anyone else, and I thought that's a funny twist. Then I looked at the next definition. “A friend is someone that you enjoy spending time with.” I thought that, yes, I did enjoy studying the Bible. But then the thought occurred, “but who would I really want to spend time with?” There were people that I hung out with from time to time, but realized if there were no other criteria like knowing developing relationships was important, that I would prefer to study the Bible over hanging out with any of them. 

“A friend is someone you go to talk things out with.” Well, ya, not only did I not have anyone that I really talked things out with, but ultimately it was the Bible I trusted most anyway. I started seeing the pattern about these Bible verses being my friends. “A friend is someone you spend time with.” My roommate's complaint came to mind, “all you do is study the Bible,” and “you know the Bible better than anyone I know.” (Well, he was a fairly new Christian and perhaps didn't know other peoples habits like he did mine.) OK, that definition works too. But by the time I had gone through my list of definitions of what friends are it became clear that the Bible verses on those two pieces of paper were not only my friends, they were my very best friends. OK, so I have a problem of not enough friends God, I already knew that!

Then it was like God directed me back to that problem that had been bothering me. I don't know if I love God because I don't know if I love God's Word. If there is anything that may be better than God telling you that He loves you – it may be God telling you that you love Him. I know that my heart is deceitfully wicked. I know this from experience and I know it because the Bible tells me so. Therefore when I want to tell God that I love him, I tend to say I really want to Lord, but I really don't know if its true. This was one of those times when God clearly told me that I love Him. It was not simply the intellectual exercise of contemplating the definitions of “friend,” but He made it quite clear that He was telling me that I loved Him. Not only that, but stop worrying about it and move on. We loved each other and that was how it was.

I can't claim to be in that same place with God now; situations change; life patterns change; that was a long time ago; but when I think about that experience the same emotions of thankfulness come back and I know that there is nothing I want nearly so bad as to really truly love God.

"God My Friend" OR "True Religion"

There is an analogy that i read or heard someplace. I don't even remember what it was used to say, but it is a really nifty word picture. Imagine a lady sitting and listening to music. She is nodding her head and tapping her feet with the rhythm and smiling about the message in the lyrics. A deaf man is watching her. He knows from experience that when the lady gets done doing this at lunch break she is much easier to deal with in the afternoon. It is good for her soul. So he does the same thing she does. He sits down, nods his head, taps his feet and smiles for about 10 minutes like she does. Of course, since he cannot hear the music, it does nothing for him, except for the placebo effect. Because he tells himself it will help he has a better attitude in the afternoon.

The Christian church service is supposed to be putting into practice genuine relationship with God. People that observe the ritual but do not have a proper relationship with God – everyone has a PERSONAL relationship with God – for most that is not a right relationship, but rather is based on personal rebellion or unbelief – for people that only observe the outward manifestation of a right relationship with God, as they try to do religion correctly, they merely mimic those outward manifestations.

If true followers of Jesus get together to live out their faith together they will have some kind of method for doing so. That method will be kept fresh by the true followers, and will adapt to different situations of daily relationship with God. If the group becomes influenced by people who are no longer in a fresh relationship with God or never have had, then the method will get off track. That is where false religion comes in.

To the degree that the religion is influenced by people who do not have a fresh, living relationship with the Lord Jesus, to that degree it will simply be an unshrunk patch that will tear the fabric of the religion apart when the Holy Spirit actually rules in peoples hearts.

I am looking for work again. I have tried to seek God about it. I have attempted to get my heart right with Him so that He would be free to lead me in the best directions for the job search. I have looked up pertinent promises in the Bible and attempted to line up my prayers with what i know to be God's will based on the Bible. I have attempted to seek God's face and God's strength.

I have done a lousy job of it. I am so imperfect that there is no way that by my efforts i can do the job correctly or effectively. But as I went through the motions of the job hunt this morning i realized that God's peace is ruling in my heart. I reacted to situations not according to what logic would say but rather trusting God. It is not because of what is good in me that I can have peace and joy in my life. It is because God is good and faithful and honors my feeble attempts at friendship by being my friend and filling me with His Holy Spirit. As I type this i have tears pouring down my face because i know how GOOD God is to me. There is nothing I want more in this life than to know that God loves me and that I love God.

Only people that understand this kind of relationship with God can create true religion.

“Render to God and Render to Caesar” OR “American Idolatry”

Luke 20:25 “And He said to them, Therefore render to Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and to God the things which are God's.”

What is the difference between what we rend to Caesar and what we rend to God? In order to put this into practice we need to understand what Caesar asks of us and what God asks of us.

