to Love Him, is to live
"love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul, so that you may live."
Love, in it's fullness, completely filled (Ephesians 1:23) in the One Who always gives life because He is Life (John 14:6)...this is living.
"love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul, so that you may live." (Deuteronomy 30:6b)
To Love Him, is to live.
If He alone is Life, then to love anything or anyone else looking for life, only leaves us wanting more...needing more.
"those who trust in the LORD will lack no good thing." (Psalm 34:10b)
There is no life found in loving anything or anyone ultimately, over the Lord. And if He hasn't given me or you something, then it would not be good for us right now...it would not lead towards life. Walking with Him in love, knowing that this is Life, that this is best for me and for His glory, and that to veer outside would not breathe life, anchors my heart, soul and mind.
This is why Jesus said all the Law the Prophets are summed up in this, "'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'" (Matthew 22:37-39)
Dr. John Piper compellingly outlined the ultimate essence of evil at Passion in 2017 as, "the loss of taste for God as our all-satisfying life and joy, and the preference for other things above God himself."
What does my heart long for above God Himself? That thing will never be enough...even if it's good. That thing will not breathe life into my soul, only being ultimately captivated in His love is able.
Piper continued, "as long as you see commandment-keeping as the essence of good, and commandment-breaking as the essence of evil, you will never get to the bottom of why you do what you do, or are what you are. You will never see the greatness of God’s majesty, or the fullness of Christ’s triumph, or the beauty of a life that pleases God if you think the essence of evil is commandment-breaking."
Keeping a set of rules does not make you moral, any more than it brings your soul life.
Yet even in this being captured in Him, and loving Him and therefore finding life and walking in His ways, the overflow of a life filled with the Spirit has distinctive fruit. Fruit that has lovely and complex flavors all together, that our finite minds like to see in contradiction.
"But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control." (Galatians 5:22-23)
Love and self-control. Together. A part of the same fruit. Not in contradiction. Desires and passions mastered in tandem as a Greater desire and passion overcomes.
To those who are afraid of boundaries because you don't want to trade the delight and wonder of walking with Jesus for duty, I say delight all the more even as you exercise self-control. These cannot be in contradiction, when they come from the Spirit...Who breathes life.
To love Him is to keep His commandments (John 14:15, 21, 23; 1 John 5:3). But the love, the love it comes first. And fuels all the rest.
When we are tempted to go outside of what He's given us to find life and love, then we just don't know how lavish, how sweet, how rich, how deep His love is.
To Love Him, is to truly live.