When one loves and communes with God whole heartedly and with God loved above all, this increases one's capacity and offering of love to all others. In the secular mind this seems counter intuitive. Insecurity drives many to measure how much love and material attention are given to them, especially compared to others. And people, rightfully, do need and require a great deal of love, especially children and the frail. This is not "being needy", this is the preservation of a flourishing society. The scriptures are very clear about the need for romantic love, charitable love, and respectful love.
When one puts God at "the top of the list", one is able to carry out one's capacity to love to order of magnitudes higher than when God is viewed as a "competitor" for love (or worse, God is not loved and absent by one's choice in their relationships). Here are the reasons that love flourishes when one "loves God more" than even one's spouse or child:
- Loving God, like exercise, stretches and opens the heart wider in order to carry, give, and receive more love.
- Loving God teaches a purer form of love, one that like pure oxygen, can heal what ails.
- Loving God causes the person to embrace the teachings and protective powers of God, which like antibodies in nursing milk, is passed on to the loved one in protection. One's own spiritual health promotes healthy love within the recipients of your love, which can now be viewed as your love's "offspring."
- Loving God means that you will be the good steward of love in turn, and you will be less likely to allow or worse promote unhealthy love in others.
- Loving God means that you study God's family, and see role models of those with enormous capacity for love, even in the most dire of circumstances. You can easily translate such love into both stressful times and more secure times.
- Loving God opens one to the gifts of the Holy Spirit (wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord) which are of a direct aid in preventing taking a loved one for granted, and works to refresh one's love for others over the years and throughout the circumstances of life. (This is the secret of quite a few of the many- decade marriages of those who lived during "the greatest generation.") One is less likely to stray or to take a love relationship for granted when one allows the Holy Spirit to constantly and continually refresh it.
- Loving God means that you better understand the reasons for certain choices the Lord made about how humankind should conduct their lives, and the health of those choices. In turn, you can explain what might otherwise be seen as unreasonable boundaries to others, and thus bring them to greater love and understanding of God and life.
- Loving God changes one's secular perspective of time, and therefore "buys back" more time for love, and less tolerance of love numbing or deadening activities in ones life.
- Loving God is necessary for the righteous, and empowers them to fulfill in both the long and the short run, more agendas that are social ills, charity, or love of neighbor motivated. One is able to deliver social goods more through putting the love of God first, because love of God is the ultimate quality control and quality assurance, which ensures that you are truly delivering the social benefit that does no harm and only truly helps. For example, one might think that a certain business might benefit the poor, but then when looking through the eyes of God by putting love of God first, one would see potential pitfalls in the idea, and be open to another business that might be of greater practical love and grace for the recipient.
I hope these guidelines help, and God bless!
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