How to Love God as He wants to be Loved

Several weeks ago, Carolyn and I had the joyful privilege of visiting the Celiberti family in the Hospital after the birth of their twins. Part of the ritual of such a visit is to go to the window of the newborn nursery and admire the freshly minted babies. All of the babies lie there in their little basinettes, some of them awake, some asleep. On the basinettes, there are little placards in either pink or blue, telling you who the occupant is and who he or she belongs to. Each baby also wears a little identification bracelet with his name on it. When the nurses bring the babies to the mothers to be fed, they match that little bracelet on the baby with a bracelet on the mother, to be sure that they’ve got the right baby.

These precautions are necessary, because newborns are so new that they don’t yet have any strong distinguishing characteristics of their own. And they certainly can’t tell you who they belong to! They need those marks of ownership.

Christians are like that in some ways, too. We need to have the marks of ownership - birthmarks, if you will - to show people who we belong to. If a person doesn’t have these marks of ownership, John says, it is because he does not belong to the Lord. The apostle John, in the book of 1 John, has shown us what these marks are. There are three of them:

I want you to draw a picture in your mind’s eye with me for a moment. Draw a picture of a triangle. Have you got it? Now, color this triangle gold. Good! Now, at each point put one of the following words: believe, love, obey. Have you done that? Now in the very center of the triangle, right in the middle, put the words “born of God”. Got that? You know what you’ve just drawn? You’ve just drawn a diagram of the authentic Christian life.

A person who is born of God has three things that are true of his life, according to the book of 1 John:

1. He believes that Jesus Christ is God come in the flesh.

2. He loves others.

3. He obeys God.

That’s a very simple definition of what a Christian is: A Christian is someone who believes that Jesus Christ is God, loves others, and obeys God.

If those three things are true of you; you’re a Christian. If they’re not; you’re not. It’s as simple as that.

Let’s look at some Scripture

1 John 4:15 If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in him and he in God.

1 John 5:1 Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God

That’s the belief component of a true Christian. You must believe that Jesus is the Son of God, the Christ, the Anointed One come from God to redeem us from our sins. You don’t have that, you’re not a Christian.

But being a Christian doesn’t stop there. Your belief has to have shoes on. It has to make a difference in the way you live and the way you relate to other people, or it isn’t true belief. You have to have love to be a real Christian. You can’t say that you believe in Jesus if you don’t love people. You can’t say that you love God if you don’t love your wife. You can’t say that you are a believer if you mistreat your kids. You can’t say that you’re part of the family of God if you can’t get along with certain people who rub you the wrong way. Love proves your belief. Let’s look at some Scriptures:

1 John 3:10 This is how we know who the children of God are and who the children of the devil are: Anyone who does not do what is right is not a child of God; nor is anyone who does not love his brother.

1 John 3:14 We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love our brothers. Anyone who does not love remains in death.

1 John 4:16 God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him.

So you can’t be a Christian without belief and you can’t be a Christian without love. Because love is what shows that your belief is real. But your belief is shown in another way in your life as well as love, and that’s obedience. A real Christian obeys God. Let’s look at some Scriptures:

1 John 2:3-4 We know that we have come to know him if we obey his commands. The man who says, “I know him,” but does not do what he commands is a liar, and the truth is not in him.

1 John 3:9 No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God’s seed remains in him; he cannot go on sinning, because he has been born of God.

1 John 3:24 Those who obey his commands live in him, and he in them.

So you can’t be a Christian if you are not obeying God. And if you are obeying God, it is going to make a tremendous difference in the way you live. This is what I want to focus upon today - obedience.

Our love for God is shown in our obedience to God. If you want to know how God wants us to really love Him, He wants us to obey him. The great English Bible expositor, and chaplain to the Queen, John R. Stott says: “If we truly love God, we keep his commandments”. It’s that simple.

Over and over in the Bible, from beginning to end, God has told us that He wants our obedience. He doesn’t want our sacrifices, He doesn’t want our religious services, He doesn’t want our verbal expressions of love and devotion; He want our obedience. Because only our obedience shows that we truly love and honor Him.

