Loving the Lord: Not Easy in Today's World

By A. W. Tozer

Jesus replied, "Because I will only reveal myself to those who love me
and obey me. The Father will love them too, and we will come to them
and live with them.  ---John 14:23

        The gravest question any of us face is whether we do or do not love
the Lord!
 
        Too much hinges on the answer to pass the matter off lightly, and it
is a question that no one can answer for another.  Not even the Bible can
tell the individual man that he loves the Lord; it can only tell him how he
can know whether or not he does.
 
        It can and does tell us how to test our hearts for love as a man might
test ore for the presence of uranium, but we must do the testing.
 
        If we lived in a spiritual Utopia where every wind blew toward heaven
and every man was a friend of God, we Christians could take everything
for granted, counting on the new life within us to cause us to do the will
of God without effort and more or less unconsciously.
 
        Unfortunately, we have opposing us the lusts of the flesh, the
attraction of the world and the temptations of the devil.  These complicate
our lives and require us often to make determined moral decisions on the
side of Christ and His commandments.
 
        When with honesty and serious minds we ask our-selves,
"Do I love the Lord, or no?", there will likely be any number of personal
workers standing by to quote convenient texts to prove that we do.
 
        But our Lord told His disciples that love and obedience were
organically united, that the keeping of His sayings would prove that we
love Him. This is the true test of love and we will be wise to face up to it! 

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     Yours in Christ,
     Paul N. F.