There was a comment for this post which I found interesting. Below are the parts I want to highlight
Loving the Lord means obedience. Disobedience is rebellion, akin to witchcraft.
Loving the Lord isn’t about wanting to hang out with the Dude.
And obedience is all about our human will. Will you or will you not obey? If you obey, you love. If you disobey, you are not loving.
Firstly, obviously loving the Lord isn’t JUST about wanting to hang out with the Dude. But it would seem rather obvious to me that if I love somebody, or in this case God, I WOULD want to hang out with him. Or if you like, be in his presence. Now, it does seem from the comment I’m supposed to disassociate desire to hang out with love. Gosh, there are some really LONELY BUT LOVED people.
The first and third highlighted parts of the comments confuse me. Is Love the cause and Obedience the effect? Is obedience an expression of my love? Or is Obeying equal to love? Has the person leaving the comment confused obeying to love. I mean, in the army, we all obey our officers, but does that mean we love them. To me obedience seems to be about fear.
Here is the thing… I think these two POVs about our relationship with God are conflicting and cannot coexist:
“If You Obey Me, You Love Me”
If You Love Me, You Will Obey Me”
I have a feeling that a significant number of Christians subscribe to the first POV. Just because they obey God, they think they love him. Some Christians go as far as to say how we feel isn’t important, or rather not as important as our actions - Obedience is more important than what you might be feeling. And if You can force yourself to Obey, that action screams love.
The second POV begs the question about why if I love someone that it will lead automatically to me obeying that someone. Obedience is about deferring to authority while Love is, well love is something else.
When I love someone, it’s probably likely that I would trust that individual. If I trust that individual, it is likely I would defer to the person’s opinions, advice and instructions especially if I have the awareness of my lack of knowledge and experience as oppose to the other. When it comes to knowledge and experience, God is probably the go-to guy.
So, when I love God, I’ll probably be more likely to follow him. Or if you like, I’ll be more likely to obey him. It probably won’t always be easy - our human instincts, lack of wisdom, limited knowledge and most importantly pride could at times hinder us.
Here is the thing…Loving Someone means you are more likely to ‘obey’ that person. Of course, when it comes to God, it should be Always ‘obey’ since God probably knows his shit and a wise person would in his best interest ‘obey’ God.
The way of expressing the second POV, like the first highlighted part of the comment focuses too much on obedience in the context of a hierarchical structure - which to me is just like Christianity as a religion. We are supposed to obey just because the person above says so - the person above says so because the above person says so all the way back to God.
We totally miss the point of how love affects the dynamics of influence.
I’m pretty sure by now, a lot of people will have missed my point. So I’ll stop here. Have a nice day.
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