"Blessed are they that do his commandments, that they ... may enter in through the gates into the city" (Revelation 22:14)
The command to love God with our whole being has seemed to many persons to be impossible of fulfillment, and it may be properly argued that we cannot love by fiat.
Love is too gentle, too frail a creature to spring up at the command of another. It would be like commanding the barren tree to bring forth fruit or the winter forest to be green.
What then can it mean?
The answer is found in the nature of God and of man.
God being who He is must have obedience from His people. Man being who he is must render that obedience, and he owes God complete obedience whether or not he feels for Him the faintest trace of love in his heart.
It is a question of the sovereign right of God to require His people to obey Him.
Man's first and basic sin was disobedience. When he disobeyed God he violated the claims of divine love with the result that love for God died within him.
Now, what can he do to restore that love to his heart again?
The heart that mourns its coldness toward God needs only to repent its sins, and a new, warm and satisfying love will flood into it. For the act of repentance will bring a corresponding act of God in self-revelation and intimate communion.
Once the seeking heart finds God in personal experience there will be no further problem about loving Him.
~A. W. Tozer~
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