Chapter Seven: Obeying the Great Commandment
CHAPTER SEVEN
OBEYING THE GREAT COMMANDMENT
“Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” Jesus replied: “‘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.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
MATTHEW 22:36-40
I enjoy fellowship with God, and often in the morning I awaken with the words in my mind, “I love You, Lord.”
For a time, however, it seemed as if I could hear the still, small voice of God in my mind saying, “Oh, really?” After a few of those occasions I began to reflect on what I was saying. What did I mean when I said, “I love You, Lord”? And why did I get the impression that perhaps God was not all that impressed with my sincere expressions of love to Him?
When I said, “I love You, Lord,” I was expressing a sense of delight in God and an eager anticipation of fellowship with Him during my early-morning quiet time. I could hardly wait to get dressed. I wanted to be with God; to enjoy His Word; to share my heart with Him in prayer; and in the words of David,
to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD
and to seek him in his temple.
PSALM 27:4
What is wrong with that? Are not those noble, godly desires? Why was I frequently getting this nagging thought in my mind that perhaps God was not all that convinced of my love?
I began to reflect on the question, What does it mean to love God? This is an important question. After all, Jesus said that the greatest commandment is to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” (Matthew 22:37). To love God with all my heart and soul and mind obviously means to love Him with all my being, with everything I have. And if I am to love God with this total wholeheartedness, then I need to know what it means to love God. So I began to study this passage in Matthew.
The first thing I saw from Jesus’ reply in Matthew 22 is that He actually quoted from the Old Testament. The question that had been put to Him was, “Which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” So Jesus went right back to the Law, specifically to Deuteronomy 6:5, and quoted that Scripture as His answer. I decided, then, to study this greatest commandment as it was originally given in the Old Testament.
To help us understand what God is saying to us, we need to see Deuteronomy 6:5 in its context. For your convenience, I am going to reproduce Deuteronomy 6:1-8 so that you can more easily follow me in the primary lesson I learned from this Scripture.
These are the commands, decrees and laws the LORD your God directed me to teach you to observe in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to possess, so that you, your children and their children after them may fear the LORD your God as long as you live by keeping all his decrees and commands that I give you, and so that you may enjoy long life. Hear, O Israel, and be careful to obey so that it may go well with you and that you may increase greatly in a land flowing with milk and honey, just as the LORD, the God of your fathers, promised you.
Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads.
HOW TO LOVE GOD
As you read these verses from Deuteronomy, one thing that becomes clear is that the primary message is obedience to God. Notice how words such as commands, decrees, and laws are prominent (see verses 1, 2, 6). Then note how obedience to these commands, decrees, and laws is emphasized.
We are to observe them (verse 1), keep them (verse 2), and be careful to obey them (verse 3). They are to be upon our hearts (verse 6). We are to impress them on our children and talk about them continually; that is, when we sit at home, walk along the road, lie down, and get up (verse 7). We are to use all manner of reminder devices to keep His commands continually before us.
For the Israelites, that meant tying them on their hands and foreheads (verse 8) and writing them on their doorframes and gates (verse 9). For us, it might mean a “Post-it” note with a pertinent verse of Scripture stuck on the bathroom mirror or the clock on our desk. For a friend of mine it means a three-by-five card with a Scripture for the day written on it that he carries in his shirt pocket and refers to throughout the day. For another friend of mine who had a problem with a “heavy foot” on the accelerator pedal, it meant taping a card onto his dashboard on which he had paraphrased 1 John 2:6: “Whoever claims to live in Him must drive as Jesus would drive.” Of course, the most obvious reminder device is the discipline of Scripture memorization. Daily review and meditation on key passages is far and away the most effective means of keeping God’s commands continually before us.
It is in the midst of this strong emphasis to the Jews on obedience to God’s law, and on the practical necessity of keeping its precepts always before them so they would obey, that we find the greatest commandment, “Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength” (verse 5). Therefore, I concluded that, whatever else might be involved in loving God with all my heart, obedience to His law was certainly a major part of it.
(Again, I want to remind you that when I speak of the law of God as it applies to us today, I am referring to the permanent moral law of God that is binding upon every human being. I am not referring to the law given to Israel through Moses, some of which was temporary, such as the ceremonial law and the civil law.)
