Loving God

By On October 15, 2012 · 4 Comments · In God Moments

“According to Jesus, what’s the greatest commandment?”

As I asked the question, I bit my lip. Not because I expected my audience of primarily college students to not respond but because I’ve seen crowds get this one wrong.

GreatestCommand

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“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength,” someone answered.

“Then second is, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself,’” said a neighboring college student.

Those are two different things:

1. Love the Lord your God

2. Love your neighbor as yourself.

I heard your, “Duh.”

That was my first thought when Keith pointed this out to me. But then he revealed that most of us are living like we love God by loving our neighbor. That’s a true statement but it’s not the only way to love God.

A lot of us are living the two greatest commands as one.

Loving your neighbor as yourself is good. It’s a way to show your love of God.

But it’s secondary.

It’s not enough.

We must first be loving God then loving our neighbor.

For me, the first one’s harder.

It’s become easier for me to serve my friends than to sit privately with God.

Sometimes I blame it on busy-ness, sometimes I call Scripture boring (if you’re appalled by that statement, you’ve never explored Leviticus), and sometimes I just don’t want to spend time with God.

Let’s practice the greatest commandment this week: love God first.

If you need some tips, I wrote a guest post for Ashley about building a quiet time habit. She’s also got a great post of tips.

What keeps you from loving God?

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  • http://twitter.com/takeYourglory Jessica

    And sometimes, we love God BY loving others. :-) Thanks so much for this post! So inspiring, and so true. I think we so often breeze past really, really loving God, and rush right into doing.

    • http://KatieAxelson.com/ Katie Axelson

      Glad it caused you to pause, Jessica.

  • http://www.hisgirl4life.blogspot.com/ Tara

    Indeed, Katie. I agree that the first one sometimes is the hardest. What keeps me from loving God at times simply comes back to the lies of Satan and thinking that maybe the Lord doesn’t love me like He says and maybe I’ve been too big of a failure. Of course those are lies, but in the darkness they can seem true. Great challenge to love Him first this week. Definitely doing that! Blessings! :)

    • http://KatieAxelson.com/ Katie Axelson

      I hate that the enemy fills your head with those lies, Tara.