Loving the Lord: Not Easy in Today's World
 
By A. W. Tozer

. . .If a man love me, he will keep my words;
and my Father will love him, and we will
come to him. . . . ]ohn 74:23
 
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.