I would like you to ponder the following: What motivates you to live like you do? What is it that compels you to do certain things and constrains you from doing other things? What ultimately and primarily influences your decisions to act and behave in certain ways and not in others?
For some, the answer will be as we are told in 1 John 2:16-17, satisfaction of their lusts for pleasure, possessions and power. For others it will be to gain honor and avoid shame, which was the motivation of many in Jesus’ day and has been the primary motivation in most Mid-Eastern and East Asian cultures. For others, the motivation may be to meet a hierarchy of needs as proposed in the psychological theory of Abraham Maslow, or to gain reward and avoid punishment as proposed by psychologist B.F. Skinner.
Similar to Skinner’s theory of human motivation are those who embrace the philosophy of Hedonism, where their primary motivation is to seek maximum pleasure and avoid all pain. A more religious person may answer that their primary motivation in life is to avoid Hell and merit Heaven, while others are primarily motivated in all they do by love for their family.
Love is to be our primary motivation for all that we do, but it is not love for family or for our country or love for ourselves. The Bible makes it very clear that our primary overriding motivation in all that we say or do is to be our love for God, with love for our neighbor a close second.
Jesus tells us in Matthew 22:34-40 that the preeminent commandment, that subsumes all other of God’s commands is that “you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself”. In Luke 10:25-28, Jesus presents such love for God as being essential to a person inheriting eternal life – entrance into Heaven. This makes perfect sense, because why would Jesus, who is God, desire to have with Him in Heaven those who did not love Him above all else while on earth. In fact, 1 Corinthians 16:22 states quite tersely, “If anyone does not love the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be accursed”, essentially let him (or her) be condemned to Hell.
God’s command for us to love Him personally and passionately above all else is not a command made by a being who needs anything from us; it in no way benefits God for us to love Him. He is not trying to cure His loneliness or fill up His emptiness or increase his significance or improve His self-esteem as we do many times when we are desiring someone to love us.
It is a command given by an infinitely glorious, eternally joyful, self-existent, self-sufficient being, who created you and me in His glorious image to be the objects/beneficiaries of His love; sharing in the eternal love relationship between God the Father, God the Son and God Holy Spirit, in whose presence we would know only fulness of joy and pleasure forevermore as His beloved children (Psalm 16:11). As such, He alone would be the object of our deepest love, the source of our greatest joy, such that our love for Him would motivate all that we do. However, this is clearly not the relationship we have with God today.
We learn from God’s gracious self-revelation, the Bible, that it is sin, our rejection of His authority over our lives, and the corrupting power of that sin on our minds and hearts, that has separated us from experiencing, valuing and rejoicing in God’s love for us, with our love for Him being replaced by love for this world and the things of this world (1 John 2:15-16).
However, God, in love, executes His eternal plan in and through the person and work of Jesus Christ, to restore men and women to the glorious relationship of mutual love which He created us to enjoy in Him and with one another in the beginning. In my next post, I will begin to look at how that plan results in sinful men and women coming to a place in their life where all that they do, both while in this world and throughout eternity, will be motivated by their love for God and their faith in His love for them.
In the meantime, I would encourage you to take time to view a related teaching on this by Pastor Brian Borgman that can be found at this link: The Love of God Poured into our Hearts You will be greatly blessed.
Grace and Peace ×
Thanks Jim