What Does It Mean to Love God?

When Scripture commands love for God, what kind of response does it require?

Key passages

Deuteronomy 6:4–9; Matthew 22:34–40; John 14:15–24; Psalm 63; 1 John 4:7–21.

Chapter thesis

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.

More than one feeling or one action

The word love is used so widely that it can become almost empty. People may mean attraction, approval, kindness, loyalty, pleasure, sacrifice, or preference. Scripture gathers several of these dimensions into a God-centered whole. Love for God includes genuine affection: the Psalms thirst, rejoice, remember, and cling. It includes trust: the believer treats God’s character and promises as dependable. It includes allegiance: God is not one interest among many but the rightful Lord. It includes obedience: Christ repeatedly connects love with keeping his word. It includes communion with God: eternal life is knowing the Father through the Son, and believers are invited to abide in Christ’s love.

No single element is sufficient by itself. Strong emotion without truth may be religious excitement. External obedience without faith may be fear, pride, or self-salvation. Correct doctrine without worship may become sterile mastery of ideas. Service without communion may become activism. Biblical love is the integrated orientation of the person toward God as God.

This does not mean that every dimension is equally vivid at every moment. A suffering Christian may possess little felt joy while continuing to trust and cling. A new believer may have warm affection but limited understanding. A mature disciple may obey through a season of emotional heaviness. Love should be judged by its object, direction, truth, and fruit over time, not by a momentary emotional reading.

God as the supreme good

To love God is not merely to value the benefits he gives. It is to value God himself. Psalm 73 reaches its turning point when the psalmist can say that God is his portion even when body and heart fail. Psalm 63 calls God’s steadfast love better than life. Such language does not despise creation. It places every created gift beneath its Giver.

This priority exposes idolatry. We may want God mainly as a means to health, marriage, success, emotional stability, ministry influence, or protection. Those are understandable desires, and many are legitimate subjects of prayer. Yet if we would abandon God when he withholds them, the gift has become functionally ultimate. Love says, sometimes through tears, “Even when I do not understand your providence, you remain worthy, truthful, and good.”

A covenantal and relational reality

In Deuteronomy, love is covenant loyalty shaped by God’s prior redemption. Israel is not told to create a deity through devotion. The Lord has acted, revealed his name, rescued a people, and bound them to himself. Their love is to fill homes, conversations, memory, work, teaching, and public life. It is relational, but never casual. The God loved is the holy Creator and covenant King.

In the New Testament this covenantal reality becomes Christ-centered. The Father makes himself known in the Son. Jesus loves his disciples, lays down his life, sends the Spirit, and calls them to remain in his love. To love God is therefore inseparable from receiving, trusting, and loving Christ. A vague spirituality that admires “the divine” while resisting Jesus does not match apostolic Christianity.

Voice from the church: John Stott

Stott repeatedly joined faith, love, obedience, and worship around the person of Christ. His useful emphasis is that clearer sight of who Jesus is does not end in information; it calls forth trust, devotion, submission, and praise. The qualification is that intellectual clarity alone cannot regenerate the heart. The Spirit must make the truth spiritually apprehended and personally received.

Important distinction

Love is not less than obedience, but it is more than compliance. A person may perform correct actions for reputation, control, fear, or self-righteousness. Christian obedience flows from faith and increasingly seeks God’s pleasure because God is loved.

A working test

Ask not only, “Do I feel close to God?” but also:

• Do I want God to be honored even when I receive no recognition?

• Do I return to Christ when I sin, or do I hide behind excuses and self-punishment?

• Am I willing to revise my desires when Scripture contradicts them?

• Does my claimed love for God become patience, truthfulness, generosity, and love for people?

• Do I seek fellowship with God rather than using religious activity to avoid him?

These questions diagnose direction; they do not measure salvation mechanically. The strongest evidence of love is not sinless performance but a persevering, grace-dependent movement toward God that bears real fruit.

Chapter summary

Love for God is whole-person devotion to the triune God revealed in Christ. It embraces affection, trust, allegiance, worship, obedience, and communion. It places God above every rival and becomes visible in love for others.

Reflect and discuss

1. Which dimension of love - affection, trust, allegiance, obedience, worship, or communion - do you most often neglect?

2. Which gift of God are you most tempted to value above God himself?

3. Where does your life already display a genuine, though imperfect, movement toward God?

Practice for this week

Read Psalm 63 on three separate days. Each time, write one sentence beginning, “God is worthy of my love because…” Then choose one act of obedience that expresses that truth.

Prayer

Father, you alone are God and you are worthy of my whole life. Unite what is divided in me. Teach me to delight in your goodness, trust your word, obey your Son, and love the people you place before me. Let my devotion be truthful rather than performative, through Jesus Christ. Amen.