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R edeem er Bible Church

Unreserved Accountability to Christ. Undeserved Acceptance from Christ.

Loving God, Part Two:

The Impediment to Loving God
Selected Scriptures

Introduction
During his earthly ministry, Jesus accepted an invitation to dine with a Pharisee
named Simon. Since it was a time in which Jesus’ popularity was high, his
whereabouts had become known to the people of Simon’s city.

Among those who knew that Jesus was eating with him was a woman who was
considered a “sinner” (probably a prostitute). Upon finding out that Jesus was nearby,
“she brought an alabaster vile of perfume, and standing behind Him at His feet,
weeping, she began to wet His feet with her tears, and keeping wiping them with the
hair of her head, and kissing His feet and anointing them with the perfume” (Luke 7:37-
38).

The gospel writer tells us that this act was not at all well received by Jesus’ host.
In fact, Jesus’ willingness to accept such a gift resulted in Simon concluding that Jesus
could not have been a prophet, since he was so closely associating with a “sinner.”
Knowing Simon’s thoughts, Jesus offered a response in terms of a parable. He said, “A
moneylender had two debtors: one owed five hundred denarii [about a year and a half’s
worth of wages], and the other fifty [about a month and a half’s worth of wages]. When
they were unable to repay, he graciously forgave them both.” (Luke 7:41-42a).

With this, Jesus turned to Simon and asked, “So which of [the debtors] will love him
more?” (Luke 7:42b).

“Simon answered and said, ‘I suppose the one whom he forgave more.’

“And He said to him, ‘You have judged correctly’” (Luke 7:43).

And then Jesus said something truly astonishing:

He said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? I entered your house; you
gave Me no water for My feet, but she has wet My feet with her tears and wiped
them with her hair. You gave Me no kiss; but she, since the time I came in, has
not ceased to kiss My feet. You did not anoint My head with oil, but she anointed
My feet with perfume. For this reason I say to you, her sins, which are many,
have been forgiven, for she loved much; but he who is forgiven little, loves little”
(Luke 7:44-47).

What I want you to see here is that this woman’s totally unnecessary, totally
gratuitous, totally extravagant act is called an act of love. Since she has been forgiven

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much she loves much. And her love expressed itself not in obedience; Jesus did not
command her to do what she did. On the contrary, the text from which we read is very
clear that this woman acted on her own initiative—standing and weeping and wiping
and kissing and anointing. As soon as she learned that Jesus was at Simon’s house,
she immediately got her costly perfume and began anointing Jesus with it along with her
own tears.

If, as it is often asserted, love has no emotional content; if it is really the case that
love to Christ is merely obedience, then what Jesus says about this woman’s act would
be absurd. She wouldn’t really have been expressing love for Christ since she wasn’t
responding in obedience to any command. And so Christ would have defined love
erroneously.

But love cannot be reduced to acts of obedience alone. It is wrong to conclude

that love is not what you feel, but what you do. Though love is certainly more than
feelings, it is not less than feelings either. This woman’s love manifested itself in a
totally gratuitous sacrificial act, yes, but it wasn’t her duty to do it and it was performed
with delight. This act was loaded with spontaneity and emotion and Jesus calls it love.

Even Jesus’ illustration about the forgiveness of a great debt indicates that
biblical love includes our affections. When the men in his story were unable to repay
their lender, the lender forgave their debts. Then Jesus asks, “So which of them will
love him more?” Is Jesus talking about obedience? Is he talking about the cold
carrying out of duty? No, he is talking about the emotional response of those forgiven of
their debts. I will love the man who forgives my debt. And, says Jesus, the more debt
you have been forgiven, the more love you will have for one who cancels it.

So then, love for God is not simply expressed through the performance of
religious duty. On the contrary, you can perform all kinds of acts of obedience, every
manner of sacrificial deed, and be bereft of love. As the Apostle Paul has said, “And if I
give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I surrender my body to be burned, but
do not love, it profits me nothing” (1 Corinthians 13:3). The unavoidable implication
here is that love cannot be reduced to duty—love is more than duty—it is not less than
duty, but it is more than duty.

And this is the love that the Lord demands from us. He obligates us not simply to
love him with our volition (with our wills), or with our action (with our deeds), but we are
commanded to love him with our emotion (with our hearts) as well. “You shall love the
Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with
all your strength” (Mark 12:30).

Heart, soul, mind, and strength—there is no component of your humanity, there

is not a single faculty that the Lord can abide outside of the orb of complete devotion to
him. He demands all of you—he wants your emotions and your choices and every
ounce of your strength. Your love for him, in order for it to be love that honors him,
must therefore be more than your acts of obedience; it must include your affections.

