God our Creator, Sustainer, Redeemer, Deliverer, and Lord has every right to require of His creatures whatever pleases Him. And because He is infinitely wise, loving, and good, we can be certain that what He requires of us is precisely what we need.

The Lord requires, as we have seen, that we fear Him and walk in all His ways.

Third, the Lord requires that we love Him. Now the order of love’s appearing in the requirements of God may strike us as strange. Should we not first love the Lord, then fear and obey Him? No. First we fear God, then, by faith, we take up His commands. Then we love Him. It will be much easier to love the Lord once we have begun to walk in His paths, for when we do, we will discover how good and true those paths are, and how much our Redeemer and Lord loves us by showing us to live so well.

The love we feel for God will flow from the fear and obedience we show Him. If we wait to fear and obey the Lord until we love Him as He commands, we will never get there. Let us keep the order that God requires, daily, in prayer and meditation, renewing fear of God; daily, in prayer and obedience, walking in the paths of the Lord; and daily, in the blessings and joys of these two, improving love for God Who faithfully loves and cares for us.

T. M. Moore

The Law of God is the soil which, fertilized by the rest of God’s Word and watered by His Spirit, brings forth the fruit of Christian life. If you’d like to understand this process better, and how to make best use of the Law in your walk with and work for the Lord, order the book, The Ground for Christian Ethics, from our online store.

Except as indicated, Scripture taken from the New King James Version. © Copyright 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.