This equating of obedience to God with love to God is a prominent feature of the book of Deuteronomy. Without trying to be exhaustive, I found six other passages in the book where love and obedience are tied together. To help us feel the impact of this strong repetitive emphasis, they are quoted as follows:
And now, O Israel, what does the LORD your God ask of you but to fear the LORD your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to observe the LORD’s commands and decrees that I am giving you today for your own good?
DEUTERONOMY 10:12-13
So if you faithfully obey the commands I am giving you today —to love the LORD your God and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul.
DEUTERONOMY 11:13
If you carefully observe all these commands I am giving you to follow —to love the LORD your God, to walk in all his ways and to hold fast to him.
DEUTERONOMY 11:22
Because you carefully follow all these laws I command you today —to love the LORD your God and to walk always in his ways.
DEUTERONOMY 19:9
The LORD your God will circumcise your hearts and the hearts of your descendants, so that you may love him with all your heart and with all your soul, and live. . . . You will again obey the LORD and follow all his commands I am giving you today.
DEUTERONOMY 30:6, 8
This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live and that you may love the LORD your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the LORD is your life, and he will give you many years in the land he swore to give to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
DEUTERONOMY 30:19-20
It should not surprise us that obedience to God’s law is a major part of loving Him. After all, Jesus said, “Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me. He who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love him and show myself to him” (John 14:21; see also verses 15, 23). And the apostle John wrote, “This is love for God: to obey his commands” (1 John 5:3). I have known John 14:21 for years. I have preached it and written about it. I have taught that the proof of our love to God is our obedience to Him. Or to put it another way, our love to God will always manifest itself in obedience to Him.
CRUISE-CONTROL OBEDIENCE
So what is new? What did I learn from my study of Matthew 22:37 and Deuteronomy 6:5 that I didn’t know before? What I saw was the intensity and wholeheartedness with which I should obey God. If we are to love God with all our heart and soul and mind, and if obedience is a major part of such love, then it follows that we are to obey Him with all our heart, soul, and mind. We are to put everything we have into obedience to Him.
My observation is that most of us who are believers practice what I call a “cruise-control” approach to obedience. Many cars today have a convenient feature called cruise control. When you are driving on the highway you can accelerate to your desired speed, push the cruise-control button, and take your foot from the accelerator pedal. Some mechanism attached to the engine will then maintain your desired speed, and you can ease back and relax a little. You don’t have to watch your speedometer to make sure you’re not going to get a ticket for speeding, and you no longer have to experience the fatigue that comes with constant foot pressure on the accelerator. It’s very convenient and relatively relaxing. It’s a great feature on cars.
However, we tend to obey God in the same way. To continue the driving analogy, we press the accelerator pedal of obedience until we have brought our behavior up to a certain level or “speed.” The level of obedience is most often determined by the behavior standard of other Christians around us. We don’t want to lag behind them because we want to be as spiritual as they are. At the same time, we’re not eager to forge ahead of them because we wouldn’t want to be different. We want to just comfortably blend in with the level of obedience of those around us.
Once we have arrived at this comfortable level of obedience, we push the “cruise-control” button in our hearts, ease back, and relax. Our particular Christian culture then takes over and keeps us going at the accepted level of conduct. We don’t have to watch the speed-limit signs in God’s Word, and we certainly don’t have to experience the fatigue that comes with seeking to obey Him with all our heart, soul, and mind. This is what I call “cruise-control” obedience, and I fear it is descriptive of many of us much, if not all, of the time.
RACE-CAR OBEDIENCE
By contrast, consider race-car drivers. They wouldn’t think of using cruise control. They are not interested in blending in with the speed of those around them. They are not out for a Sunday afternoon drive. They want to win the race.
Race-car drivers are totally focused on their driving. Their foot is always on the accelerator as they try to push their car to the outer limits of its mechanical ability and endurance. Their eye is always on the track as they press to its limit their own skill in negotiating the turns on the track and the hazards of other cars around them. They are driving with all their heart, soul, and mind.
This is what it means to love God with all our heart and soul and mind. It means to obey Him with all our heart and soul and mind. It means, in the words of Hebrews 12:14, to “make every effort . . . to be holy,” and in the words of the apostle Peter, to “make every effort” to add to our faith the various facets of Christian character (2 Peter 1:5-7).
