Do You Love God the Most?

"Do you love God the most?"

My daughter, sitting next to me in the passenger seat, asked me this question as I drove her to a recent practice. An automatic answer came to mind after decades of trying to be a good Christian. Everyone knows you love God first. Yet something told me not to give the answer that came to mind so quickly. I suspect it was the Spirit herself inviting me into a bigger moment.

Here was my teenage daughter asking me this question, and the context matters immensely. She already knows I love her. I tell her all the time. So as I thought about the person asking me this question, I suspect she is really wondering how much I love her. Or more specifically, she was likely asking about the boundaries of my love for her.

I've been in ministry long enough to make a sadder realization. At the heart of a question like this is whether my love for God would ever cause me to love her less.

That may seem like a strange observation as you read this, but I've spent enough time with Christians in the LGBTQ+ community to know that this is not a hypothetical question (to offer just one application). Many a Christian parent banishes or refuses to embrace their queer child as a direct result of the way they understand their faith in God. They love their child less as a perverted result of their misguided love of God. While it's usually not as dramatic, a parent can apply this thinking whenever they sense their child is stepping outside the faith.

When Jesus was asked about distilling the most important part of all 613 laws in the Hebrew Scriptures, He said that the first commandment would be to "love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind" (Matthew 22:37 NLT). But He then offered a second command that was of equal importance to the first, which is to "love your neighbor as yourself" (39).

If loving others is of equal importance to loving God, then we would be hard-pressed to ever say that we love God more than others. It creates a false dichotomy precisely because one of the greatest ways to love God is by loving others.

But trying to love God more than others also assumes God is merely another object or person to be loved. It fails to see that God is love itself, and that all other expressions of love flow from that.

The theologian David Bentley Hart, whom I consider the most brilliant Christian alive today, offers us helpful wording around this idea. In his book That All Shall Be Saved, Hart explains that "God is not an 'entity.'" This is the problem with saying we love God first and then offering a list of secondary applications that follow. Hart then poetically explains that God is "the fullness of Being and the transcendental horizon of reality that animates every single stirring of reason and desire." We are animated to love others because of the fullness of the love of God.

In his book The Experience of God, Hart explains it like this:

God is the source and ground of being and the wellspring of all consciousness, but also therefore the final cause of all creation, the end toward which all beings are moved, the power of infinite being that summons all things into existence from nothingness and into union with itself.

God is more than something or someone to be loved. That's why "anyone who does not love does not know God, for God is love" (1 John 4:8 NLT). Loving others is the same as knowing God. 

The parents who reject their queer child think they're loving God more by loving the child less. But there is no more of God to be had that way. Loving a person less is a failure to know the God who is love. Even when a pursuit of God is the reason for it. As John explains a few verses later, "if we don’t love people we can see, how can we love God, whom we cannot see?" (1 John 4:20 NLT).

When Jesus says that loving God is "the first and greatest commandment," we must consider what we mean by first (Matthew 22:38 NLT). First need not imply a rank that pushes out all others. First can explain a source that enables all that follows. 

So what did I actually say to my daughter that night? I told her I loved her through my love of God and that it was God who enabled me to live in love and then extend it to her. I told her I did not believe God was a person to be loved, but rather the source of the love we experience.

There was no competition between her and God. Rather than viewing God as a potential rival to her dad's love, she was able to see God as the source of the love she and I share together. She also has no need to fear that I would respond differently to her in the future based on my pursuit of loving God.

Be careful how you love God first. Some attempts to do so may cause you to miss the point completely.

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