How can you love God who you cannot see ?

Have you ever noticed how it is hard to love people you do not see often? Parents, grandparents, friends who have moved away… Loving them when we do not see them takes a lot of effort.

I think some of us feel this way about God. We LOVE Jesus, but struggle to know how to love Jesus when we do not see him. It is not a lack of desire, but what is out of sight is often out of mind. So how do we love a God we cannot see?

According to the Bible, if someone says they love God but hates a fellow believer, they are a liar. This is because if we don’t love people we can see, we cannot love God, whom we cannot see. To love God, we must love our neighbor and our enemies. Jesus says the most important commandment is to show the love of Jesus to the Lord, and the way to love the God we cannot see is to love our neighbor that we can see.

1 John 4:20-21 states that "But if we say we love God and don’t love each other, we are liars. We cannot see God. So how can we love God, if we don’t love the people we can see? The commandment that God has given us is: ‘Love God and love each other!’"1.

This passage suggests that loving others is an essential part of loving God. It is not possible to love God without loving others. Therefore, it is important to treat others with kindness and respect, as we would like to be treated ourselves.

Matthew 22:36 “Teacher, which is the most important commandment in the law of Moses?”

37 Jesus replied, “‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.’ 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 A second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 The entire law and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments.”

Now first off, if you are a religious leader in this time, you have spent 30 years learning the law and the prophets and Jesus has the audacity to say it can all be learned in two simple sentences. You would either feel cheated in the years of learning that could have been a conversation, or you feel like it could never be that easy. Jesus says the most important commandment is not to not sin, but to show the crazy love of Jesus to the Lord. Then He tells us the way to love the God we cannot see is to love our neighbor that we can see.

So the next question is, who is my neighbor. Jesus teaches this in the story of the good Samaritan. In our culture, this would be like the story of the good “thief.” Jesus said the way to love them is not to argue with them and tell them they are wrong, but to serve them and tell them about Jesus (message of hope not judgement). Serve people who are different than you by serving them and telling them how Jesus changed your life is loving a God you cannot see.

If you do not love your neighbor (“your brother”) whom you can see, how can you love God whom you cannot see?

Well, John, that’s easy! We do it all the time. God is always here – our neighbors aren’t so near and obvious. Plus – no offense – but God is just generally “nicer,” easier to deal with, than many of our neighbors.

But no, this John, who sees much more clearly than most of us, sees it differently. After all, his Teacher Jesus said love your neighbor as yourself.

If you cannot love the present real persons in your life, you cannot be truly loving the not-so-present, not so in-your-face God that you imagine you are loving.

I say “you” because John said “you”, and because we must feel it personally. But it’s really WE. How can WE love the invisible God if we do not love our very visible brother / neighbor?

Now how does that logic apply to a slightly different situation – what about persons whose lives intersect yours only because some tv network, or preacher, or politician, or popular magazine happened to feature them – in order to make money or otherwise manipulate us?

Truth be told, some of those distant persons are suffering because of OUR activity / inactivity or because of deeds being done in our name.

Nevertheless the Bible does seem to put some emphasis on proximity. That might be just because back in those days most people never had any practical awareness of people who lived more than a few miles away. If you were going to love, it had to be people nearby. But certainly we are expected to think and act in love toward fellow humans wherever they are.

What does “love your neighbor” mean? Well, surely it starts with attention.

The most loving thing we can do for others is love God more than we love them. For if we love God most, we will love others best

I know this sounds like preposterous gobbledygook to an unbeliever. How can you love someone best by loving someone else most? But those who have encountered the living Christ understand what I mean. They know the depth of love and breadth of grace that flows out from them toward others when they themselves are filled with love for God and all he is for them and means to them in Jesus. And they know the comparatively shallow and narrow love they feel toward others when their affection for God is ebbing.

There’s a reason why Jesus said the second greatest commandment is like the first: if we love God with all our heart, we will love our neighbor as ourselves (Matthew 22:37–39). It functions like faith and works; if we truly have the first, the second naturally follows.

But if God is not the love of our life, there is no way that we will truly love our neighbor as ourselves. For we will love ourselves supremely.

So we see that if we love God most, we will love others best.

I find this to be a convicting and uncomfortable truth: How we love others, particularly other Christians, reveals how we love God. The apostle John puts it bluntly: “He who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen (1 John 4:20). Our love for each other is an indicator of the place God is holding in our hearts.

God is very good at designing things this way: our faith is revealed by our works (James 2:18), our creeds are revealed by our deeds (Luke 6:46), and our love for him is revealed by our love for others (1 John 4:20). He makes it very hard for us to fake it. And this is a great kindness (Romans 2:4).

Since the greatest and second greatest commandments are involved in these things, we know they are important to God. So perhaps the best thing we can do today is take an honest, lingering look at the way we love others, allow what we see to have its Philippians 2:12 effect on us, and ask God what he would have us do in response.

We may find that this is the most loving thing we will do for everyone else today.