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As Jonathan Edwards has rightly said, “That religion which God requires, and will
accept, does not consist in weak, dull, and lifeless wishes, raising us but a little above a
state of indifference: God, in His word, greatly insists upon it, that we be in good
earnest, ‘fervent in spirit,’ and our hearts vigorously engaged in religion.”1

The reason why Edwards’ assessment is correct is because it is what the Bible
teaches. Turn in your Bibles with me to 1 Peter 1:8:

And though you have not seen Him, you love Him, and though you do not
see Him now, but believe in Him, you greatly rejoice with joy inexpressible and
full of glory.

What is so remarkable about this passage is that the Apostle Peter is setting
forth joy and love to the Lord as proof of the genuineness of his audience’s faith. The
upshot of this is that holy affections like joy and love are essential components of true
Christianity. In other words, love for Christ and inexpressible joy in Christ are
characteristics of the genuine believer.

Now for our purposes it is our love for Christ that is significant here. If biblical
love has emotional content and if biblical love is what is characteristic of the genuine
believer, then if we do not feel love for Christ we cannot be believers.

And even though true believers are characterized as those with love for God, we
are also commanded to love him. We have quoted the great commandment already:
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your
mind, and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30). And Psalm 31:23 says, “O love the
LORD, all you His godly ones! The LORD preserves the faithful And fully recompenses
the proud doer.”

Since, then, we are both characterized by love for God and commanded to love
God, then we should expect to find ourselves in a condition in which we both already
love the Lord and at the same time need to love him more. The fact that God would
command us to love him implies at the very least that our love for him can wane. And
we all know by experience that it does wane. I have shared with you how there is not a
day that goes by that I do not find myself literally begging the Lord for more love to him.
Daily my prayers express the same sentiment as Elizabeth Prentiss’ “More Love to
Thee”:

More love to thee, O Christ, more love to thee!

Hear thou the prayer I make on bended knee;
This is my earnest plea,
More love, O Christ, to thee,
More love to thee, more love to thee!

Daily I am saying something to the Lord like these lyrics with which you’re all familiar:

1
Jonathan Edwards, “A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections” in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol
1, edited by Edward Hickman (Carlisle, PA: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1998 reprint of the 1834 edition), 237.

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Prone to wander—Lord, I feel it—

Prone to leave the God I love:
Here’s my heart, O take and seal it,
Seal it for thy courts above.
—Robert Robinson (1735-1790)

I want to love the Lord so badly, and yet I feel so hindered in doing so. Don’t
you?

Of course, the million dollar question is this: Is this something that we should
simply expect and learn to live with—that our love for God will always be weak until we
depart to be with Christ?

I would answer yes and no. Yes, we should expect to lack love for the Lord in
the sense that we should expect any sin. But in no way should we learn to live with it
(there’s the “no”). Learning to live with something implies a certain degree of comfort
with the thing with which you live. So we should never learn to live with a lack of love
for God any more than we should learn to live with any sin.

Instead, knowing the inevitability of sin in the area of our love for God should
work to give us a decided advantage in our battle against it and therefore should help us
to develop a biblical strategy for putting it to death. Put positively then, the inevitability
of lacking love for God ought to motivate us to learn from Scripture how to cultivate and
keep our affection on fire.

But where do we begin? Well, a very good place to start is with the question
why. Why do we often fail to love the Lord? The quick answer is, of course, our own
sin. But such an answer doesn’t go deep enough. We need to be more specific. We
need to know what sin or sins in particular hinder us from loving the Lord.

Let us this morning, then, focus our attention on some impediments to loving
God.

Impediment 1: Lack of Faith

The first impediment to loving the Lord is implicit in 1 Peter 1:8. Remember.
Peter sets forth love for Christ as a proof of the genuineness of the Christian’s faith.
And since love for Christ is definitive of a truly Christian life, it means that the reason
why you may lack love for the Lord is because you are not a Christian. If you are bereft
of genuine affection for God, if you entirely lack “a delightful and affectionate sense of
the divine perfections,” as Henry Scougal has said, or in John Owen’s words, if your
heart has never come clearly and fully up to delight and rejoice in God, then you need to
ask if you are a Christian at all.

The Apostle Paul warns the Corinthians at the end of his first letter to them,
saying, “If anyone does not love the Lord, he is to be accursed” (1 Corinthians 16:22).
Literally, he says, “If anyone does not love the Lord, let him be anathema.” To be
anathema is to be set apart for destruction. It is to be placed on a divine waste pile to

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await God’s righteous and angry decimation. So if you do not love the Lord, you are
under a curse; and until you love the Lord, that curse will not be removed.

