Shalom, you need to hear this, the burden of the word is heavy on my heart
Many, many of us do not know God. We have the wrong idea of who he is, what he does, has done, will do and what he wants. We do not understand and we get off track so far and so often. How can we then make him our number one priority.
Religious leaders in Jesus’s time where no different. They had constructed an image in their head of who God is. What he is meant to look like, sound like, how he was supposed to act, what he would say and many others. They did not know God.
All the studying and praying and constant adherence to the law did not do a single thing. Like you and I, we could read the Bible all day and pray all day and still miss who God is. Our skewed view of the Lord pulls us away from his real beauty.
1 John 4:19 says “We love because he first loved us.” The start is to understand that you and I can only love because he loved first. Our love for God and others is built only and always in response to his love for us. For God is love.
We can’t read our way to love, nor can we find a list of things we can do to create love in our hearts for Gods. Therefore our love for God is always in direct relation to our perception of his love for us. Did you see it?
What we think of God and how we perceive our Lord directly reflects our love for him!