Nuggets from An Urgent Call to a Serious Faith by Dave Hunt - Love Solves Everything

Nuggets from An Urgent Call to a Serious Faith by Dave Hunt – Love Solves Everything

Loving God is the secret of the Christian life. If we truly love Him, then we want to serve, please, and glorify Him. We would not want to do anything or even think a thought that would displease or dishonor Him. A genuine love for God – and only that love – produces consistent holiness in our daily lives. Love is also the great wellspring of joy and peace. It causes us to witness to the lost around us with passion and without shame. For who is ashamed of one’s lover? And who does not rather speak well, boldly, and continually of the one he loves!

Where shall you find this love that we must have for God, and without which we cannot please Him? It is not hiding somewhere in our hearts waiting to be discovered. Nor is it a potential that we have that only needs to be developed. We cannot work it up. It cannot be produced by effort. This love is not in us at all. Though it involves our will and emotions, it comes from God alone.

How then is this love produced? Love is a fruit that the Spirit bears in our lives (Galatians:5:22But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith,
See All...). It is miraculous, like the fruit on a tree – something that only God could produce. Yet we are not like a tree that has no will or emotions. Obviously much more is involved when the Spirit bears fruit in the believer’s life than is involved in fruit-bearing in nature. His love is the key.

The verse, “We love him because he first loved us” (1 John:4:19We love him, because he first loved us.
See All...) tells us that our love for God comes as a response to His love for us. We know of His love through His Word. Our hearts are stirred as we believe what the Bible tells us of God’s love in creating us, giving His Son to die for our sins, patiently bearing our stubborn rejection, pardoning and saving us from the penalty that His holy law demands for our sin, providing heaven at infinite cost. Surely to meditate upon God’s love for us must produce, by His Spirit, fervent love for Him.

Much more, however, is involved than reading and memorizing and believing what the Bible says about God and His love. Jesus reproved the Pharisees for searching the Scriptures and at the same time refusing to come to Him, the One of whom the Scriptures testified. What the Bible says about God is there in order to lead us into a personal relationship with Him. We must know not only His Word, but we must know Him personally. There is an intimacy with God that is promised to those who love and thus obey Him—an intimacy that is missing in the lives of many Christians.