In a lecture on preaching that John Piper gave to the students of The Master’s
Seminary, he shared a story about hearing a respected Bible teacher preach on this
passage from 1 Corinthians 16. Piper said that he was extremely grieved by the fact
that the minister read the text, coldly commented on it, and then sat down, as if he were
relating to his congregation nothing more than a recipe. His exhortation to future
pastors was pointed:

There’s [sic.] thousands of people in our churches that don’t love Jesus!
And they’re hell bound, calling themselves Christians! They don’t love him. They
don’t love him…I say that here because I know in atmospheres that I love like
this one where exposition and truth are held up high and emotions are suspicious
that you are in grave danger.2

In this context, Piper is warning the men of the danger of preaching the word of
the living God as if all they were doing was relating a recipe. His point is that as pastors
we cannot expect the people under our care to be affected by the things of the Spirit
when we are not affected by them ourselves. So this quotation speaks to both of us
with equal force.

So you need to ask yourself if you are one of those thousands of people in our
churches that don’t love Jesus, that really don’t love him. And if your answer is that you
do not have a delightful and affectionate sense of the divine perfections, if your answer
is that you have never felt love for God, then you need to repent and believe in the Lord
Jesus. You need not only to believe in your mind that the Lord is good, but you need to
taste and see that he is good. You need to know him by experience as much as you
need to know him by your intellect.

I am especially concerned in this regard for those of you who have grown up in
Christian homes. Most of you cannot remember a time when you did not believe that
God was our creator, that we have rebelled against him, that the Father sent his son to
be the propitiation for our sins, and that Jesus was raised on the third day for our
justification. For you, these facts are undisputed. But your acknowledgement of the
facts of the gospel does not make you a believer. Demons acknowledge this; Satan
acknowledges this. But Satan and his minions do not love the Lord; they utterly hate
him! I ask you, Do you love the Lord? Do you feel love him? Or do you feel nothing.

If you feel nothing, if you have felt nothing, then do not think that because you
give assent to Christian teaching, stay out of trouble, and lead an outwardly Christian
life that you are thereby a believer. A believer is a person who possesses the Holy
Spirit. Romans 8:9 says, “But if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not
belong to him.”

2
From a message by John Piper entitled, “What Is Preaching?” delivered at The Master’s Seminary
on February 16, 1995, emphasis in delivery of the original.

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And Romans 5:5 says that “the love of God has been poured out within our
hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.” What this means is that one of the
marks of the presence of the Holy Spirit is the presence of love for God. So if you don’t
have love for God, you don’t have the Holy Spirit, and if you don’t have the Holy Spirit,
you are not a Christian.

Do not let pride keep you from bowing the knee to the Lordship of Christ. Do not
care that others will think it scandalous that you could have been in church for so many
years without having yet come to the savior. I invite you to taste and see that the Lord
is good.

So then, the first and greatest impediment to loving God, to loving him truly is
that you may not possess saving faith—you may not be a Christian.

But what about the rest of us? What of those who have had the love of God
shed abroad in our hearts, who have tasted and seen that the Lord is good, and still feel
as if our life with God has become stale and dry, all of duty and none of delight? What
are we to do when the fires of our love for the Lord seem to have quieted down to all but
a flicker?

Look to Your Affections

The place to begin is with the recognition that we are always loving something or
someone. The second greatest commandment makes this clear. We are told to love
our neighbor as ourselves, which clearly implies that each of us already loves him- or
herself. And it is on this basis that we are commanded to love others. We are to make
the measure of our love for others the love we have for ourselves.

Ephesians 5:28-29 says, “So husbands ought also to love their own wives as
their own bodies. He who loves his own wife loves himself; for no one ever hated his
own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it.” We are always cherishing and nourishing
ourselves. The love of a husband for his wife then is no different than the Christian’s
love for his or her neighbor: the husband’s love for himself is the measure of his love for
his wife.

So when we lack love for the Lord, it is not that we have become incapable of
loving him; it is that we have transferred our affections to that which we believe will bring
us satisfaction, to that which we believe will cherish and nourish ourselves better or
greater than the Lord. Or better, is it is that we have hoarded our affections for use on
our own sinful pleasures, believing the lie that we can nourish and cherish ourselves
better or more than the Lord can nourish and cherish us.

Add to this that we have been joined to the Lord as a wife is joined to her
husband, and the transfer or hoarding of our affections for our sinful pleasures is
revealed as nothing less than spiritual adultery.