In our text for today, we find the words…

1 John 5:3 This is love for God: to obey his commands. And his commands are not burdensome

The word “obey” in that verse means literally “to keep, to guard, to keep close watch over”.

A missionary with the Wycliffe Bible Translators was working in a remote area with a tribe of Indians. He was translating the New Testament into their language. But he was struggling to find the right word in the tribal language to express this word “obey”. One day, the missionary whistled for his dog, and his dog came bounding over to him from the other side of the village. The chief was watching and he said to the missionary “Your dog is all ear”. The missionary realized that he had just found the right word for obedience - the word that meant “all ear”.

When God speaks to you, are you “all ears”? Do you jump to do His will. Do you set aside what you are doing to do what God wants you to do? Or do you say “Not now God. I’ll do it someday, but not now. I’m busy doing my own thing right now. Maybe later I’ll get around to what you want me to do.” We have a saying in our house about that kind of response from our children:

Delayed obedience is disobedience.

General Bernard Montgomery was a brilliant British general in the Second World War. He was a master tactician and a careful planner. He never went into battle until he was sure his troops and his supplies were adequately prepared. During the early part of the war, Churchill assigned Monty to take over command of the struggling British army in North Africa. The German General Rommel, the Desert Fox, was at the door of Egypt with his Afrika Korps, and the Suez Canal was the great prize he coveted.

Montgomery found his command in disarray. The morale of the troops was low. The lines of communication were dreadful. Perhaps most distressing to Monty, was that he discovered that orders from headquarters were not being carried out swiftly and without question. He quickly made it his business to instill a sense of obedience in his officers and his troops. He made it clear that he expected his commands to be carried out. He declared: “Orders no longer form the basis for discussion, but for action.” And it was because of his decisive approach to the issue of obedience that his army was able to defeat the Germans and turn the tide of battle.

We cannot play games with God in the area of obedience. We cannot say that we love Him if we do not obey Him. Too many Christians make lots of noise about loving God, but when you look at their lives, you find that they are doing what they want to do. They are really following their own agenda, not God’s. True Christianity is not all about getting warm fuzzy feelings once a week at church, about singing the hymns, and reading the Bible, and praising the Lord. True Christianity is all about obeying God out there in the world - in the office when your boss gets on your case, in the school when your buddies want you to compromise your principles, in the home when your preschoolers are driving you right up the wall. What you do in those places tells whether you’re a real Christian or not. Anybody can fake it at church.

But you may be asking “How do I know what God wants me to do? How does He give me my marching orders? What is it that I am to obey?”

Nowadays, you hear people talking about what God told them to do. God told me to do this or God told me to do that. “I had a vision of a nine hundred foot Jesus, and He told me to build a huge medical complex and raise millions of dollars to pay for it. And if I didn’t do it, he’d take me home.” Is that how God speaks to us? Does God reveal His will to us in visions and dreams and special revelations? Do we hear voices from heaven? Does God whisper in our ear? How do we know what God wants us to do?

Let me tell you a story that I think answers the question. There once was a minister of the Church of England who lived about a hundred years ago. He often used to have conversations with an old cobbler who was a Christian. The cobbler did not have much education, but he really loved the Lord and he really knew his Bible. One day, the minister happened to mention the cobbler to a friend of his. The minister’s friend was a theologian who had a pretty high opinion of himself and his theological knowledge. He said he’d like to meet the cobbler because he was sure he could ask the cobbler some questions about the Bible that the cobbler would never be able to answer.

So the minister took him to the cobbler’s shop. After they were introduced, the young theologian asked the old cobbler “Can you tell me what the Urim and the Thummim were in the Bible?” The cobbler replied, “Well, I don’t know exactly: I understand that the words apply to something that was on the breastplate of the high priest in the OT. I know that the words mean “Lights and Perfection” and that through the Urim and Thummim, the high priest was somehow able to discern the mind of the Lord. But I find that I can discern the mind of the Lord by just changing two letters of those words. I take my Bible, and by “usin’ and thumbin’” it, I find out what the Lord wants me to do.”