The apostle Paul didn’t have auto races and cruise controls to use as illustrations, so he used the metaphor of a footrace. Here is how he put it in 1 Corinthians 9:24-27:
Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize. Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last; but we do it to get a crown that will last forever. Therefore I do not run like a man running aimlessly; I do not fight like a man beating the air. No, I beat my body and make it my slave so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified for the prize.
Do you see the similarity to our contemporary illustration? The footracer running aimlessly or the boxer beating the air is the same person out for a Sunday drive with his or her cruise control on. The runner striving for the prize who goes into strict training and beats his or her body —that is, subdues its desires —is like the race-car driver who drives with all his or her heart and soul and mind. And Moses and Jesus and Paul all said this is the way we should live the Christian life.
God is not impressed with our worship on Sunday morning at church if we are practicing “cruise-control” obedience the rest of the week. You may sing with reverent zest or great emotional fervor, but your worship is only as pleasing to God as the obedience that accompanies it.
This is why the Holy Spirit was creating this sense of uneasiness in my mind over my professed love for God. I wasn’t living with some flagrant sin in my life, I was simply living in a “cruise-control” mode of obedience. I had lost the commitment and intensity that is implied in the “pursuit” of holiness. I wasn’t seeking to obey God’s law with all my heart and soul and mind. Instead I had settled into a comfortable routine, in which there were no major vices, but neither was there an all-out effort to obey God in every area of life, especially in interpersonal relationships.
We should delight in God. We should eagerly anticipate fellowship with Him during the quiet time and even throughout the entire day. It is healthy to want to gaze upon His beauty and to seek Him in His temple. The Westminster Shorter Catechism answers the question “What is the chief end of man?” by saying, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever.” We are not only to glorify God, we are to enjoy Him forever, both in this life and in eternity.
So the enjoyment of God and the desire to fellowship with Him and to worship Him are certainly important dimensions of our love to God. But the most important dimension is our wholehearted obedience: our desire to obey Him with all our heart, soul, and mind.
AN ACCEPTABLE MOTIVE
Although obedience is the primary way we express our love to God, it is not the same as love. Love is essentially a motive. Someone has made the point that love is a verb. For example, I am to love my wife as Christ loved the Church (Ephesians 5:25). Jesus said we are to love our enemies (Matthew 5:44). In each instance love is used as a verb. So then, it is correct that love is a verb, not a feeling. I am to love my enemies without regard to my feelings toward them.
In another sense, however, love is not a verb but the motive that prompts and guides other verbs; that is, certain actions. For example, I love my enemies, first by forgiving them for their harmful actions toward me, and then by seeking their welfare in appropriate ways. The verbs in this sentence are forgive and seek. Love always needs other verbs to give it hands and feet. By itself it can do nothing. This can be seen in 1 Corinthians 13, where Paul uses love as a noun, the subject of a whole list of action statements. Love is patient, love is kind, it does not envy, it does not boast, and so on.
The converse truth, though, is that love gives validity to my actions and makes them acceptable to God. I can seek the welfare of my enemies so they hopefully will be nice to me or not harm me again. That is not love; it is manipulation. It is looking out for my welfare under the guise of looking out for theirs.
Love for God, then, is the only acceptable motive for obedience to Him. This love may express itself in a reverence for Him and a desire to please Him, but those expressions must spring from love. Without the motive of love, my apparent obedience may be essentially self-serving. Negatively, I may fear God will punish me, or at least withhold His blessing from me, because of some disobedience. I may abstain from a particular sinful action out of fear I will be found out or because I don’t want to feel guilty afterward.
Positively, I may be seeking to earn God’s blessing through some pious actions. I may conform to a certain standard of conduct because I want to fit in with and be accepted by the Christian culture in which I live. I might even obey outwardly because I have a compliant temperament, and it is simply my “nature” to obey my parents, or my teacher, or civil authorities, or even God.
All of these motives —both negative and positive —may result in an outward form of obedience, but it is not obedience from the heart. Our behavior may appear outstanding to other people but not be acceptable to God because it does not spring from a motive of love to Him. Only conduct that arises from love is worthy of the name of obedience.
To love God with all our heart and soul and mind and to obey Him wholeheartedly and diligently are like the two sides of a coin. You cannot have one without the other. Fervency of worship on Sunday morning or in our private devotions is vain without an accompanying fervency in obedience to God. On the other hand, precise and exact obedience to the law of God is vain if it is not prompted by love for Him.
