Put negatively, someone who doesn’t study to know and obey God’s law will be deeply lacking in their love for God Himself. You can’t profess to love God while ignoring one of the ways He’s made Himself known to you. Put positively, one of the best ways we have to deepen our love for God is to know and do His law. God is a Spirit and cannot be physically seen, but just like His works of creation and salvation, the law is a revelation of His character. So, love the law because you love God. And love God by loving His law.

Oh how I love your law, it is my meditation all the day!
Psalm 119:97

Let’s admit together that this isn’t easy. We are born with a predisposition against God’s law. To the natural man or woman, God’s law is like the brightness of the sun to eyes that have gotten used to the dark. We avoid it. Really, we hate it.

But it should be different now, right? For those who have been brought to new life through the Spirit of Christ, our attitude toward God’s law should be better than hatred and rebellion. And a lot of times it is: when we’re on top of our spiritual game, we really do love God’s law. But when we begin to slip in our spiritual disciplines, or when discouragement and depression come creeping, or when we refuse to deal forthrightly with our sins, or when we listen too much to the world’s hatred of God’s standard – this is when our love for God’s law wanes.

So here’s some help. Here are a couple more reasons to love God’s law that you might not think about all the time, a couple more arrows for your spiritual battle to hold onto that love. 

First, love God’s law because it shows us God Himself. We can’t and don’t believe that God’s law is arbitrary, that the ten commandments were picked out of thin air. Rather, Scripture shows us that the law is the way it is because God is the way He is. The law proceeds directly from the character of God and thus is one of the best ways we can know God in this world.

Put negatively, someone who doesn’t study to know and obey God’s law will be deeply lacking in their love for God Himself. You can’t profess to love God while ignoring one of the ways He’s made Himself known to you. Put positively, one of the best ways we have to deepen our love for God is to know and do His law. God is a Spirit and cannot be physically seen, but just like His works of creation and salvation, the law is a revelation of His character. So, love the law because you love God. And love God by loving His law.

Second, love God’s law because of heaven. Our current sermon series through Revelation is coming down to the end, drawing our attention more firmly to heaven. And I’ve been praying that God will give our congregation a greater and greater passion for our eternal communion with Him. As He does that, as God gives us passion for heaven, we will naturally long for heaven here on earth…so much so that we’ll sincerely pray, “thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven!”

And there’s the connection – how is God’s will done in heaven? What does day-to-day life look like in heaven? Well, it looks exactly like the law of God. Heaven is not the place where we will be freed from the law of God, but the place where we will, finally, be most freed unto that law. When we read the ten commandments (or any of Scripture’s exposition of those commandments), we are reading a description of heaven.

There are so many questions about heaven, so many mysteries will not have answers to in this life. But there are things we can know for certain now. We can know that the essence of heaven is communion with God. And we can know that the law of God is the best descriptions of heavenly life. What a great reason to love God’s law!

Jared Olivetti is a minister in the Reformed Presbyterian Church in North America and serves as the pastor of Immanuel Reformed Presbyterian Church in West Lafayette, Indiana. This article appeared on the Gentle Reformation blog and is used with permission.