Think about it. What happens when a wife cheats on her husband? Well, she
breaks her covenant of love with her spouse by setting her love upon another. There is
a transfer of her affection from the one she promised to love to one whom she has been

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forbidden to love. It is not that she has become bereft of feelings of passion or
affection; it is that she has simply transferred them to someone else.

So it is with spiritual adultery. When we set our desire and passion and affection
on something or someone other than God, we commit adultery against him.

So again, if we are lacking love for the Lord, it is not because we have stopped
loving or delighting in something or someone, it is that we have taken our love away
from our husband and given it wantonly to someone we think more deserving, more
delightful, more capable of nourishing and cherishing us.

Now to believe that there is something or someone more satisfying than the Lord
is the height of folly; for the truth is that a day in his courts is better than a thousand
outside, the truth is that his loving kindness is better than life, the truth is that satisfies
the thirsty soul (Psalm 84:10; 63:3; 107:9).

To believe that we will be satisfied by something or someone other than God is to

believe a lie—a lie conjured by our own rebellious hearts which look for satisfaction
outside of the Lord. The bottom line is that to believe that we will be satisfied by
something or someone other than God is to lack faith in who God really is!

That our lack of love is an issue of faith is implicit in 1 Peter 1:8. Read it again
with me: And though you have not seen Him, you love Him, and though you do not
see Him now, but believe in Him, you greatly rejoice with joy inexpressible and
full of glory.

Impediment 2: Lack of Faith

Notice that Peter says that his audience loves a Christ it cannot see. In our case,
the idea is even more absolute—we have never seen him. As believers we are called
to love a Lord who remains invisible to us. This makes loving the Lord difficult, doesn’t
it? Which is easier, to love a puppy you can cuddle and pet and squeeze, or to love the
puppy described for us in an encyclopedia? The answer is easy, “The one we can see
and feel.”

This, then, is the Lord we are commanded to love: a Lord that is out of our sights.
And yet, this passage tells us something else. It tells us that though we do not see
him now, we believe in him. In other words, though we do not see him with the eyes
of our head, we do see him with the eyes of our heart, with the eyes of faith. Thus, like
every aspect of the Christian life, loving the Lord is loving him by faith, which is the
conviction of things not seen (Hebrews 11:1). What this means, then, is that at the root
of our failure to love the Lord as Christians is a lack of faith in him. Oh, we do believe.
But we’re also rife with unbelief.

And we cannot expect that our love for the Lord will be very strong if we are not
attacking our lack of love for what it really is—a lack of faith. For if we truly believed
what the Scripture says about all the Lord is for us in Jesus Christ, we could not help
but be taken up with love for him, we could not help but be enamored of him. We would
see his beauty and we would not be able to resist him.

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Edwards is right when he says, “The things of religion are so great, that there can
be no suitableness in the exercises of our hearts, to their nature and importance, unless
they be lively and powerful.”3 The things of religion are so great that only lively and
powerful exercises of our hearts are appropriate.

Our problem comes when we fail to believe that they are as great as they really
are. Our problem is that we refuse to believe what the Scripture says about the Lord.
For I will say again, that when we are believing what the Scripture says about all the
Lord is for us in Jesus Christ, we will not be able to help being full of affection for him. It
will be our irresistible inclination.

We will be able to sing with the psalmist and mean it: “One thing I have asked
from the LORD, that I shall seek: That I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days
of my life, To behold the beauty of the LORD And to meditate in His temple” (Psalm
27:4). The accoutrements of the Temple represent only a meager and dim reflection of
the beauty of the divine perfections. So to see in the beauty and majesty of the Temple
the beauty and majesty of the living God required the eyes of faith back then just as we
need eyes of faith to see the beauty and majesty of the biblical descriptions of the living
God today.

And unless we see the Lord as lovely as he really is, we will not love Him. John
Owen puts it this way, “God must be revealed unto us as lovely and desirable, as a fit
and suitable object unto the soul to set up its rest upon, before we can bear any love to
him. The saints (in this sense) do not love God for nothing, but for that excellency,
loveliness, and desirableness that is in him.”4

And though the initial revelation of the loveliness and desirableness of the Lord is
revealed to us upon our conversion and reception of the Holy Spirit, it is continually
revealed to us throughout the Christian life by faith.

We need to see the Lord as lovely as beautiful and as absolutely breathtaking as

he really is. And as long as and as often as we do, we will find him completely
irresistible.

I would add to our need to see the Lord as lovely an additional need. If we are
going to love the Lord, we need to see him through the eyes of faith as our loving, kind,
and inestimably compassionate heavenly Father. You may be failing to love the Lord
because you are failing to believe that he loves you. We need to strive to continue to
believe 1 John 4:16, which says, “We have come to know and have believed the love
which God has for us.”

