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DECEMBER: The Victory of Faith

December 3

KEEPING GOD’S COMMANDMENTS

For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments: and his commandments are not grievous.
1 John 5:3

There is nothing about which we can so deceive ourselves as the fact that we love God. A man may come to me and say he loves God. He says with Browning, “God’s in His Heaven, All’s right with the world.” But when something goes against him, he finds he does not love God. He says, “Why does God…?” Feelings are very deceptive. How do we know we love God? There is the next step—when “we keep his commandments.”

Our Lord emphasizes that in John 14:21: “He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me.” You cannot separate these things. Love is not a sentiment; it is the most active, vital thing in the world. If I love God, I want to please Him—I keep the commandments. And what I may regard as the love of God in my soul is a pure delusion unless it leads me to keep God’s commandments and to live life as He wants me to live it.

“Again,” says someone, “you have just shifted the problem. This keeping of the commandments—what is this?” “Well,” says John in essence in a kind of footnote on which he is going to elaborate in the next verse, “what matters in this whole question of keeping the commandments is my attitude toward them. When I face the commandments of God, do I resent them? Do I feel that God is imposing an impossible load upon me? Do I groan and grumble and say, ‘Oh, this hard taskmaster who asks of me the impossible’?”

“If that is your attitude toward the commandments of God,” says John in effect, “you are not keeping them, and neither are you loving God, and you are not loving your brethren—you are outside the life altogether.” For someone who is truly Christian does not find the commandments of God to go against the grain.

A Thought to Ponder
Someone who is truly Christian does not find the commandments of God to go against the grain.

From Life in God, pp. 30-31




Today’s devo is taken from Walking with God Day by Day © 2003 by Good News Publishers. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Crossway Books, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

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