Preface

The question How do I love God? reaches beneath almost every other question in the Christian life. Prayer, holiness, worship, mission, endurance, and love for people all depend on what we believe God is like and whether our hearts are being ordered toward him. Yet the question can also become painful. A believer may know the greatest commandment and still feel cold. Another may possess intense religious emotion while resisting obedience. A third may serve tirelessly while secretly trying to earn the acceptance already offered in Christ.

This book argues that Scripture refuses these reductions. To love God is to respond to his supreme worth and gracious self-giving with whole-person trust, delight, worship, allegiance, obedience, and desire for fellowship with him. This love is commanded, but fallen people cannot manufacture it. It begins in God’s prior love, is revealed decisively in Jesus Christ, is awakened by regeneration, and grows through the work of the Holy Spirit in the ordinary life of faith.

The book therefore begins with Scripture’s definition and storyline, moves through the gospel and the transformation of desire, examines emotion and obedience, and then turns to the practices, obstacles, community, suffering, mission, and lifelong maturation of love. Historical voices are included as witnesses, not masters. Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Owen, Edwards, Spurgeon, Lewis, Stott, Packer, Keller, Piper, MacArthur, Ferguson, Reeves, and others are useful only insofar as they help us see what Scripture teaches.

The intended reader may be a new believer, a mature Christian, a discouraged disciple, a small-group leader, or a pastor seeking a structured resource. Read slowly. Use the questions. Pray the prayers in your own words. Do not treat the practices as a mechanism by which God can be controlled. They are invitations to place yourself before the God who has already acted in Christ.