How to Know if You Love God (5)

Oh, let us labour to have this affection of love planted in our hearts; that God by his Spirit would teach us to love him. It is not a matter of the brain to teach. God only is the great schoolmaster and teacher of the heart.
The soul that loves God and Christ says, 'Are there any other people who carry the image of God and Christ?' That soul will be sure to love them also. Undoubtedly if we love God, we will love his children, and anything that has God's stamp upon it. We will love his truth, his cause, his religion, and whatever is divine and touches upon God.
Love for God will make us please him in all things. As Christ describes it out of Moses, to ‘love God with all our mind, with all our soul, and with all our strength' (Deut. 6:5; Luke 10:27). Where love is, it sets all on work to please. It sets the mind to study. It will study God's truth, and not serve him by our own inventions. If he be a magistrate, with the strength of his magistracy; if he be a minister, with the strength of his ministerial calling. In any condition I must love him, with all that that condition enables me to.
Much might be said to this purpose to test ourselves, whether we love God or not. It is the command of both the Old and New Testaments. ‘I give you a new command,’ said Christ (John 13:34). Yet it is no new command, but old and known. But it is commanded now in the gospel; it is renewed by new manifestations of God's love in Christ, 'that we should love him, as he has loved us' (John 15:12). This affection the Holy Spirit sets out as the disposition and qualification of those for whom God has prepared great things: 'eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has entered into the heart of man, the things which God has prepared for those that love him' (1 Cor. 2:9).

Devotional Readings taken from Puritan Richard Sibbes 'Refreshment for the Soul.'
A Glance of Heaven, Works, vol. 4, pp. 189-91
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