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In this study, we will examine what it means to love God with your heart, soul, mind, and strength and to love your neighbor as yourself. 

But before we can know what it means to love God and our neighbor, we must first understand what it means to love. To that end, take a few moments to reflect on how love is typically portrayed in our culture. 

• Write down a few of the key qualities that often define how people understand the concept of love today. When you are finished, we will take a closer look at how the Bible defines love in order to compare the two understandings. 

How God defines love

While the Bible defines love in a variety of ways across the breadth of God’s word, a common thread is that biblical love prioritizes the pursuit of another person’s well-being over your own. 

Now, that does not mean we ignore our own needs or diminish ourselves in order to lift others up. No good parent wants that for their children, and the same is true of our heavenly Father. But knowing where to draw that line can be difficult, and Scripture doesn’t advocate for an easy, one-size-fits-all approach to how we should love others. 

Rather, God’s plan is for the practical ways in which we love to be part of an ongoing conversation with him. 

In short, the Holy Spirit gets to be the one who decides what it means for us to love others and to love him, and our primary job is to follow his guidance.

• What is your first reaction when you read that God dictates what it means to love? 
• What are some practical ways in which the biblical approach to loving others differs from the approach of the culture as you described it above? 

Love is not a feeling

Though we are ultimately called to follow God’s lead on what it means to love in a given situation, his word gives us some general guidelines.

Perhaps the most significant difference between the culture’s understanding of love and the understanding we find in the Bible is that, in Scripture, love is a choice rather than an emotion. 

God never commands us how to feel. He does not designate certain emotions as inherently sinful or others as necessarily pure. Rather, his primary concern is with how we respond to those emotions. 

Love is much the same. 

God can command us to love him (Deuteronomy 6:5), to love our enemies (Matthew 5:44), and to love others as ourselves (Mark 12:31) because it is always within our power to do so. Were love synonymous with affection or desire, then it would be beyond our ability to control. As such, there would be many times in which we were compelled to sin without a path to avoid it. 

God does not set us up to fail like that. He knows that we will sin, but we will never encounter a situation in which we have no option except to sin. 

Understanding this distinction is important because it removes one of the primary barriers to loving people well: the belief that we have to like them first. 

That may sound harsh, but if we wait to love our enemies until we can convince ourselves that we like our enemies, then chances are that we’re never going to start loving them or liking them. And the same logic extends to all of our relationships. 

After a big fight, most spouses do not feel very loving toward one another. And every parent can remember a time when their child was jumping on their last nerve like it was a trampoline. You may not like the other person in those moments, but it doesn’t mean that you stopped loving them.

Why? Because love is a choice you make that goes beyond fickle feelings like warmth and agreeableness. In those moments, the best way to honor the other person as God intends is to remember your decision to prioritize their best interests and act accordingly. 

• Take a moment to reflect on a time when you failed to love someone when you did not particularly like them. What factors led to that decision?
• Next, think back on a time when you chose to love someone well when you did not like them. What factors led to that decision? How did those factors differ from the previous question?

When you don’t like God

While it’s important to remember that love is a choice in our relationships with other people, it is just as important (if not more) to remember that love is choice in our relationship with God.

There will be times in life when it feels like God has let us down. Whether it’s an issue we face personally, something that afflicts a loved one, or even just looking at the depravity and evil in the world around us, there will be days when we have difficulty reconciling God’s omnipotent, omniscient, all-loving nature with the difficulties inherent to this life. 

And in those moments, we may not like God very much. 

In fact, we may want nothing more than to vent and scream about all the ways in which we simply cannot understand why he hasn’t stepped in to change something that is within his power to change. 

If our love for God is limited by how much we like him, then we will not be able to consistently dedicate our heart, soul, mind, and strength to his service. We will not be able to love him as the Bible describes and as he deserves. 

And he knows that. 

It’s why he gives us examples throughout Scripture of people arguing with him or yelling at him without condemning either action. 

Now, there’s certainly a line we shouldn’t cross—he is still God, after all—and if our frustrations turn into disrespect, he can be quick to remind us of that fact. But ultimately, the God who made us knows that there will be times when our finite minds cannot understand his infinite perspective on our lives and that we will be tempted to respond out of frustration more than faith. 

Even then, though, he also knows that our best path forward is to prioritize our pursuit of his well-being—which Jesus defines as obedience to his word and will (John 14:15)—even when we may not feel like doing so. 

• Think of a time when you did not like God very much. How did you respond in that moment? Looking back, would you change anything about that response? 

Looking to Christ’s example

Whether it’s loving God or loving others, doing so consistently is difficult. Fortunately, the Gospels give us an excellent example of what that looks like in Jesus. As he told his disciples, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another” (John 13:34). 

To that end, over the next few lessons we are going to look at examples from Jesus’ life for additional characteristics of what the Bible means when it calls us to love. Then, we’ll examine what it means to apply those principles to loving God with our heart, soul, mind, and strength and our neighbors as ourselves. 

• As we finish for today, spend a few minutes praying and reflecting on ways that you can choose to love God and those he has brought into your life. Ask the Lord to point out anyone whom you need to love better. Then write down the thoughts the Holy Spirit brings to mind.
• When you’re done, turn those thoughts into a prayer, asking for God’s help in loving well the people he brought to mind and any others that you may encounter. Write your prayer in the space below.