by Rose Murdock

"We love him because he first loved us." 1 John 4:19

One night after a beautiful time of worship with the Lord these words came to me, "If I don’t believe that He loves me, then my worship is just a lie."  In other words, if I don’t know and believe that God really loves me, then when I worship Him I am being hypocritical—it’s not true worship.

The reason for this is because you can’t worship God without loving Him.  To worship someone means that we love them with reverence and allegiance and devotion.  Our worship is an expression of our devout love.  So since I can’t worship God without loving Him and since the Bible tells us that we love Him because He first loved us then that means that any expression of ‘worship’ without first knowing and believing and receiving His love for me is simply a religious act and not a true expression of worship from the heart.  It’s a lie.  I’m being fake or worshipping simply out of a sense of duty and not love.

This verse in 1 John says that we love Him because He first loved us.  But it’s not enough for Him to love us.  God loves the whole world but the whole world doesn’t love and worship Him. It’s when we know that He loves us and believe that He loves us—then we will worship Him.  So the key to our sincerity in worshipping God is to know and believe that He loves us.  How do we do that?

It begins with an understanding of what Jesus has done for us.  "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son…"  Giving His Son was the greatest expression of love towards us.  Receiving the love of God is not waiting for God to make us happy and fix problems in our life immediately and to our satisfaction.  It’s about understanding that His love for us gave us what we didn’t deserve.  If rescuing us from hell for eternity was all that Jesus did for us then that alone would be enough for us to love and worship Him forever.  But yet, not only did He deliver us from the devil’s clutches but He also has brought us into His glorious Kingdom, into His presence, into His life and all the fullness of that life.  What an awesome thing!

We need to pray and ask the Lord to help us understand what He has done for us.  He didn’t love us because we were deserving of it.  And His love is not something we can be demanding of.  He gave it freely.  Oh how God loves it when people respond to His love with appreciation!  Think about how you feel when someone responds to your act of kindness with appreciation and gratitude.  You feel much better when someone appreciates an expression of your love then when someone is ungrateful or critical of how you’ve expressed love to them or takes it for granted.  We need to thank the Lord for whatever amount of knowledge we have about His love for us and then pray that He gives us a greater understanding of what Jesus has done for us.  We need to know.  We need to believe that He loves us.  We need to worship Him out of a sincere heart of thankfulness and love and not simply as an act of religious duty.

Take just a minute to think about what Jesus has done for you.  Let Him know you appreciate it.  Receive it as the act of love that it was and respond accordingly.  He is so deserving of our sincere love and worship!