Just Because You Love Him
"Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love The LORD thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment."
Matthew 22:37-38
There's no doubt about it, when we serve The LORD we are BLESSED. When we obey Him and keep His WORD, we enjoy greater joy and success in our lives than we could ever experience any other way.
Even so, however, that's not the reason we serve Him. That's not our motivation for obeying Him and believing His WORD. We do all those things—and do them gladly—just because we love Him. Because He laid down His life for us, we willingly give Him our all.
We should all have the attitude of the outlaw biker I heard about years ago. He came to a friend of mine when he was still a sinner and said, "I understand you pray for the sick and my son has cancer. Will you pray for him?"
My friend agreed and when he prayed, The LORD healed that little boy. Shortly thereafter, the biker came back and said, "I'm here to give my life to God. He healed my boy, and anyone who would do that for me, I want to serve for the rest of my life."
You and I might not have had the same experience that biker had, but we're in the same position, nonetheless. As born-again children of God, every one of us has been saved from a spiritual cancer that had doomed us to hell. We've been delivered out of the kingdom of darkness and brought into light. We've been loosed from the bondage of death and given God's free gift of eternal life.
What's more, not one of us earned it. Not one of us deserved it. We all received our deliverance just like that biker did—not on our own merits, but in total dependence on the mercy and love of God.
In light of what He has done for us, we owe Him our service. We owe Him our lives and our love.
We ought not be saying, "OK, LORD, I'll do what You're telling me to do because I believe I'll be BLESSED if I do. But I'm warning You, if THE BLESSING doesn't come, I'm not doing it anymore."
No! If we'll just meditate on what God has already done for us, and let the truth of the sacrifice He's already made for us dawn in our hearts, we'll be so in love with Him, we'll jump at every opportunity to serve Him. We'll want to obey Him. We'll say as Psalm 40:8 says, "I delight to do thy will, O my God...."
Of course, THE BLESSING will follow, as it always does, and because we walk by faith, we'll expect it. But as much as we enjoy it, we'll get far more pleasure simply from serving Jesus. We'll do everything we do for Him just because of love.
Kenneth Copeland
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