Where He Leads I Will Follow: All the Omnis

 

Whoever has my commands and keeps them is the one who loves me. The one who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love them and show myself to them.”  John 14:21

 The order, the progression of things, matters. We love God because He first loved us (1 John 4:19). We obey God because we love God (John 14:21). God loves us > We love God > We obey God. This is a very clear and important flow. When those arrows get moved around, when people try to put things in a different order, it goes poorly.

 At times in my life, I mistakenly had the impression that God loved me only when and because I obeyed Him. Like His love was dependent on my actions. If I was obeying Him, I was in His favor or love and when I was making poor choices, I was out of it. The first fallacy of this thinking is it puts me in charge of God – how ridiculous! The idea that God’s choice to love me would be dependent on something as fallible and inconsistent as myself is so foolish, but we let ourselves get caught up in that kind of thinking. Like God couldn’t possibly love us as we are, warts and all. Like we have to clean ourselves up and make ourselves presentable for Him before He will deign to grace us with His love. But that’s not the truth at all! The Bible tells us in the first verse I referenced, 1 John 4:19, that the only reason we are able to love God is because He loved us first. First. Before anything. Before we could get anything right, or wrong for that matter. He loves us not based on our merits, but based on His. He loves us because He is a loving God, is in fact, Himself, love (1 John 4:8). So, because God loves us, we are able to love Him back. He opened the door. He invited us in.

 How does obedience come into play then? While it is not a determining factor of the love we receive from God, it is an expected response. When we love someone, we want to please them. We trust them. We believe in them. When we love God and believe that He is who He says He is, that He is omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient – all the omnis – we have to trust that what He tells us to do, and not do, is best. If, by our actions, we show that we do not believe these things, we don’t really love Him. That’s it at its core. Our obedience is a demonstration of our love. It proves it. It shows it. It testifies to it.

Here’s the Thing: God doesn’t love us because we obey Him, we obey Him because we love Him. It is a natural outpouring. It is our innate, default response. Our obedience is a testimony of our love.

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