First, what does Caesar ask of us? I think that everyone would agree that Caesar represents the Government. I am going to be talking about the government in the U.S.A. because that is what I am familiar with. For most western countries the basic issues will be the same. For short hand I am going to call our Caesar “Uncle Sam.”

What does our Caesar, Uncle Sam, ask of us? Uncle Sam asks that we obey the laws and he would kind of prefer that we vote. He is quite clear that we are to pay our taxes. Uncle Sam does NOT ask for our love and devotion. There IS pressure in the U.S.A. to love our country, stuff like “America, love it or leave it.” That does NOT come from law. For people that have been born into the U.S.A. there is no feeling or loyalty type stuff required of us by the government. For an immigrant who takes an “Oath of Citizenship” the rules are a little bit different. Here is a link to a copy of that oath:  <http://www.nps.gov/elis/forteachers/upload/Citizenship%20Oath.pdf>. What I am getting at though, is that Uncle Sam, as contrasted with God, does not require our absolute love to Him. Uncle Sam does not particularly care if the U.S. citizen born here even likes him.

On the other hand, what does God require of us? God requires that we love Him with all of our being:

Luke 10:27. “And he answered, 'You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.'”

We can see from the Sheep and Goats passage starting with Matthew 25:31 that loving people is a subcategory of loving God; we are taught in the New Testament job description to love three kinds of people, our brethren, our neighbors and our enemies.

We have a serious choice to make in this. In Luke 16:13 Jesus tells us that:

“No servant can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon."

That King James word, “mammon” hides what this is talking about. In the NASB and many other modern versions it is translated to the word “wealth” which is what most agree that it means. What Christians do not admit to is that in loving Uncle Sam, in loving the American Dream, what they are loving is wealth. But loving wealth is what it is primarily all about. We are a rich country and Christians want very much to keep it that way. But then again, Christians have been taught that serving the state is serving God since the compromises with Constantine the Great.

Of course there is also the freedom stuff that goes with it. I am talking about things like freedom of speech, religion, happiness, to own property and the Miranda. We lump these all into things that God has proclaimed that we must have. We claimed in the Declaration of Independence that certain “inalienable rights” were given to us by God. Most Christians believe therefore that this is a Biblical principle. I am not sure where these Christians get this idea as I am sure most of them have not looked at the Bible and what it says closely enough to decide for themselves what the Bible says about it. These rights ARE very much a part of how we should treat each other. They were a very good thing to be put into law.

These rights are not, however, something that we should love. They are part of the world system, and we must choose between loving God and loving the things of the world. As for these rights being inalienable? What is true about this is that the principles about God commanding us to love people has always been there. We are commanded to love people, period. What is not true is that these rights are inalienable. If we look at both Biblical and secular history we will see that people have frequently been alienated from this type of treatment. For most of history these have not been the law of the land.

These American rights were put into place in the U.S.A. by God using solders and statesmen as tools to get this job done. It is ultimately God who determines history, not people. These rights were tools that God has used for a period of time to do tasks that He wanted done in our culture. I believe that these tasks had to do with calling us to Him, and that we mostly did not heed that call. This fits in with Biblical history. These freedoms are tools in God's tool chest. Throughout most of history God has kept these tools in the tool box unused. If in our culture God decides to put those tools away and pull out other tools, like perhaps persecution, we need to welcome God's working in our lives and culture in whatever way God wants to work. If we decide to love the tools rather than God, the infinite creator of the universe and every one of us in it, if we choose to love freedom rather than God, we are idolaters. No greater love has any man than this, that he lay down his life for his idols. We should not lay down our lives for these tools, these freedoms.

Mar 8:35-36 “For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel's will save it. For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and forfeit his soul?”

We SHOULD lay down our lives for Jesus and His gospel. We should NOT spend our time and other resources protecting freedom rather than loving people into the Kingdom of God.

Simple logic, simple two plus two equals four reasoning, then tells us that we cannot love both Uncle Sam and God. We must choose, are we going to love God like He commands us to, or are we going to love Uncle Sam, the American Dream and the things of the world? James 4:4 tells us:

“You adulteresses, do you not know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.”

A Christian has a choice to make. They must choose between loving Caesar, our Uncle Sam, and loving God. Uncle Sam does not even care if we like him let alone love him. God on the other hand demands, commands, that we love Him totally. This has been a principle of God from Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eve through the kingdom years of Israel, through the exile of Israel, through the days of Jesus' earthly ministry, through modern times and will always be the commandment. We are to love God with everything we are and with everything we have. Everything about loving God is good. Loving God is not only the right thing to do but is totally desirable. If we have clear minds and clear hearts and we know God we will want to love Him. God is GOOD and WORTHY to be loved. Followers of Jesus understand this and are always doing their best to love God more completely and more accurately.