How Can We Best Show Our Love to God?

“Can I love God without hurting myself?” I felt the weight of it as a question that God truly wanted me to dig into until I found the answer. The Bible is full of verses about denying self, dying to self, and taking up one’s cross, but how far does it go? Is it only about giving in to God when you and He come to a difference of opinion? Or is there a real requirement to give until it hurts in every area for God to know that you love Him? How can we best show our love to God?

My Situation

I have a history of fasting a lot, but believe me when I tell you it’s not for my glory. I certainly would never have done it unless God had made it perfectly clear that it was required, and He has had to drag me, kicking and screaming, into it many times. Without going into detail, let’s just say that this has been an ongoing issue for years, and I’m sensitive to the times when I believe the Lord is insistent about it.

This week, being the week before Resurrection Sunday, I had Friday off. Lately, the Lord has had me water fasting until 5:00 pm on Mondays, and lots of school holidays are Mondays. This time, I was excited about a Friday off to relax and spend time with the Lord as I got some things done around the house. Then I started thinking about what Good Friday stands for. It’s a day when our Savior died for us. He endured a betrayal by friends, a terrible death, and separation from God. Who was I to have a relaxing day off work, fix a fruity breakfast shake, and go out to lunch?

I checked again. “Lord, are You requiring a fast? Because if You are, of course, I will do it. I know by now that what You want is best, so just say the word…” Nothing. This time, He wasn’t requiring anything. It was all up to me, and now I had to choose.

The Bible Has a Lot to Say

I started checking verses about sacrifice, suffering, pain, and cost. I found verses about Jesus’ ultimate sacrifice, self-sacrifice, and enduring suffering. The verses glided over my mind’s eye until I came to one. Hosea 6:6.

“For I desired mercy and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings.”

I checked the commentaries and found a great explanation by Got Questions.

The words of Hosea 6:6 are spoken again by Jesus in Matthew 9:13 and 12:7, and they were words of rebuke every time. In Hosea, the people were continuing to bring sacrifices and do rituals while they worshipped other gods. They had no heart to know the one true God who loved and cared for them. In Matthew, Jesus rebuked the Pharisees for again focusing on the letter while ignoring its spirit. Faithfulness and love toward God were more important than procedural observances and rituals without them. The Pharisees fasted twice per week and tithed everything they had to God. They also had a real problem with Jesus reaching out to tax collectors and grabbing grain on the Sabbath. Their hearts were far from God, even though they went above and beyond even what the Law required for righteousness.

Jesus Is Our Righteousness

Of course, Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection fulfilled the Old Testament Law once and for all. In the Age of Grace, our righteousness is not found by following the Law but by trusting in the finished work of Christ on the cross. Fasting and obedience are still very much required, but they don’t make us righteous. Only the blood of Jesus does that.

On the topic of fasting, Romans 14:6b says, “…He that eateth, eateth to the Lord, for he giveth God thanks; and he that eateth not, to the Lord he eateth not, and giveth God thanks.” God loves us when we’re fasting. He also loves us when we’re eating. How quickly I had forgotten that exact lesson the Lord had taught me two years ago. I wrote about it in the blog The Sneaky Sin of Self-Righteousness.

Here’s a quote from that blog: “It turns out that when I was worried that I wasn’t doing ENOUGH to be pleasing to God, I was saying that my actions, my works, were what was keeping God happy with me all along…I’m pleasing to Him because of what He has done for me on the cross, not anything I could ever do ‘for Him.’”

My Decision

I decided not to fast. When I fast on Mondays, it’s because I know that God has led me to do it. I submit to Him because He is my God, He knows better than I do, and He has a plan for me that requires it. (After all, God’s main love language is obedience.)

If I were to fast this time, though, it wouldn’t be for loving submission. It would just be out of some sort of “payback” for His sacrifice for me. (Read the blog here about the folly of trying to “pay God back” instead of just being grateful to Him.) Or worse, because I thought that it would make Him happier if I grit my teeth through the pain of sacrifice to Him than if I spent the day in the “knowledge of God,” thankful for His sacrifice for ME.

The Line of Requirement

It’s so hard to know sometimes when we should rest and when we should work. When we should DO and when we should just be grateful for all Jesus has DONE. One of my favorite blogs the Lord has given me in the past seven years is 3 Simple Instructions from God to Us. It’s the one in which He showed me through Hebrews 3 and 4 that if we will just listen, obey, and trust, we can be sure that we are pleasing to God (and showing Him that we love Him).

As I was contemplating this blog, I was also listening to my new favorite song on the YouTube channel Bible Twang: Psalm 1 But Make It Country. (The channel owner takes the Bible and uses AI to make country songs.)

Here’s the chorus about the righteous, “He’s like a tree planted by streams of water that brings forth its fruit in its season, whose leaf don’t wither. Everything he does shall prosper.”

Love God with Gratitude

The analogy of a tree shows how very helpless we are. Trees don’t plant themselves. They don’t water themselves, and it’s not by “trying” that they bring forth fruit.  God plants us and sustains us, and it’s only by His Holy Spirit that we can produce anything good in our lives. We prosper because of the Living Water in us – not because we are striving to the point of pain or exhaustion. There is no need to earn the love that God already makes abundantly available by His great grace. And unless the Holy Spirit is commanding our sacrifice, we can show our love better by acknowledging what God has done for us with gratitude from the heart than with religious performance.

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