“Teacher which is the most important commandment in the law of Moses”? Jesus replied, “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart,all your soul and all your mind,” (Matthew 22: 36-37)
God is GOD! He does not require anything. He is all-sufficient, self-existing, complete.
As the sunday school song goes, silver and gold belong to Him. The earth and the fullness in it also belongs to Him. Even the vastness of the unexplored heavens belong to Him. There is nothing that exists that does not completely and utterly belong to Him, even the very breath that we take minute by minute.
There is one thing though, God does not have. It is the one thing He desires more than anything.
It once upon a time belonged to Him, but it was wrongfully and spitefully taken away from Him. He has given His utmost to try get it back, in some cases with great joy and success, in most cases NOT.
It is the one thing He cannot exercise His majestic might and awesome power to take back by force. In fact, God can only wait and hope…..that it will be given Him…………Our Love!
The one thing God deeply desires is that we would love Him. It is the primary reason He created man; to exist in a loving and close relationship with Him. His plan was to have someone much like Him, whom He could lavish His great love upon and in return receive back un-restrained love and trust in intimate one-ness. It is not un-like a man who falls in love with a girl. He would do anything to win her love and affection. His desire is to love her and live with her in an intimate union, finding mutual fulfillment in the beauty of their great love for each other.
That plan was brutally shattered when Adam fell prey to the Serpent’s deception. The secret tragedy of that shattering is that man now had the knowledge that he could choose between good and evil. The disclaimer the serpent failed to give Adam was that he would never be free of the tyranny of evil. This meant Adam lost the capacity to yield his pure heart to Love, Goodness, Holiness, Truth,…….God.
You cannot compel someone to love you. The minute you coerce, compel or con someone to love you, love ceases to exist. Love is a freely given act of our will. If its not freely and willfully given its NOT love. Therefore God cannot make us love Him. The only remedy for this tragedy was to make a way for man to regain the ability to freely and willfully choose to know Him (God) and therefore ultimately love Him…… To know God is to love God.
Enter the Man Jesus Christ. He is the way to the restoration of all things between God and man. Man’s ability to know God has been restored through Christ’s life on earth. Through Christ’s sacrificial death, God has made known His great love for man. By Christ’s glorious resurrection, God has crushed evil’s stranglehold over man’s freedom to choose Love, Goodness, Holiness,Truth……God.
Because of Christ- (God becoming man), man now has the freedom to choose to give God his heart, his love and his friendship. Its the reason God created man. Its the only thing God deeply longs for and can’t have; unless we make the choice to give it to Him.