God I Want to Love You More

This summer I started praying this: “God I want to love You more.”
Simple. Straightforward. Honest. An admission that if I am to love God more, He must give me that love…I cannot grow it myself. It is a fruit of grace. He must impart it if I am to have it.
Since I started praying that prayer all sorts of things have happened… but not what most Christians would expect…challenges increased, new problems sprang up. I shared some of this in my last post, The Long Road.
For some reason there is this expectation that prayers like….
• Give me patience,
• Teach me to forgive,
• Help me to be humble,
• I need more compassion,
• I want to love You more,
Will be answered by the Holy Spirit immediately granting such grace to the soul; like if we are really, really honest in our request the strength, faith, trust, and obedience will be unlocked and immediately available.
Sometimes I think we believe working with the Holy Spirit is a lot like the relationship between Chuck and “the Intersect.”

For those of you who don’t know, Chuck was an action comedy that was on a few years back about a guy named—you guessed it—Chuck, a mild-mannered nerd and Stanford dropout working tech support at a Los Angeles Buy More (a barely veiled Best Buy) when his former college roommate turned rogue CIA agent e-mails him a virus called “the Intersect” that implants the entire U.S. intelligence network into his brain.
Chuck needed to learn how to be an agent for the CIA and how to use the power of the Intersect. While the Intersect had the capability to give him all the information and skill he needed in the field, he first needed to learn how to unlock them so they could be used at the right time. Once he learned how to do that, whatever skill he needed was instantly at his command. He didn’t need to learn how to do kung fu, defuse a bomb, or decode a message—it just came to him.
That makes for entertaining TV, and unfortunately, is how many Christians believe the Holy Spirit works most of the time.
God loves it when we ask to love Him more, to be more gracious, to love others the way He loves us—that is asking to be more like Jesus, and therefore a prayer that God not only loves to hear but loves to answer. But when we pray for these things, we should not expect to instantly go from a 10 pound capacity to a 100 pound capacity to love, or forgive, or whatever it is that we asked for. What we should normally expect is that things happen—and by “things” I mean troubling things, hard things, painful things, unexpected things—that require us to have more patience, give more love, and show more grace.
The way God normally answers the prayer to love Him more is to bring us to places where He begins to expose our hidden idols to us; where He begins to dig up and remove things that we have been habitually going to for comfort. These are not necessarily bad or sinful things. Often they are good things. It is easy to think we are placing our hope in Christ when in reality we are placing it in that we tithe, or that we have a perfect attendance record at church, or that we spend regular time in the Bible, or our Saturdays at the city soup kitchen. We have to know that as good as doing these things may be, they are not trustworthy signs that prove we love Jesus. They can just as easily be signs that we love to look like we do.
Does that surprise you? Isn’t that the meaning of scriptures like…
Isaiah 58:2 (NIV), For day after day they seek me out; they seem eager to know my ways, as if they were a nation that does what is right and has not forsaken the commands of its God. They ask me for just decisions and seem eager for God to come near them.
Matthew 15:7-9 (NIV), You hypocrites! Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you: “‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are merely human rules.’”
1 Corinthians 13:3 (NIV), If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
Colossians 2:20-23 (NIV), Since you died with Christ to the elemental spiritual forces of this world, why, as though you still belonged to the world, do you submit to its rules: “Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!”? These rules, which have to do with things that are all destined to perish with use, are based on merely human commands and teachings. Such regulations indeed have an appearance of wisdom, with their self-imposed worship, their false humility and their harsh treatment of the body, but they lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence.
The first step in answering the prayer of the Christian to love God more, is to show how we are our own worst enemy in that endeavor. That we cannot grow it, we cannot make it, and if it were up to us, we could not keep it, and worse, we would not even want to.
Then He shows us that loving Him more means loving Him for who He is—because He is loveable and worthy of love, worthy of the greatest love—not because of what He can do for us, how He can make us feel, or that we like His plans for us. So when we find His blessing being withdrawn God is saying, “Do you love Me first for who I am or because of what I do for you?” When He removes the joy of worship, the satisfaction in doing His work, and the comfort of His presence, He is asking, “Do you love Me first for who I am or because of the good feelings my presence can bring?” When His way seems hidden, or we feel lost, or that we are in a horrible place, God is asking, “Do you love Me first for who I am, or because you like where I am taking you?”
As we are learning these things, we find our prayer to love Him more and more answered. I say “learning” because they are never fully learned. We are always learning them. This side of heaven we will never fully know the depth of our sin or the depth of His love for us or the full beauty of His Person.
So I am not surprised by the strange things that have happened, the challenges that have come to me and my family, or by the struggles that I am wrestling with in daily asking to love God more. Expecting things like this does not make them less painful, or less real, or less dangerous. But I know that they are—at least in part—the means by which God is answering my prayer.