Free What is the Point?: Discovering Life's Deeper Meaning and Purpose by Misty Edwards Page B

as loving God without seeking to obey Him—not because He is a tyrant, but because He knows us best and He knows the best way to bring us forth in love. His commandments are the pathway to love and life. He said, “If you love Me, keep My commandments. . . . He who has My commandments and keeps them, it is he who loves Me. . . . If anyone loves Me, he will keep my word” (John 14:15–23).
    “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word.” What could be confusing about that statement? Three times, within several verses, Jesus makes it clear how He defines loving Him. From Genesis to Revelation He makes it clear. Yet it is strange how nebulous and how blurred many are on this definition. There is no such thing as loving Jesus without seeking to obey His words. It is a deception. It is a religious figment of someone’s imagination and nothing more than religious sentiment. The Holy Spirit will not bare witness to it on the last day, and Jesus will not buy it at the judgment seat. God requires more than singing to Him about love or writing poems about love. He requires more than sentimental feelings.
    There is an unholy momentum in the nations where more and more people, who, in the name of Jesus, are making Him into the image of what they want in a god. Then they are defining love according to the god that they created. It is not Jesus.
    One of the core issues of conflict of the generation in which the Lord returns will be the definition of love. Do we love on God’s terms, or do we love on the terms of the humanistic culture that has no reference to obedience to what He has already spoken? We must love Jesus with the intention to “keep His commandments” because Scripture is our pathway to Him and the standard that we will be evaluated by. We can’t say that we love Him and then refuse the path that leads to Him. That would be like saying you love someone in a foreign country but you refuse to look at them, talk to them on the phone, read their messages, get on an airplane to see them, or even speak the same language as them. This isn’t love.
    Jesus’s commandments are the tracks that lead to Him. If you love Him, you will take the train and find Him. That does not mean our obedience is mature or that we never fail. I often fail and come up short in my obedience, but my heart is set to obey the written Word of God, most specifically the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5–7). It is the clearest definition of love in the Bible. There it is in three chapters.
    H E O WNS U S
    Jesus doesn’t only want to forgive us; He also wants to own us. He wants to brand us with His name, to mark us and claim us as His own possession. He wants us to bear His name so that everything that is His is ours. It is the meek who will inherit it (Matt. 5:5). Your freedom is in the yoke of Christ and in binding yourself to Him and throwing away the key. I want to be a prisoner of love, bound by affection, motivated by desire, and clinging to Jesus by giving Him control of my life.
    Right at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount He makes it clear that He wants the whole of you, not just your deeds but also your heart. It involves more than a checklist; it involves every part of your being, right down to your thoughts. He wants to fully possess you and transform you into the image of love. We transfer the rights of our life into His hands by obeying His written Word. When you agreed to accept His blood for the forgiveness of your sins, you were entering into a covenant to give yourself to Jesus. You do not own yourself any longer. You belong to a Master, and your freedom is found in His words.
    It is the most liberating way to live, to live in love. You were created for it. The good thing about His commandments is His heart behind them. All of His commandments lead us to Him, and they lead us to freedom. That’s the stunning part. Many people are wrapped in the heavy chains of darkness, with the master called Sin standing above them, with a whip