Growing in Love (Obeying the Great Commandmant, cont.)
In my last post, I shared from the book I'm reading about some of the motives, other than love for God, from which we can obey. I'm not saying I don't ever fall back into fear or guilt or wanting something from God as a motive for obedience. But it has helped me to realize that when I am motivated by those kinds of things, I am not obeying from a heart of love. Those are selfish motives. No matter how much we convince ourselves they are about God; they are really about us. And any time we make something all about us, it's not about our love for God.
God knows our hearts better than we know our hearts. And we may succeed in fooling ourselves, but we never succeed in fooling Him. Many times, we are not even fooling other people when we are successfully deceiving ourselves. One of the serious pitfalls we can fall into, as Christians, is to lie to ourselves about our own hearts. If we convince ourselves that our motives are right when they are selfish, we won't repent because we already feel self-justified and self-righteous. But the truth is that we are only justified through confessing our sins and repenting and pleading the blood of Jesus. By deceiving ourselves about our own hearts, we literally commit spiritual suicide. We can't receive God's grace and His forgiveness while we continue to justify our actions and our hearts -- claiming they are pure. We must face the truth about ourselves in order to receive the justification that God has provided in Christ. On the other hand, we must not fall into self-condemnation.
If we believe God loves us in proportion to our performance, we may try to hide our sin and attempt to manipulate God (and people) through an outward obedience that is not from the heart. I don't want that kind of obedience to prevail in my life. I want to obey from a heart of love.
Our obedience cannot be motivated by love for God until we are so secure in His love for us that we don't fear acknowledging our sinfulness and repenting.
From The Discipline of Grace by Jerry Bridges:
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 to God can only be a response to His love for us...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."
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.
...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)..."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." (James Frasier)
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 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 to 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.
God knows our hearts better than we know our hearts. And we may succeed in fooling ourselves, but we never succeed in fooling Him. Many times, we are not even fooling other people when we are successfully deceiving ourselves. One of the serious pitfalls we can fall into, as Christians, is to lie to ourselves about our own hearts. If we convince ourselves that our motives are right when they are selfish, we won't repent because we already feel self-justified and self-righteous. But the truth is that we are only justified through confessing our sins and repenting and pleading the blood of Jesus. By deceiving ourselves about our own hearts, we literally commit spiritual suicide. We can't receive God's grace and His forgiveness while we continue to justify our actions and our hearts -- claiming they are pure. We must face the truth about ourselves in order to receive the justification that God has provided in Christ. On the other hand, we must not fall into self-condemnation.
If we believe God loves us in proportion to our performance, we may try to hide our sin and attempt to manipulate God (and people) through an outward obedience that is not from the heart. I don't want that kind of obedience to prevail in my life. I want to obey from a heart of love.
Our obedience cannot be motivated by love for God until we are so secure in His love for us that we don't fear acknowledging our sinfulness and repenting.
From The Discipline of Grace by Jerry Bridges:
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 to God can only be a response to His love for us...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."
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.
...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)..."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." (James Frasier)
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 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 to 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.
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