Monday, May 28, 2007

What It Means to Love God

by Wayne Shih @ http://acts18910.blogspot.com

From John Piper's book Taste and See (pp. 203-204):
What is love to God? Some reduce it to doing things in obedience to God because John 14:15 says, "If you love Me, you will keep My commandments." But that is not what the text says. It says that obedience will result from love. It does not say that obedience is love. Nor does 1 John 5:3 contradict this when it says, "This is the love of God, that we keep His commandments," because the next phrase is to be taken with it: "and His commandments are not burdensome." In other words, love is not just the doing but the doing from a certain kind of heart that makes the doing "not burdensome."

Piper goes on to refute another expression of love for God which has only to do with acts of willpower. Then he writes:
So what then is love to God if not mere action or mere willpower? Here is the way St. Augustine defined it over sixteen hundred years ago: "I call [love to God] the motion of the soul toward the enjoyment of God for his own sake, and the enjoyment of one's self and one's neighbor for the sake of God" (On Christian Doctrine, iii, x, 16). That, I think, is a very good definition. Unlike the other two definitions suggested above, delight in God is at the heart of the definition.

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