by J.D. Greear
We love because he first loved us.
1 John 4:19

In Genesis 3 we find that sin has left us spiritually dead, meaning that the heart of our love for and delight in God was killed. Our original sin was idolatry. We valued what the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil could give us more than we valued God.
St. Augustine said Adam was choosing the company of his wife more than he was choosing God. He put more weight on being with Eve than he did on actually knowing and walking with God. In effect, he worshipped that way of living more than God.
God’s response was to give us over to our idols. Our hearts became, as John Calvin said, idol factories. Because of our idolatry, God’s laws to love and to serve and to glorify Him became unnatural to us. And when we do try to keep them, we chafe against them.
Imagine I have a metal bar that I am going to try to bend right in front of you. I take that metal bar, and I bend it and get it down to a certain shape. Then, one of two things happens. Either I stop applying pressure on the bar, at which point the bar immediately snaps back into its original shape. Or maybe I put so much pressure on it that it snaps in two. This is a picture of what happens to our hearts when we apply God’s law without the gospel. We either give up trying when the external pressure is removed, or we break spiritually. The law can demand our conformity, but it is powerless to reshape our hearts.
Martin Luther said this was the dilemma of the Great Commandment. If you love someone, you don’t need to be commanded to love them. You just love them! Luther concluded that what the law actually requires is freedom from the law, because if you really love God, you won’t need to be commanded. You couldn’t be commanded. You would just do it.

Thought to Remember for Today

For works to be good in God’s sight, they cannot be a means to anything else. They must come from the inward fount of the new man. Just as lovers do not need to be told what to do and say, a truly righteous heart needs no commands to be righteous. I never need to be commanded to kiss my wife, to eat a steak, or take a nap. Those things just come from the inward fount of who I am. Because you believe God has first loved you, your love for Him will flow more and more naturally. You will love, not because you’re commanded to love but because you are loved.

Fitzpatrick, E. (2016). Grace untamed: a 60-day devotional. Colorado Springs, CO: David C Cook.