Make God Your Valentine

With Valentine's Day right around the corner, couples are planning how they want to spend their Valentine's Day, and stores are stocked with all of the red, white, and pink hearts and stuffed animals that you can find. Love is in the air. So for this week's article, I was inspired to write about love, but in a different way than what you are probably thinking.

I want to talk about what it means to love God.

Now, if you have grown up in church, you have heard the importance of loving God. It is almost so simple that we overlook it; it's easy for us to view this as "understood knowledge" or just another "Sunday School answer." However, loving Jesus is the first step to loving anything because we are able to love others because Christ first loved us. (1 John 4:19)

Loving God entails the following: Obeying all of His commands, believing in His Word, spending time with Him through prayer, scripture, and community, sharing His love with others, thanking Him for the good times and the bad, pushing into Him when things get hard, and enjoying all He is.

Loving God means to be completely satisfied in Him.

In 1 John, we see that John is lovestruck with Jesus and he never got over it. John lived his life every day going out and proclaiming the gospel, and as he did, God filled him with joy. There may be times where we have those "valley-low" moments, and we feel like we have "gotten over" God's love, but I can assure you that He has not gotten over you.

In Matthew 22:37-38, Jesus says, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment."

Ultimately, loving God means to show His love to others and to be completely in love with Him. Give Him your full heart.

So this Valentine's Day, I encourage you to take some time to spend with God so that you can fall more in love with Him.