Love via Obedience)

In yesterday’s post we gave both an acknowledgement and a question. Yes, Jesus does love you, but how do you love him back? Can someone say that they genuinely care for their Savior while shamelessly performing the very sins that make him suffer to death? Surely, genuine love for the Lord must look different.

The scriptures detail exactly what genuine love would look like. Jesus, himself, said, “If ye love me, keep my commandments,” (John 14:15).

We also learned yesterday the importance of knowing Jesus. There, too, the scriptures tell us how to do so.

“And hereby we do know that we know him, if we keep his commandments,” (1 John 2:3).

“Whosoever abideth in him sinneth not: whosoever sinneth hath not seen him, neither known him,” (1 John 3:6).

The message of the scriptures is clear. If we want to do our part to gain salvation, we must love and know the savior, and the means and the fruit by which we come to love and know the savior is by keeping his commandments.

The Proper Framing)

There is an important distinction that we must make here, though. We are not saying, “keep the commandments to make it into heaven,” or “do enough good works that you deserve to be saved.” Those sorts of messages make people overwhelmed and uncomfortable, and well they should, because they stray from the true theology.

When we focus primarily on the works, we stop being motivated by love, which is supposed to be the core of our behavior. It is entirely possible to do good works without love, and those offerings are not acceptable to the Lord, as Cain famously learned.

We should always frame our obedience to the commandments as a natural extension of our love of him. We should say, “he loved me first, and he died for me, and me following his word is just the way that I love him back.” Any time we feel that our works are being driven by a different motivation, such as fear, we need to recenter ourselves on love.