You want to know what God wants you to do? It’s in this book, my friend. God’s not going to send you a telegram, or an angel, or a dream, or a vision of what he wants you to do when you’ve got this book sitting on your shelf. He wants you to be “usin’ and thumbin’” it. God has revealed to us in this book all that He wants us to know about how to live life.

2 Peter 1:3 His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness

…and it’s in His Word. So don’t go looking for dreams and visions and voices. Get yourself into the Word, and get into it to obey it. That’ll show God you really love Him.

During the five years I was in college, I was going with a beautiful young woman whom I later married. She lived in Montreal; I attended school in Toronto, 350 miles away. Through our long periods of separation, we wrote lots of letters. Every day, I would check my mailbox to see if a letter from my sweetheart had arrived. Almost every day there was one, some days there were even two! Now can you imagine if I had taken those letters out of my mailbox, took them back to my dorm room and put them on the shelf unopened? After a few weeks, I would have had a big stack of letters gathering dust. I’m sure you’d begin to wonder how much I really loved the person who was writing those letters.

Yet this is what many so-called Christians do with their Bibles. The Bible is like a love letter to us from God. But so many of us don’t even open it. We keep it on the shelf, perhaps we have two or three Bibles on the shelf, and perhaps some Bible study books beside them. But we don’t open them, and we don’t read the Bible as a love letter - hanging on every word, reading and re-reading it, memorizing it. And if we don’t read it, how can we possibly obey it?

Your love for God is shown in your obedience to God. And your obedience to God comes from the Bible, because that’s where you find God’s will.

Perhaps we’re afraid to obey God because we think that if we do, God will make us into weirdos- religious fanatics who go around mindlessly exclaiming “Praise the Lord” or singing hymns in supermarkets. Or maybe we think that if we obey God, he’ll ship us off to Upper Volta as missionaries to the Tsetse tribe or something. We just don’t want God’s will to mess up our life, our plans, our dreams.

1 John 5:3 This is love for God: to obey his commands. And his commands are not burdensome

The word that is used in that verse - “burdensome” - means literally “a heavy, crushing, fierce weight” The KJV says “grievous”. In other words, the commandments of the Lord are not meant to oppress us, to weigh us down. They’re not like the rules of the Pharisees mentioned by Jesus.

Matthew 11:28-30 “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

But the trouble is that we think we know better than God what’s good for us. So we go our own way, without regard to God’s will for us, without thought of obeying Him, and then we’re surprised that our life is full of heartaches and crushingly heavy burdens. We need to hear David Livingston when he said, “I would rather be in the heart of Africa in the will of God, than on the throne of England out of the will of God.” It takes faith to say that.

Our text in 1 John tells us that this kind of faith - the kind of faith that puts God first, that makes us want to obey God, is the kind of faith that enables us to overcome the world, to live victoriously.

When we become a true child of God, the Bible says that though we still live in the world, the world no longer holds a spell over us. To be sure, the world still puts pressure on us. We still are tempted by the world to abandon God and go our own way, to do our own thing. We feel the moral pressure that comes from the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life. We feel intellectual pressure to stop believing God and His Word. We may even feel physical pressure from the world in the form of persecution for being a Christian. But the world’s pull on us is no longer decisive; the fascination of the world has lost its appeal. It’s like a witch who is wearing a beautiful mask, but the mask has slipped. We no longer are so attracted to the world and the things of the world, if we are real Christians. This is what John means when he says that we have overcome the world. When we make obedience to God our Number One Priority in living, we overcome the world.

There are three marks of a genuine believer:

1. He believes that Jesus Christ is God come in the flesh.

2. He loves others.

3. He obeys God. And when he does, he overcomes the world.

These are the birthmarks of the Christian. They show that he has been born of God. Are they true of you?