Loving the Lord: Not Easy in Today's World

By A. W. Tozer

Jesus answered and said unto him, If a man love me, he will keep my words:
and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode
with him.          --  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.