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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

John Shin

How to Love God?

I was just reflecting that the first message I ever gave in a public forum was here at Advent Hope, my first year of medical school.

So whenever I come here, I feel like I'm coming back home in a lot of ways.

And it's always a privilege and a blessing to be here, to see so many familiar faces and also to meet new friends whenever I come by.

Before I begin, I hope you would bow your heads with me as we say a word of prayer.

Dear Lord, we are so privileged to be able to worship you on your Sabbath day.

We thank you, Lord, for giving us a special time where we can take a break from the cares and concerns of the world and to focus our thoughts where it ought to be, on you.

And Lord, today I'm going to share a topic that I think most of us have wrestled with at 1 point or another in our lives.

And so I just ask for you to fill me with your words and that your truths are made clear that they strike home to the heart.

I grew up in Maryland and when I went to college, I decided to go to a large state school, so the University of Maryland, College Park.

And it's a school where there's 50, 000 students when you count the undergraduate and the graduate population.

So I was really happy to finally kind of be in an area where I'm free from kind of my small little world that I grew up in, in Maryland, and finally able to live in the marketplace of ideas.

And I remember in order to get the full experience, I told my parents I want to live in the dorms.

Even though it's local to us, I don't want to commute from home, I want to live on campus.

And I remember I chose a dorm that had a mixture of international and US students.

And you would think that I applied to live in that dorm because I had an interest in international relations or the community.

But in fact, I chose it because it was 1 of the only dorms with air conditioning.

So I wrote this very long, flowery essay about how I love the international community, and I got in.

And I remember in this dorm, I fast made some friends, but there was this 1 guy who, I'll just call him Carl.

Every time I tell this story, his name changes.

His name is, I'll call him Carl, who it was clear that all his life, very likely his mother had taken care of all of his basic needs.

And for the first time ever, he was now in a situation where he had to take care of himself, and he was not doing a good job.

And his roommate would complain to us because we knew that we could always smell Carl before we could see him.

And it got to the point where his roommate pleaded with him, saying like, listen, I cannot function as your roommate unless you bathe at least once a week, you know?

So, and whenever we walk by their room, if the door's ajar, I look in there, it looked like a tornado went through it.

And I was asking this guy's roommate, like, what is going on with your room?

Like, he just dirty underwear on the ground, socks strewn over on my side.

And he's just pulling out his hair like, I don't know what to do.

So he tried threats, bribes, begging with tears in his eyes and it just seems like Carl would just sit there and just kind of nod his head with his oily, greasy hair and ignore him.

Well, 1 day we were in the lobby of our dorm and people are just passing by and there's this really well-dressed guy walking out the door.

And as we're talking, 1 of our friends frees and he's like, that was Carl.

And so we all rush over to the window that overlooks the awning.

And then we see this guy bring a button-down dress shirt and slacks kind of walking away.

That's not Carl." He said, I swear I saw his face.

Well, fast forward a couple of days and we're sitting in the lobby again talking amongst ourselves and we see Carl walking towards us because we're facing kind of away, and then the door is behind us.

And clearly it's Carl, but the man is like dressed to the nines.

He looks like a million dollars, like, I don't recognize this man.

So we just kind of, literally, we stopped talking.

We just look at him and he like walks out.

And his roommate was telling us like, he's cleaning his room, like his life is in order.

A lot of young people in the audience, what do you think might be going on in Carl's life?

If you had to take a wild guess, Any ideas?

Well, being the young men that we were, we all ran over to the window and we again looked out like, where's Carl going?

And indeed, there's this lovely young lady who meets him in front of the dorm.

They hold hands and they walk off into the sunset.

That was my first introduction to the transformative power of love.

You know, in Matthew 22, 37 through 38, Jesus says, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.

The secret to our Christian walk and to life itself is falling in love with God because we know that everything flows downstream from this.

Romans 13.10, Paul says, love is the fulfillment of the law.

John 13.35 says, by this all will know that you are my disciples if you have, what?

1 John 4, 16, God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him.

So without a love for God, our religion becomes a dry formality and it becomes legalistic.

Because in my opinion, legalism is any attempt to obey God without loving him.

I think that's the best way I can put legalism, if you had to sum it up.

Any attempt to live the Christian life that stems from a motivation other than love for God.

So then developing and maintaining a genuine love for God is the engine that moves forward our Christian life.

But this is also the greatest challenge of our Christian walk.

Because how do you fall in love with a God who you cannot see, who you cannot hear, who you cannot feel.

I remember in college, I had my best friend in college, he was an atheist, and as we had these freewheeling philosophical discussions at night, and we were roommates together, it got to the point where he said, John, how do you believe in love in a God that's so abstract?

It's like asking me to fall in love with a tooth fairy or Santa Claus.

Like mentally I can kind of picture it, but emotionally, experientially, I can't do it.

Like I can love my mother, I can love my friend, I can love you, John.

And it was a profound question to me because I realized I didn't have the answer in my own life.

Chesterton said, the Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting, but rather it has been found difficult and left untried.

There's a lot of people who we go through our entire lives attending church, professing to be Christians, and we really don't know what it means to love God.

And we feel like it's so taboo to talk about because everyone assumes if you're going to church, if you've been a Christian all your life, well surely the bedrock foundation is that you know and love God and everything stems from there.

But the more I'm honest with myself and the more I talk to other people, I think this is actually a very pervasive issue, not in just our church, but in all churches.

We know a lot about Christ, but we don't know him on a personal level that makes us fall in love with him.

If you've ever wrestled with this yourself, if you feel like you're going through the motions and that rather than your faith propelling you on a love journey, that you're kind of carrying your faith on your shoulders and putting up a show, and that going to church is a formality, your religion is a formality, and it doesn't really move your heart, then my prayer is that the Lord will speak to you today and that this topic will be relevant for you.

Because honestly, friends, once you fall in love with God, everything else is details.

But if you don't fall in love with Him, nothing else really matters.

So the million-dollar question is, how do we fall in love with God?

1 John 4.19, I believe, gives us the answer.

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How to Love God?

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