This Is How You Love God

Hello friend. Can we sit together for a moment? Not as a content creator and a viewer, just two people who have walked with God long enough to know that sometimes the road feels longer than it should. You've served. You've shown up. You've never walked away.

But I want to ask you something that might feel like a hand on your shoulder in the dark. When you are all alone, no one watching, nothing to perform, do you actually feel like you know how to love God? Or has loving him become something you say more than something you live?

I've been there. I remember sitting on the edge of my bed one night, decades into ministry, thinking, "I have preached about loving God a thousand times, but if I'm honest, my heart feels like a well I draw from every day and nobody ever fills." I do things for God. I talk about God. But do I actually love God? The way a person is loved, known, treasured? Or have I just mastered the language of devotion without the intimacy of it?

Maybe you felt that quiet ache, too. It's not doubt, it's wistfulness. A sense that somewhere along the way the vibrant first love wonder of knowing God got buried under decades of habit. Tonight, we're going to untangle that. Not with a new program, just the word of God, a few honest stories, and truth that doesn't just inform, it rekindles.

Let's start where Jesus started. In Matthew 22, a lawyer tests him, "Which is the great commandment?" And Jesus, without a pause, says, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment." Not serve him, not believe in him, not be morally consistent for him. Love him with everything.

I read that verse for decades and turned it into a measuring stick. Lose patience with my spouse, fail. Worry about the finances, fail. I took the greatest invitation in scripture and used it to beat myself up. But what if Jesus wasn't giving us a test? What if he was giving us a doorway into the very thing our souls are starved for?

Let me take you to Bethany. Martha welcomes Jesus into her home and immediately gets busy. Best dishes, oil lamps adjusted, everything perfect. That's beautiful. It's what so many of us do. We teach the class, organize the pantry, visit the sick, show up early to unlock the doors. We've been Marthas for 40 years and we are tired. But Mary sat at the Lord's feet and listened. And Martha, sweating in the kitchen, finally breaks. "Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone?" I've prayed prayers just like that. "Lord, do you not see how much I'm doing for you?"

Jesus answers with a disarming tenderness. "Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things, but one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her." One thing. Jesus didn't rebuke Martha for serving. He rebuked her for letting service pull her away from the presence of the one she was serving. Loving God is not primarily doing things for him. It's being with him, sitting at his feet, letting his words reach the part of you that the busyness never touches.

This is where the ground shifted under my own feet. For years, I thought loving God meant keeping him on my to-do list. Quiet time, check. Prayer list, check. Church, check. I'd hand him the checklist like a kid who cleaned his room, waiting for the nod of approval. But I was missing the one thing.

1 John 4:10 says, "In this is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins." The definition of love, the very origin of it, doesn't begin with your effort to reach up. It begins with his reaching down. This is love, not that we loved God to perfection, not that we felt all the right feelings, but that he loved us first, completely, sacrificially, while we were still off chasing other things.

Take a breath, right where you are, in your car, on your couch, just let that settle. The God who set the stars in place has watched every one of your decades unfold, and he loves you right now. Not because of what you've done today, because of what Jesus did 2,000 years ago. Loving him is not the frantic effort to earn that love. It's the lifelong, unhurried response to it. As John says in verse 19, "We love because he first loved us." Your love for God doesn't originate in your willpower. It's a river flowing from a divine spring. Your job is not to generate the water. Your job is to open the floodgates.

I want to tell you about a man I'll call Robert. Robert served on his church board for 22 years, led capital campaigns, mentored young couples, never missed a Sunday. But privately, he felt like a spiritual accountant, keeping ledgers, balancing books, never holding the treasure. Then his granddaughter was born with a severe heart defect, and Robert, who had prayed dutifully his entire life, found himself on the floor of a hospital chapel at 2:00 in the morning not knowing what to pray. He told me later, "I realized I'd spent 60 years talking about God, but never really talking with him. I only knew how to be his employee. I never learned to be his son."

In that chapel, broken and afraid, he didn't muster a more eloquent prayer. He whispered Psalm 63. "O God, you are my God. Earnestly I seek you. My soul thirsts for you. My flesh faints for you as in a dry and weary land where there is no water." He had read that Psalm a hundred times, but now consider this. David didn't write those words from a comfortable study. He wrote them from a real desert, running for his life, stripped of his throne, surrounded by enemies. And what does he cry? Not Lord, give me back the blessing. Not return me to the palace. He says, "I want you." Not the answers, not the relief, just you.

That's the pivot. Loving God is not about feeling euphoric in the right circumstances. It's about choosing him when nothing is working, when no one is watching, when faith feels like walking uphill in the dark. Robert, on that chapel floor, wasn't performing anymore. He was thirsting, and that thirst, raw, undignified, desperate, was the most honest love he had ever offered God.

I suspect many of you, like Robert, have been in a relationship with God that feels more like a contract than a romance. You'd never say it out loud, but the Bible is unafraid of this language. God calls himself a husband to his people. Jesus calls himself the bridegroom. And in John 15, he says, "As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love." Abide. To remain. To dwell. To make your home somewhere. Jesus doesn't say, "Work for my love." He says, "Rest in it. Let every other thing in your life orbit around the truth that you are fully, unshakably loved."

