For The Love of God

In reading 1 John 2:15-17, I got as far as verse 15 and had to stop. In considering John’s remarks, I came to the conclusion that it is not possible for the believer to love the world and love God at the same time. We simply were not created with the capacity to love both at the same time nor were we created with the capacity to experience the love of God while our heart is filled with love for and of the world. Thus, John’s statement: “If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.”

To the casual observer, John is simply making the point that if you love the world, you cannot love God at the same time. However, I think he is doing more than that. You see, if it is impossible to love God while you are in love with the world then the reciprocal truth would be that it is impossible to love the world while you are in love with God. Thus, John is doing more than stating a fact about the impossibility of loving both the world and God at the same time. He is, essentially, giving us the key to how we are to overcome the world’s encroachments into our lives. If we are in love with the Lord, that is, we love Him with all our heart, mind, and soul we will not be tempted to love the world and what inferior pleasures it offers us.

The battle, then for the Christian, is one of, to what degree do we love the Lord? To love Him with all our heart, all our mind, and all our soul leaves very little room for which to love the world and its sinful allurements. Perhaps this is why it is the greatest commandment.

Now, lest you think that this is not such a hard thing to do. Keep in mind, that this is the battle of your life and for your life—to be so in love with the Lord, so satisfied with the Lord, so captivated by Him that sin’s “fruitless joys”, as Augustine referred to them, have no power over you. And it is essentially the battle of faith. What I mean by this is that the battle to love the Lord more than sin and the battle to prefer holiness to sin’s immediate gratification is a battle to believe the Word of God and its promises of an exceedingly far superior joy and happiness that is to be had and experienced through obedience and lost through disobedience. Thus, in the truest sense, in spite of how it seems, to sin is to lose the opportunity for pleasure.

So, where does one begin in his quest to prefer holiness to sin? In Romans 6:17, Paul, in commending the believers for an obedience from the heart made the point to thank God for it. Thus, the best place to start in preferring holiness is with God in that the believer turns to God in faith for faith and then to God’s Word for the promises that motivate us to obedience. As one has well said, “It takes God to love God.” In other words, “we love Him because He first loved us”. In practical terms, this means we cry out to God for the faith that will take Him at His Word and believe that He is by far our greatest treasure and pleasure in this life and the life to come. As Psalm 16:11 so aptly states about God, “In your presence is fullness of joy; In your right hand there are pleasures forever.”