Do I Love God?

I just finished a book called Life Is Mostly Edges by Calvin Miller, a pastor and author from Nebraska. After reading this book, I not only feel like Calvin is one of my dear friends and mentors, but I also feel like I have an even better understanding of what love for Jesus looks like daily. My husband and I met Calvin Miller in July 2013 and bought his book from him. He later went to be with Jesus just one month after we met him. I am so grateful I was able to shake his hand and now read his life story. It has changed me in so many ways.

In talking about his ministry years, Dr. Miller describes the struggle we all have in dealing with people and becoming people pleasers. What struck me is when he asked this question: Do I love God? Or do I love the things of God?

Am I a God-lover or a lover of the things of God? To answer honestly, I believe it goes both ways. My upbringing steered me in a way to orient my entire life around the church and the ways of the Most High. But that direction has often left me striving after the wind rather than running in a mad fury of love to my Savior.

At times, it has left me in a  state of confusion, asking my God “Why me? Why not me? How do I succeed? What do you want me to do?” These aren’t the questions He is worried about. Like Jesus said to Peter in John 21, His will for me is that I love Him, unashamedly, without borders, recklessly and fervently. Nothing more and nothing less. To love God with a furious love is to reach the highest pinnacle of living. Every day I strive toward this one thing:

TO LOVE GOD MORE AND MORE AND TO BE FULLY SATISFIED IN HIS LOVE

I can easily get wrapped up in being a Christian instead of a Christ-lover. When I am simply being a Christian, I am living to please man. But when I live a life of fervent love for Jesus, I live to please Him. For far too long I have tried to keep up with peers and be successful in a godly sort of way…but life is not about success, it is about loving Jesus fully.

This is what I have missed. This is the answer to my striving and my questions above: to love my Jesus. To know Him and make Him known. He will do the rest. He is just that good. Nay, He is better than good, He is perfect.

I am in love with a perfect Savior. May all that we do be done out of a deep agape love for God.