God is Love

What does God expect from us? The church throughout the ages has added a lot of obligations of what God desires of men, and most of them are false. God basically wants us to be good people, who are thoughtful and kind to others. Now, that’s a simple statement, but a hard thing to do, for mostly we are too wrapped up with ourselves to care about others. God gave us three things to do: (1) Love God and serve him by (2) loving others and (3) loving ourselves. As the Scriptures say, “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. And a second is like it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets” (Matthew 22:37-40). Everything contained in the Bible are in these three verses. Worth memorizing I would think. Of course, it takes the rest of the Bible to get us to understanding this simple truth. This is the entire obligation man has to God – to love others. Pretty simple right? God does not want to enslave you or take your Sunday mornings away from you. He does not want to control your life and your thoughts. Controlling others, this is a human desire and sin. He just wants you to become a better person, who loves others with a genuine heart, who is in a loving relationship with Him. God is our heavenly Father; not our heavenly tyrant. He is more concerned about our relationships than He is of us checking off a holy person to do list! The entire Bible is about relationships and how to maintain them. In fact, God points out in the Bible that if you hate people, you are not a Christian. In the book of First John it states, “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 [forgiveness of] our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us” (1 John 4:7-12). Now that is straight to the point. I do not care what you believe or what great good works you have done. If you do not love people, you are not following the ways of God, He is not your heavenly Father, and you are not a Christian. For, “God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God; and God abides in him” (1 John 4:15).