When you don't start there, with the receiving, your love for God becomes brittle and exhausting. You try to love him with all your heart, but your heart is preoccupied with performance. You try to love him with all your mind, but your mind is scrambling to figure out what he wants next. But when you abide in his love, when you accept that you are already fully accepted in Christ, everything shifts. The love you offer back stops being a payment and starts being a natural, overflowing delight.

Jesus says in John 14, "If you love me, you will keep my commandments." For years, I heard that as a condition. Prove your love by obeying. But flip it around. Love comes first and obedience grows from it, like a fruit on a healthy vine. You don't plant fruit to get the vine. You tend the vine and fruit comes.

And here is what that fruit looks like in the ordinary texture of a day. Romans 12:1 says, "Offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God." A living sacrifice doesn't stay on the altar and die. It gets up. It walks. It sits in traffic. It listens to a spouse who's hurting. It folds laundry. It forgives an old wound. It chooses patience over irritation. It whispers, "I'm yours." Not in a sanctuary, but in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday. That's how love looks when it's mature. Not loud, steady. Not performative, persistent. The quiet accumulation of a thousand small surrenders that say, without any audience, you're still my God.

One of the most tender pictures of this comes from a woman whose name we don't even know in Luke chapter 7. Jesus is dining at the house of a Pharisee named Simon, and a woman known as a sinner walks in uninvited. She says nothing. She simply stands behind Jesus weeping, her tears wetting his feet, wiping them with her hair, anointing them with oil. Simon is disgusted, but Jesus tells a story of two debtors, one forgiven much, one forgiven little. And then he says, "Her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much. But he who is forgiven little loves little."

Here's the trap many lifelong believers fall into. Because their past looks tame on the outside, they assume their forgiveness is smaller. But the Pharisee's quiet sins, self-reliance, pride, the subtle belief that he could earn his own way, are no smaller than hers. When you truly grasp that, something breaks open. Love for God stops being a Sunday chore and starts looking like tears on his feet, gratitude too full to contain.

So, how do we get there? How do we, after all these years, love God with a love that feels alive? We stop trying to love him on our own strength and ask him to love himself through us. Romans 5:5 says, "God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit." The love you need isn't hiding inside you waiting to be squeezed out. It is poured in. You can pray the most honest prayer you've ever prayed. "Lord, I don't feel it right now. My love has run dry. But you said your love is poured out, so pour it into me. Let me borrow your love for the Father, and let that become my love."

And then you practice the one necessary thing. Not a longer quiet time, not another prayer list, just space to be with him. Read a few verses and let them read you. Whisper, "Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening." Sit in silence for 5 minutes, which will feel like an hour, and offer him your simple presence. That is not wasted time. That is the very core of loving God.

I once asked an elderly missionary who had served for over 50 years, "What's the secret to sustaining love for God over a whole lifetime?" She smiled and said, "I learned to stop trying to be the bride and just let him love the bride. Every morning before my feet hit the floor, I say, 'Lord, I am yours. Let me feel what you feel for me, even just a little.' And then I let his love wash over me until I can't help but love him back." That's abiding. That's the good portion.

There's a line in the Song of Solomon that the early church fathers saw as a picture of Christ's love for his people. The bride says, "He brought me to the banqueting house, and his banner over me will love." You are standing outside the feast waiting to be let in if you're good enough. His banner over you is love, a flag flying high declaring to all of heaven and earth, "This one is mine." You don't have to earn your seat. He did the bringing. And as you linger there tasting and seeing that he is good, love for him will rise in your heart like dawn. Not because you forced it, but because you finally let yourself be loved.

So, this is how you love God. Not by manufacturing a stronger emotion or adding another discipline to your load. You love him by receiving his love until it saturates every dry crack in your soul. You love him by sitting at his feet instead of just working in his kitchen. You love him by remembering the debt you've been forgiven so that gratitude, not guilt, drives your obedience. You love him through the ordinary Tuesday, folded laundry, a patient word, a small surrender that says without any audience, you are still my God. And you love him by letting the Holy Spirit pour in what you cannot generate on your own.

Let me close with a prayer. Wherever you are right now, let these words become yours. "Father, I've known about your love my whole life, but tonight I want to know it. I admit I've often tried to earn what you've already given. Treating you like a taskmaster instead of a father. Forgive me for my busy, anxious heart. I choose now to stop striving and start receiving. Thank you that Jesus took my sin, my coldness, my self-reliance, and gave me his perfect love. Holy Spirit, pour that love into my heart right now. I don't need to feel it all at once. I just need to know it's true. So, I sit at your feet. I quiet my inner Martha. Teach me to love you back. Not with frantic effort, but with a resting, trusting, overflowing heart. I give you my hands, my days, my ordinary Tuesdays. In Jesus' name. Amen."

If you prayed that even in a whisper, something just cracked open. Tomorrow morning, before your feet hit the floor, pause for 2 minutes. Put your hand on your chest and say, "Father, your banner over me is love. Help me live there today." No long formulas, just a child leaning into the safest place in the universe.

And before you go, I want to hear from you. Drop a comment below and tell me, when did you last feel like you truly loved God, not just served him? Your answer might be exactly what someone else needs to read today. God bless you, friend. Until next time, abide in his love.