Not a feeling you have to manufacture and not a test you have to pass. Love for God starts with being loved, and it shows up in the people standing closest to you.
If you want to know how to love God, start where John starts: we love because He first loved us. You do not generate love for God and send it up. You receive His love in Jesus, and it comes back out of you.
That love takes in your whole self, heart, soul, mind and strength, and it becomes visible in how you treat people, because Scripture says you cannot love the God you have not seen while refusing the person you have.
So loving God is less like climbing toward Him and more like answering Him.
Most of us were handed the command before we were handed the reason. Love God with everything. Try harder. Feel more. And when the feelings did not show up on schedule, we assumed something was wrong with us.
John reverses the order, and he does it in six words.
“We love because he first loved us.”
1 John 4:19 · NIVJohn did not invent this order. Moses told Israel the same thing.
“The Lord did not set his affection on you and choose you because you were more numerous than other peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples. But it was because the Lord loved you and kept the oath he swore to your ancestors that he brought you out with a mighty hand.”
Deuteronomy 7:7 to 8 · NIVGod did not wait to see whether they would love Him before He rescued them. The rescue came first. The command to love Him came to people who had already been carried out of slavery.
In Jesus that order is impossible to miss. He came looking, ate with people nobody else would eat with, and gave Himself on the cross before any of us had done a thing to deserve it. We unpacked that more fully in God is love.
If loving God has felt like pushing a boulder uphill, you may have the order backwards. The first move is His. Your love is a response to a love that got there before you did.
When a teacher of the law asked Jesus which command was greatest, Jesus answered with Israel's daily confession and then added a second command nobody had asked for. We walked through that confession, and why it is a center rather than a ranking, in putting God first. Here the question is narrower: what do the four words actually cover?
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.”
Mark 12:30 · NIVThe NET Bible's notes on Deuteronomy 6 say the verb here carries covenant loyalty more than emotion. It is the language of belonging to someone, not a passing mood.
In Hebrew thought the heart was the seat of the mind. You thought with your heart. Mark's added word, mind, spells out what heart already meant.
Not a ghost inside a body. The same note says Old Testament thinking equated the soul with the person himself. Your whole living self.
Usually the ordinary word for very. Here it is a noun, and Brown-Driver-Briggs gives muchness, force, abundance. All your muchness, whatever you have.
Put those together and the point is plain. Jesus is not describing four compartments where you need to score well. He is saying there is no part of you that sits outside this. Your thinking, emotions, body, money and time. Love for God is not one department of life. It is the whole life, turned toward Him.
Notice how the scribe answers in Mark 12:33. He repeats Jesus and adds that this is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices. Jesus tells him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” The Kingdom was standing right in front of him. It was never located at the end of a long enough religious résumé. It was present in Jesus, and it is present now, and love is how you live inside it.
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Manage My Giving"Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver."2 Corinthians 9:7
“If you love me, keep my commands.”
John 14:15 · NIVLet me give the strongest version of the reading many of us grew up with. The NET Bible's note on Deuteronomy 6:5 says of the command to love, “To love the Lord is to be absolutely loyal and obedient to him in every respect, a truth Jesus himself taught (cf. John 14:15).” That is correct as far as it goes. Love that never does anything is not love. John himself says, “this is love for God: to keep his commands. And his commands are not burdensome” (1 John 5:3).
The problem is what people do with it. The verse gets turned into a checklist, and the checklist gets turned into a thermometer. Did you read enough, pray enough, give enough, avoid enough? Then you must love Him. Fall short and the verdict flips.
Obedience is how you prove your love, and how God measures it. Every failure is evidence you do not really love Him, so try harder and feel worse.
Jesus is describing what love does, not setting a test to earn it. Love and obedience grow together inside a friendship He started and He sustains.
Read the verse where Jesus said it. It is the last supper, the night before the cross. He has just washed their feet. He has just said, “As I have loved you, so you must love one another” (John 13:34). In the very next breath after verse 15 He promises them the Spirit of truth, and a few lines later He says, “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you” (John 14:18). The next chapter has Him calling them friends instead of servants.
And what are His commands, in that room? Over and over, it is one thing: love each other the way I have loved you (John 15:12). The command He asks them to keep is love.
At Sound of Heaven we believe John 14:15 is a description of love between friends, not a performance test God uses to grade you. Obedience is real and it matters. But it grows out of being loved, it is powered by the Spirit Jesus promised in the same breath, and its center is loving people the way He loved us.
The performance reading is wrong, and it has hurt people. It has been used on tender consciences to keep them anxious, on new believers to keep them in line, and on the burned out to keep them busy. We refuse the opposite error just as firmly. A love for Jesus that never changes how you treat anyone is not love. It is a feeling about Him.
In the upper room, what command does Jesus keep repeating to His disciples?
John 13:34, John 15:12 and John 15:17 all land in the same place. When Jesus says keep my commands, the command He keeps naming that night is love for one another, modeled on His love for them.
