God's Right: To Ask Obedience of His Creatures

    By A. W. Tozer

    Blessed are they that do his commandments,
    that they. . .may enter in through the gates into the city.
    Revelation 22:14

        The command to love God with our whole being has
    seemed to many persons to be impossible of fulfillment,
    and it may be properly argued that we cannot love by
    fiat.

        Love is too gentle, too frail a creature to spring up at
    the command of another.  It would be like commanding
    the barren tree to bring forth fruit or the winter forest
    to be green.

        What then can it mean?

       The answer is found in the nature of God and of man.
    God being who He is must have obedience from His
    creatures.   Man being who he is must render that
    obedience, and he owes God complete obedience
    whether or not he feels for Him the faintest trace of love
    in his heart.
 
       It is a question of the sovereign right of God to require
    His creatures to obey Him.

        Man's first and basic sin was disobedience.  When he
    disobeyed God he violated the claims of divine love with
    the result that love for God died within him.

        Now, what can he do to restore that love to his heart
    again?

        The heart that mourns its coldness toward God needs
    only to repent its sins, and a new, warm and satisfying
    love will flood into it.  For the act of repentance will bring
    a corresponding act of God in self-revelation and
    intimate communion.

        Once the seeking heart finds God in personal
    experience there will be no further problem about
    loving Him.

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    Yours in Christ,
    Paul N. F.