If You Love Me

What does it mean to really love God?  Does it mean we have to have warm, fuzzy feelings for Him, to say we love Him, to show up at Church?  Jesus gives us the answer:

If you love me, you will keep my commandments.  John 14:15

How well we keep God’s commands is a measure of how much we love Him.  Every time we choose sin, we show that we love our selfish desires more than we love God.  Saying “I’m only human” and “I’m not perfect”  does not excuse the sin.  We have to make a concerted effort to avoid sin and to avoid near occasions of sin.  When we fall, we need to ask forgiveness, and if it’s a big fall, we need to head to the confessional.   Then we keep going, keep trying to do our best.

There are some that think that they can just believe in Jesus, be saved in a one-shot deal and do whatever they want for the rest of their lives and still get to Heaven.  Jesus Himself tells us such a belief is wrong:

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.”  Matthew 7:21

If you are lukewarm, chilly (or worse) in your faith, one way to get back your devotion is to commit to avoiding sin.  If you’re in mortal sin though, you need to go to Confession first, or you can forget about making progress.

Often the beginning of the spiritual life is called “the purgative way.”  It’s the first steps we take along the narrow path.  You’ll find that those first few steps are the hardest, but once you get the hang of it you’ll find how true it is that “His yoke is easy and His burden is light.”  EWTN has an article that details the three stages of the spiritual life, (Purgative, Illuminative, and Unitive) here.  The section on “The Way of Beginners” is a good overview, and in reading the full article, you’ll get an idea of where you’re going if you start on on this journey and don’t turn back.

I’ve learned a bit through trial and error, and the occasional slap upside the head when I have the wrong idea.  I started by getting rid of mortal sins, which I did first by confessing them and then being serious about not falling into them again.  Mortal sin cuts us off from the source of sanctifying grace, and without that grace, we turn away from God even more.

I have a two-part approach to dealing with temptations.  The first is to reject them at the thought.  All sin begins with a thought, and we can either refuse them and move on, or entertain them and allow the temptation to overcome us.  If the thought persists even though I’ve tried to reject it, then I pray for the strength to overcome it.  We need to remember that on our own we do not have the strength to overcome sin; if we think so we fall into presumption and dangerous territory.  This is especially true if we allow ourselves to participate in near occasions of sin.  If you don’t want to go over a cliff, it’s pretty stupid to pull your car up to the edge and rev the engine.

After getting rid of the mortal sins, I decided the approach I’d take is to rank my venial sins and work on what I thought were the worst ones first.  I put gossiping, criticism, and other verbal sins at the top of my list, and things like going over the speed limit at the bottom.  I found that this approach was like trying to juggle a dozen torches at once, and I was not very successful at it and getting burned a lot.  Basically even though I didn’t intend to sin, I was still speeding around town and letting my mouth run recklessly, too.  Each venial sin was bruising the grace that I had and was disposing me to fall into other venial sins.  I was stuck on mediocre because instead of treating venial sins like I did the mortal ones – avoiding them at all costs – I was trying to just pick one to fix and excuse the others until I could move down the list.

Finally someone wise pointed out to me that I was rationalizing and minimizing sin by ranking them, comparing them and taking that approach.

So I have a new approach, and it’s not based on focusing on the sin at all.  Instead, I focus on the question, “what is the right thing to do right now?”  That is working far better than allowing some sins while I just work on gossip, for example. If we try to look far ahead and think about being perfect all the time from here on out, it is overwhelming.   It’s a lot easier to make the right choices one moment at a time, and in so doing, we are putting one foot in front of the other on the path to Heaven.  We may be taking slow baby steps, but we will soon find that even if the progress is imperceptible from day to day, those little steps add up significantly over weeks and months.  Soon you see where you are, know where you’ve been and find that you are tremendously far ahead of where you began.   I haven’t been on the path long enough to reflect on the journey in terms of years yet, but I think the difference will be astounding provided that I keep going forward.

Jesus tells us of the amazing gift we receive when we keep His commands:

“Whoever has my commandments and observes them is the one who loves me. And whoever loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and reveal myself to him.” John 14:21

So there is the cure for spiritual lukewarmness, chilliness, and coldness.  Do your part to keep His commands, and He will reveal Himself to you.  And that is where the close, personal relationship with God begins.

Recommended Reading: The Gospel of John, Ch. 14