In this last message on loving God we’ll turn to the simple statement of Jesus in John 14:15: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” We’ll look at the importance of obeying God, connect love and obedience, then look at Jesus’ example of obedience as the demonstration of his love for God before we apply this way of showing love for God to our life.

God showed his love for us by giving. He gave his Son so we could have eternal life (John 3:16). We can also use giving to express our love for God. We’ll meet a woman who did this and from her discover some characteristics of giving that shows love. Then we’ll look at the characteristics of the kind of giving that comes from love, rather than other motivations.

If we are going to love God with all our heart, we can learn to use the language of giving to express our love.

Martha, Mary’s sister, sometimes gets a bad rap. Jesus rebuked her (gently) and pointed to her sister, Mary, as an example of something Martha wasn’t doing. As a result of this, some have exalted sitting at Jesus’ feet over serving him. As we’ll see, this is understanding Jesus incorrectly, and it denigrates something Jesus taught should characterize his followers. In this message we’ll discover exactly what Martha was doing that was wrong, and see how acts of service can be a demonstration of love for Jesus as long as we avoid Martha’s mistakes in serving.

In this message we learn that we can show our love for God by spending time with him. We’ll meet a woman who did this and gained Jesus’ approval for what she did, then discuss how we can spend quality time with Jesus as a way to tell him we love him.

Do you ever leave a church service and feel better than when you came in? If so, you’ve experienced the power of praise and worship to help you express your love for God and to draw you closer to God. This week we’ll see how one of the great lovers of God in the Bible used praise and worship as one of his chief ways to demonstrate that he loved God with all his heart. We’ll learn that praise and worship are channels we can use daily to express our love for God and in the process find they will deepen our love for God.

Much is written about God’s love for us. Many songs have been written celebrating his love for us. Relatively few books have been written explaining how to love God. Few songs are available to help us tell God we love him. Yet the first commandment, according to Jesus, is to love God with all our heart, soul, and mind. Over the next few weeks we’ll attempt to deal with this deficit in instruction by exploring how we can show our love for God and for his Son, Jesus.