In his commentary on Matthew 22:37, John Calvin wrote,
[Christ] means by this that only the free service of our wills is acceptable to Him. Ultimately the man who comes to obey God will love Him first. . . . Let us therefore learn that the love of God is the beginning of religion, for God will not have the forced obedience of men, but wishes their service to be free and spontaneous. . . . Lastly we learn that God does not linger over the outward sign of achievement but chiefly searches the inner disposition [motive], that from a good root good fruits may grow.[46]
My wife and I moved into a house that had an unfinished garage. Every time I went into the garage I saw the bare two-by-four studs and the black feltlike undersiding. After living for twenty years in a house with a finished garage, it was rather depressing to me. Our son came home for a visit and, learning of my feelings, volunteered to install insulation and drywall in the garage.
Dan had never worked with drywall before and had to learn by doing. The finished job, though very acceptable, was not quite what one would expect from a professional drywall installer. But I am more pleased than if a professional had done the work. Why? Because the job was done out of love. Dan didn’t expect to get anything in return. He wasn’t trying to earn favor or manipulate me. He just wanted to show his love. Now every time I go into the garage I see the finished walls, but most of all, I see the love that went into them. Dan’s motive was more important to me than his performance.
Our motive for obedience is just as important, probably more so, to God than the level of our performance. A person who struggles with some persistent sin but does so out of love for God is more pleasing to Him than the person who has no such struggle but is proud of his or her self-control. Of course, the person who obeys from a motive of love will be concerned about his or her performance. There will be a sincere desire and an earnest effort to please God in every area of life.
Other motives besides pride can taint our obedience. Probably next after pride is the motive of not wanting to feel guilty. This is especially true in areas of persistent sin. You have committed some particular sin many times before and you know well the guilt feelings that have followed the act. Your motive for struggling against that temptation is to avoid the guilt that follows, rather than to express love to God.
Another wrong motive is fear of the consequences of disobedience. In my book Transforming Grace, I told of a man who believed it was his duty to tithe (that is, give 10 percent of his income to God’s work). When I asked him why he was so strict in the practice of tithing, he replied, “I’d be afraid not to.” He was afraid God would punish him financially if he failed to tithe. His motive was not love but fear of perceived consequences.
Still another frequent motive is the desire to get something from God. It could be as subtle and silly as thinking that if I kneel to pray about a message I am to give, God will grant greater blessing than if I sit in my chair to pray. In using that example, I am not disparaging the act of kneeling to pray. I’m simply trying to illustrate how our deceitful hearts can lead us to do something good from some motive other than love to God.
GROWING IN LOVE
How then can we develop this love for God so that our obedience is prompted by love instead of some lesser motive? The Scripture gives us our first clue, or point of beginning, when it says, “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). Our love for God can only be a response to His love for us. If I do not believe God loves me, I cannot love Him. To love God, I must believe that He is for me, not against me (Romans 8:31), and that He accepts me as a son or a daughter, not a slave (Galatians 4:7).
What would keep us from believing that God loves us? The answer is a sense of guilt and condemnation because of our sin. Charles Hodge said,
The great difficulty with many Christians is that they cannot persuade themselves that Christ (or God) loves them; and the reason why they cannot feel confident of the love of God, is, that they know they do not deserve his love, on the contrary, that they are in the highest degree unlovely. How can the infinitely pure God love those who are defiled with sin, who are proud, selfish, discontented, ungrateful, disobedient? This, indeed, is hard to believe.[47]
A tender conscience that is alert to sin, especially those “refined” sins such as pride, criticality, resentment, discontent, irritableness, and the like, is a great advantage in the pursuit of holiness, as it enables us to become aware of sins that lie deep beneath the level of external actions. But this same tender conscience can load us down with guilt, and when we are under that burden and sense of condemnation, it is difficult to love God or believe that He loves us.
James Fraser said, “But whilst the conscience retains the charge of guilt, condemnation, and wrath, there cannot be purity, or sincerity of heart toward God, or sincerity of the love of God. Human nature is so formed, that it cannot love any object that is adverse and terrible to it.”[48] What Fraser was essentially saying is that we cannot love God if we think we are under His judgment and condemnation.
