Lessons On Love

Part One: The First Love, The HIGHEST Love!

Many young women date, and many can tell you who their first love was (Or, maybe it wasn’t someone they dated necessarily, but someone they cared about very much). They can either remember it with fondness, with pain, or with no feelings at all. But, I would like to look at the term “first love” in a different way in this article.

I’ve heard many girls say that God is the first love of their life-and I have said this too…only to have a friend misunderstand and say, “But, I don’t really see God as the Lover type.” What this really means is that God is THE priority of your life, and You love Him first and foremost, above everything else.

But, the question is, what does it mean to love God, and how does God define that love? To find the answers to these questions, we must consult God’s holy word. First off, when we read the bible, we see that we are commanded to love Him (Luke 10:27, Mark 12:30, Matthew 22:27 and it is mentioned many times in the book of Deuteronomy). The fact that God has commanded us to love Him tells us that He believes if we really want to we will; which can only mean that the love of God is not an emotion. It’s rather hard to control how you “feel” about things, is it not? Sometimes, the only thing we can control is what we do with those emotions. So, therefore, we can conclude that it’s a choice. How do we make that choice?

Jesus says in John 14:15, very simply, “If you love me, keep my commandments.” So, when we love God, we will strive to keep all that He has told us to do, and to trust Him. That is how we love God. We see an extension of this in many places. In James 2:17 we read: “Faith without works is Dead.” What does this mean? It means your faith is meaningless if you don’t actually do what God tells you to do.

The truth is, Christians must be logical people. We can’t go by our emotions alone; for if we go by our emotions, we will be no better than the animals who act solely on instinct. We must study God’s word so we can know what He expects from us, and what He wants so that we can learn self-control; which is a commandment of God that we develop. 2nd Peter 1:5-6 shows how we grow in faith for God : “For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with Godliness…”

This shows that when we study, and gain knowledge, it encourages us to act, and develop self-control. Developing self-control means that we pause to think about our actions and their potential consequences, and then we make the right decision based on the facts given as to what we should do. When we use logic to aid in developing self-control, we can better do as God has asked us to do. We do things based on whether or not it will be pleasing to Him as defined by His word. That’s what God defines as love toward Him…it is action, not necessarily feeling. (But, I’m not going to lie…it does feel great to do what He wants me to do!)

I hope that this has taught you something. In this series of lessons, I pray that you gain a better perspective on love!