It's ok if loving God isn't easy.

Deuteronomy 6:5 says:
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.

The word that I find interesting in the list is STRENGTH. I don’t know about you, but sometimes I feel like a second-class Christian if I’m having a HARD TIME loving God. I feel like my faith is weak and my love for Him is not what it should be. Perhaps people have made you think that because your love isn’t natural and easy, your relationship with God isn’t strong.

But then I read this verse in Deuteronomy and ask:  “Would God have called us to love Him with strength if it was supposed to be easy all the time?” God calls us to use our strength when we love Him because...IT WILL BE HARD sometimes! And that’s okay. It’s okay if it is not always EASY to love God.


What makes this profound? Think of it this way: when you're a youthful romantic, you imagine your future spouse or "soulmate" to be someone incredible. You imagine them to be the most loving, selfless, honoring, caring, thoughtful, generous, patient, humble person on planet Earth. And when you meet them, there's this "honeymoon" stage where they appear to be all of those things and more. Loving them is effortless. However, as soon as you discover how deeply flawed they are, love becomes something that requires effort and strength at times. 


People become hard to love because of their imperfection.


Now imagine for a second that God is all of those soulmate attributes to their perfection. Well, actually He is. Even after your "honeymoon" stage with God wanes, He is still the perfection of those qualities. Yet, your love for Him requires strength. Provided that God is the most perfectly gracious, loving, intelligent, wise, and generous relationship we will ever have, it is unfathomable to me that God would ask us to bring strength to the table in our relationship with Him. 


Why would I need strength to love the most perfect being? Simply put: our imperfection makes God's perfection hard to love. 


We just fall short in our capacity to effortlessly, faithfully, and devotedly love a perfect God. We're just plain broken. We don't understand God's ways. We don't desire for ourselves God's perfect desires for our lives. 


At times, love will not be the effortless, natural, easy love that we dream of. And that's ok. There is room for that in faith.


The word "strength" in Deuteronomy 6 is also a challenge: Are you using your strength to love God? Or do you only love Him as long as it’s easy? Remarkably, God’s perfect love for us has nothing to do with our success or failure in this area:

1 John 4:10
This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.

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