Stay in Love with God

A devotion written for our church, to complement the Sunday sermon.  

Rule 3: Stay in Love with God

Deut. 30-19-20

Paul Stroble

“I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him; for that means life to you and length of days, so that you may live in the land that the Lord swore to give to your ancestors, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob” (Deut. 30:19-20).

Putting your whole self into a loving relationship is a commitment and a process. As Pastor Jason points out, we must nurture our relationship with God so that it remains vital and growing. But we live in a noisy world that distracts us from God. We’re human, we fail, get tired, become disappointed.

Our scripture this week is well-complemented by Deut. 6:5, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” Jesus paraphrases it slightly, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind” (Matt. 22:37). Loving God is not a one-time experience, but a choice to put our whole selves into the relationship over the long haul.

Obviously, God does not come to the door to greet us when we come home or give us a big hug to express love. We know God through God’s word, our experiences of divine guidance, the sermons of our pastor, the sharing of communion, the love expressed to us by others, and the love that we show to others.

Our love for God includes our emotional feelings, but feelings are notoriously changeable and inaccurate. For instance, we can feel distant from or even condemned by God—when, in fact, we are deeply loved!

Martin Luther once committed that when our feelings sag, we become spiritually confused and forget to trust in God’s love. “Troubled consciences are like geese. When hawks pursue them, they try to escape by flying… when the wolves threatened them, they try to escape by running.” Luther said that when our faith and feelings aren’t meshing well, we need to hold to God’s promises in God’s word and trust God’s love. (The converse is also true: we could feel smug in our faith but are actually drifting away from God.)

Both the Old and New Testaments teach that loving God is indivisible with loving others. This makes the love of God a more difficult prospect than having emotional feelings toward God. People can be difficult and hard to love!  Helping others can be difficult. (Many of us have thought to ourselves, “No good deed goes unpublished” when our desire to help someone backfired.) But the prospect of loving others gives us an excellent guide to our progress in loving God.

Like the Israelites, we struggle to “stay in love with God.” Romans 12:9-21 reminds us what an active, self-giving, covenantal love looks like: you treat your persecutors with kindness and benevolence, you try to abandon your feelings of pride and stubbornness, you refrain from cultivating vengeful feelings, you work with others without competing for praise and credit. Elsewhere in the Bible, Hebrews 13:3 teaches a kind of empathy where we put ourselves into the “shoes” of suffering people: “Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though you yourselves were being tortured.”

But we always need God’s help to grow in love. Fortunately, as we look to God, we discover that God is always ready to help us!   

Amen.