3
Edwards, “Affections,” 238.
4
John Owen, “Of Communion with God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, Each Person Distinctly, in
Love, Grace, and Consolation; or, The Saints’ Fellowship with the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost
Unfolded,” in The Works of John Owen, Vol 2, edited by William Goold (Carlisle, PA: The Banner of Truth
Trust, 1997 reprint of the 1850-53 edition), 29.

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We must believe that God is kindly disposed to us and overflowing with love for
us. In fact, the Bible teaches that God loves us more than we could ever love him.
Romans 5:7-8 says, “For one will hardly die for a righteous man; though perhaps for the
good man someone would dare even to die. But God demonstrates His own love
toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” Can you grasp what
the apostle is saying here?

Let me see if I can make it clearer. Picture the man who just moments ago
murdered your children, drowning in the sea. Picture the man who just moments ago
molested you, clinging to a rock off a precipice. Picture the man who just hurled insults
at you and physically assaulted you, caught in the train tracks with the sound of the
locomotive getting ever louder. Would you be naturally inclined to give your life to
rescue him? Never!

Paul says, “Now picture a man known to be righteous in identically dire

circumstances. How many would give their lives to save him?” Not many. Though
perhaps for the good man someone would dare to die, the reality is that one will hardly
die for a righteous man.

But God—now get this—but God demonstrates his own love toward us, in that
while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. While we were yet murderers and
molesters and scoffers and violent aggressors toward God, while we hated God, he
demonstrated his love toward us, by exchanging Christ’s life for ours—Christ gave his
life to rescue us! This is incomprehensible love. And this is the love the Father has for
us! “Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be
called the sons of God!” (1 John 3:1a KJV).

The Lord’s love for us is nothing less than exuberant. Zephaniah 3:17 says, “The
LORD your God is in your midst, A victorious warrior. He will exult over you with joy, He
will renew you in his love, He will rejoice over you with shouts of joy.” He rejoices over
us in his love with shouts of joy! With shouts of joy! “Whoo-hoo! I love you! I love you
so much,” he says.

And when we believe this (are you starting to believe this right now?), we will
love him back. Listen again to the sage words of John Owen:

So much as we see of the love of God, so much shall we delight in him,

and no more. Every other discovery of God, without this, will but make the soul
fly from him; but if the heart be once much taken up with this the eminency of the
Father’s love, it cannot choose but be overpowered, conquered, and endeared
unto him…If the love of a Father will not make a child delight in him, what will?
Put, then, this to the venture: exercise your thoughts upon this very thing, the
eternal, free, and fruitful love of the Father, and see if your hearts be not wrought
upon to delight in him. I dare boldly say, believers will find it as thriving a course
as ever they pitched on in their lives. Sit down a little at the fountain, and you will
quickly have a farther discovery of the sweetness of the streams. You who have
run from him, will not be able, after a while, to keep at a distance for a moment.5

5
Ibid., 36.

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Conclusion
We need to see God as he is. We need to see him as breathtakingly beautiful
and overflowing with love for us. God is always like this. He has not changed. We are
the problem. We have failed to believe his word. And so we have failed to see him as
he is. Is it any wonder that our affections are not moved, that we can so easily, even
from one moment to the other, feel almost nothing? Is it any wonder that we so quickly
transfer our affection to other things?

So then, whether you are a Christian or a non-Christian the ultimate reason why
you are failing to love the Lord is the same: you lack faith. If you have never come to
love the Lord it is because you have never trusted in the Lord Jesus Christ for salvation.
You have not yet tasted and seen how beautiful and loving and satisfying he is.

Now if you have come to love the Lord, but find yourself struggling to maintain
your affection for him (as we all do, all the time) it is because you are not looking on the
Lord with the eyes of faith.

And since it is an issue of faith, you must know that it is not something that you
can work up yourself. You cannot manufacture faith. Only God can work it in us. So
though we believe, we need to be like the man in Mark 9:24 who says, “I do believe;
help my unbelief.”

We are our greatest impediment to loving the Lord from the heart. We refuse to
believe what is true of him, preferring to walk by sight rather than by faith. O that God
would work in our hearts to incline us more and more to him so that we would love him
with all our hearts.

Redeemer Bible Church

16205 Highway 7
Minnetonka, MN 55345
Office: 952.935.2425
Fax: 952.938.8299
info@redeemerbiblechurch.com
www.redeemerbiblechurch.com
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Loving God, Part 2: The Impediment to Loving God © 2004 by R W Glenn