Men Who Love God: An Intro to the Lenses of Love
What does it mean to be a man who loves God?
This is the question we get to explore together this morning. The focus of our time will be on the word Love.
Love is not an add-on to the Christian life. It is not as if we can say, “I have faith, and I hope I can love God as well.” Or to say, “I believe in Him, and I hope I love Him.”
To have faith in God—to believe in Him—is to see Him as He is and therefore love Him as He is. To flip it around: if you don’t love Him then you don’t believe in Him. You don’t have real faith and His love has not been poured into your heart. Your heart has not been changed, and you are still blind to His goodness and His glory.
Love is at the core of what it means to understand God, and believe in Him. It’s the core of what it means to see Jesus and put your faith in Him.
At the Center of Scripture
Scripture makes this plain to us. Love takes center stage in the Bible and in what God commands of us. You can’t get too far into God’s commands without love taking the lead position. Deuteronomy 6:5, which articulates the greatest command listed in the Old Testament, starts with these three words:
“You shall love…”
Whatever follows is done from and through love. Love is essential for obedience.
Deuteronomy 6:5,
“You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.”
And we know it is the greatest commandment because Jesus tells us this. We read in Mark 12:28–31,
And one of the scribes came up and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, asked him, “Which commandment is the most important of all?” Jesus answered, “The most important is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 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.’ The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.
We learn more of where this love comes from in 1 John 4:7–10,
Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
At minimum, there are three clear observations we can make here:
1) We see the necessity of love.
You must love God to obey his commandments because love is commanded. Not only is it commanded, but rightly understood, it fulfills the whole law as we love God and love others.
2) We see love is robust, it is holistic. Love is substantial and multifaceted.
We love God with our hearts, we love God with our souls, we love God with our minds, and we love God with our strength.
3) We see that God is love and He has poured out His love on us.
Romans 5:5, speaking about us being justified by faith and hoping in the glory of God, says,
“and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.”
We have an infinite God who is love. Which I assume at minimum means His love is about the size the He is, infinitely big and glorious. And he has poured it into our hearts.
His love is like the heat and energy of the sun. Our one little sun produces an insane amount of energy. The Sun produces about 3.8 x 10²⁶ joules of energy every second. By comparison, the entire earth uses much less than that every year. Love like that you could say demands a response, or at a bare minimum solicits a response.
Our Three Lenses of Love
Knowing the weight of God’s love for us, do we reflect it back toward God in our love for Him? Not just knowledge of Him, or awareness of Him, but love for him?
Does seeing and receiving the intense heat of his love warm your heart at all?
We can’t take a single step in our walks with God, in obedience to Him, if we don’t love Him. It is the most important command — it’s the gateway to everything else.
We must be men who not only intellectually assent to loving God, or can articulate clearly the need to love God, but who actually love God.
So what does genuine love of God look like in response to what He has done? What does it look like for a heart that has received a Niagara Falls sized dumping of love on it, to receive and respond to that love?
In order to answer these questions this morning, we are going to walk through three perspectives, or lenses, of love. What might it look like for us to increase in our love for God? These three lenses of love are:
Affection
Allegiance
Action
So for the rest of our time, we are going to walk through these three things — each their own section. Between each one we will break for a period to discuss as a table, or in groups of 3-5.