This is also why loving God is never a transaction. You do not love Him so He will pay out. Blessing comes from His goodness, not from a devotion quota, which we laid out in blessings from God.
If you want a test, John gives one. It just is not the test most of us expected.
“Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen.”
1 John 4:20 · NIVJohn does not say loving people is a nice extra for the spiritually advanced. He says it is where love for God becomes visible. That is exactly why Jesus attached the second command to the first in Mark 12, a pairing we traced in the great commandment.
Jesus lived this out with Peter by the lake. Three times He asked, “Do you love me?” Three times Peter said yes. And three times Jesus answered with people: feed my lambs, take care of my sheep, feed my sheep (John 21:15 to 17). Peter's love for Jesus was not going to be measured by how intensely he felt it. It was going to be lived out in the people Jesus handed him.
Patience with the people who see you at your worst. Listening to your kids. Apologizing first. Love for God that skips the kitchen table is a theory.
Honest numbers, fair treatment, and kindness to the coworker nobody likes. The Long Island Expressway at rush hour counts too.
Jesus stretches the circle all the way out, to the people who have hurt you. We walked through that in love your enemies.
Showing up for each other. Carrying burdens. Refusing gossip. John 13:35 says this is how everyone will know you belong to Jesus.
This does not replace worship, prayer or Scripture. Those are how you stay close to the one whose love you are passing on. Jesus put it as remaining in His love (John 15:9), which we explored in what it means to abide in Christ. But worship that never reaches the person next to you has stopped short.
Some people read all this and still carry one quiet fear: I do not feel much love for God at all. Maybe I used to, and it faded.
Here is the good news in the Hebrew. The love Deuteronomy asks for is covenant loyalty, not a constant emotional high. Feelings are welcome and they come and go. Loyalty is turning back toward Him again today, even when your heart feels like a dead battery.
Before you try to love Him more, let Him love you. Read a Gospel slowly and watch how Jesus treats people. That is the Father's face.
The Psalms are full of people telling God they feel nothing, or feel abandoned. Honesty with Him is a form of love, not a failure of it.
Pick one person and one act of kindness this week. Feelings often follow obedience rather than leading it.
Love for God grows in company. Sit in worship with others, even on the weeks you just sit.
If you have been told that your struggles prove you do not really love God, hear this plainly: that is not the voice of Jesus. Seasons of numbness can come from grief, exhaustion, depression or old wounds, and none of them cancel His love for you.
You do not have to fix it alone. If you would like someone to pray with you, our prayer team would count it a privilege, and if you are on Long Island you are welcome to come as you are on a Sunday.
Everything here comes back to Jesus. He is what God's love looks like in a human life, and He is how we learn to love God back. He loved the Father with everything, and it looked like healing, feeding, forgiving and finally laying Himself down for people who did not deserve it.
So loving God is not a mountain you climb to reach Him. He came down the mountain. Your part is to let that love land, let it reach every part of you, and let it keep moving until it reaches the people beside you. That is heart, soul, mind and strength on a Tuesday.
For more on this, read agape love, why obedience is better than sacrifice, what we believe and our articles page.
You love God by receiving the love He showed first in Jesus, letting it take in your whole self, and passing it on to the people you can actually see.
Tell us where you are. Somebody at Sound of Heaven will pray with you and walk through it with you.
The Bible starts with God's love, not ours. John writes, "We love because he first loved us" (1 John 4:19). Jesus then describes the response: love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength (Mark 12:30), and love your neighbor as yourself. In practice that means receiving His love in Jesus, turning your whole life toward Him, staying close through worship, prayer and Scripture, and letting that love show up in how you treat the people around you.
It means no part of you sits outside your love for God. In Hebrew thought the heart was the seat of the mind, the soul meant the whole living person, and the word behind strength carries the sense of muchness, everything you have. Jesus is not listing four separate scores to keep. He is describing a whole life, thinking, feeling, body, money and time, turned toward the God who loved you first.
Jesus said it at the last supper, right after washing His disciples' feet and telling them to love one another as He had loved them. In the next breath He promised the Spirit of truth and said He would not leave them as orphans. It describes what love between friends does, not a test God uses to grade you. Obedience matters, and the command Jesus keeps naming that night is love for one another (John 15:12).
According to John, no. "Whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen" (1 John 4:20). That is why Jesus joined the command to love God with the command to love your neighbor. Worship, prayer and Scripture keep you close to God, and love for people is where that closeness becomes visible. When Peter said he loved Jesus, Jesus answered, feed my sheep.
You are not alone, and it does not mean God has given up on you. The love Deuteronomy asks for is covenant loyalty, not a constant emotional high. Start by receiving His love again, perhaps by reading a Gospel slowly and watching how Jesus treats people. Be honest with Him the way the Psalms are. Do the next loving thing for someone near you, and stay connected to other believers. Feelings often follow rather than lead.