This means that we must continually take those sins that our consciences accuse us of to the Cross and plead the cleansing blood of Jesus. It is only the blood of Christ that cleanses our consciences so that we may no longer feel guilty (Hebrews 9:14; 10:2). To paraphrase James Fraser, “The conscience once cleansed no longer retains a charge of guiltiness and of judgment for it. So there are two ways of having a good conscience. One is by not having transgressed; the other is by having the guilt taken away by the application of the blood of Jesus.”[49]
When our sense of guilt is taken away because our consciences are cleansed by the blood of Christ, we are freed up to love Him with all our hearts and souls and minds. In fact, not only are we freed up, we are motivated in a positive sense to love Him in this wholehearted way. Our love will be spontaneous in an outpouring of gratitude to Him and a fervent desire to obey Him.
Jesus said, “He who has been forgiven little loves little” (Luke 7:47). In the context of that statement He essentially said the converse is also true: Those who have been forgiven much love much. Therefore, we can say that the extent to which we realize and acknowledge our own sinfulness, and the extent to which we realize the total forgiveness and cleansing from those sins, will determine the measure of our love for God.
So if we want to grow in our love for God and in the acceptable obedience that flows out of that love, we must keep coming back to the Cross and the cleansing blood of Jesus Christ. That is why it is so important that we keep the gospel before us every day. Because we sin every day, and our consciences condemn us every day, we need the gospel every day.
FAITH AND LOVE
There is an inextricable link between faith and love. Without faith, it is impossible to please God (Hebrews 11:6), and as we have seen, without love it is impossible to please God. But this love arises in our hearts only as we by faith lay hold of the great truths of the gospel. To do this, our faith must be constantly nourished by feeding on the gospel. That is why I stated in chapter 1 that the most important message we need to hear as believers is the gospel. It is not the only message; we do need to hear the requirements of discipleship. But the gospel is the most important, because it alone provides both the proper motive and the only enduring motivation to respond to our Lord’s call to discipleship.
The apostle Paul said in Galatians 5:6, “For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision has any value. The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love.” As we by faith feed on the gospel, that faith will express itself in love; that is, in loving obedience to God. This is the very nature of faith.
Beginning with the next chapter we will consider some of the other disciplines we must practice that are important to the pursuit of holiness. But remember, none is more important than the discipline of continually feeding your soul on the great truth of the gospel.
John Owen was considered the prince of Puritan theologians. He wrote three masterful treatises on sin: Of the Mortification of Sin in Believers; Of Temptation; and The Nature, Power, Deceit, and Prevalency of Indwelling Sin. Those three volumes have been very influential in my own personal pursuit of holiness. He also wrote a book entitled Communion with God, in which he made this statement: “The greatest sorrow and burden you can lay on the Father, the greatest unkindness you can do to him is not to believe that he loves you.”[50]
Does that sentence surprise you? Would you have expected Owen to say that the greatest sorrow and burden we can lay on the Father is to commit some scandalous sin? Isn’t that the way we tend to think of God, more as our Judge than as our Father? That is because we do not keep the gospel constantly before us.
You can easily gather by the nature of his three treatises that John Owen was not soft on sin. In fact, his work on indwelling sin is very sobering —almost scary —as he exposes the nature, power, and deceitfulness of the sin that still resides in us. But Owen was more concerned that we keep before us the gospel: the love of God revealed in His Son, Jesus Christ.
To the degree that we live with an abiding sense of His love for us in Christ, to that degree will we love God with all our heart and soul and mind. So, as we turn our attention in the following chapters to the personal disciplines we need to practice in the pursuit of holiness, let us not put the gospel “on the shelf” of our lives. Let us review it daily, and in the joy that it brings, pursue these disciplines.
[46] John Calvin, Calvin’s New Testament Commentaries, vol. 3, A Harmony of the Gospels Matthew, Mark and Luke and the Epistles of James and Jude, ed. David W. Torrance and Thomas F. Torrance, trans. A. W. Morrison (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1972), 36.
[47] Charles Hodge, Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, reprint, 1955; 1886), 290.
[48] James Fraser, A Treatise on Sanctification (Audubon, NJ: Old Paths Publications, 1992; originally published 1774, revised 1897), 418.
[49] Ibid.
[50] John Owen, Communion with God, ed. R. J. K. Law (Edinburgh, Scotland: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1991), 13.