Can we love God

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Ioana

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I mean can we ever really?
  1. If we’d love Jesus wouldn’t we cry at the thought of His Passion?
  2. Would we do anything for God if He didn’t comfort us?
I’ve discovered that the Lord is very kind and sweet to me and sometimes in the words of common prayers I declare that I love Him. But do I? Or do I love the comfort He gives me? I want to love Him but sometimes I don’t think I do. I did cry several times during the Sorrowful Mysteries but that was only when mixed with other things. Surely if I truly loved God I wouldn’t have needed external factors. Similarly I’d basically never sin. So is it all due to purely selfish motives on our part?

I acknowledge that God is great and that He loves me and everyone. That would be why I would say I love Him, because He loves me and that’s amazing and sweet and I wanna be with Him. Would I want to be with Him if it would bring me no joy though? Would I love Him if He didn’t love me?

So the question is how do you know if you love God and if you don’t love God how do you get yourself to love Him?

Sorry for the strange inquiry.
 
I guess a person could act as if they loved God because they wanted to love Him but it doesn’t mean they do.
 
Wow. That was deep! Your first question reminded me of the quote from St. Jean Vianney, “If we really understood the Mass, we would die of joy.” I think that quote is encouraging to help us all to try to understand and love God better.
God asks us to _try to love Him, even if we are not always successful. The golden rule is to love God with all one’s mind, heart, soul, and strength, and to love one’s neighbor as yourself. I think trying to follow that rule will help to love God more.
As for your second question, we can never know what God would be like if He didn’t do anything to comfort us, because He _does! One of the many amazing things about God is that even though we do not deserve it, He loves us unconditionally, always waiting for us to receive His love and mercy, instructing us to take up our cross and follow Him. All we can do while we are here on this earth is to try to live every day to the best that we can in a way that glorifies God. And pray always for the grace to love and serve Him better.
I hope this helps! God bless. 🙂
 
Cheers. He’s honestly done so much for us all and if you think about it we’ve done literally nothing in the process of our salvation (not to the positive at least).

I had a relationship in which I pretend to kind of love somebody (fake it till you make it) and it left me thinking if that’s what I’m doing with God.

The thing is He gives us good things whether we love Him or not so maybe (or so I am reassuring myself) asking if you love God shows you do. It would sadden me to think I didn’t.

So do I/we/ anybody love Jesus?

I guess we could ask Saint Peter this question, he’d be amused. 🙂
 
Ioana, it sounds like you do love God very much just by the fact that you are showing your concern. It sounds like you’re already a great saint in the making! 🙂 I think understanding the way God loves us is very helpful in understanding how to love God in return. Prayer and frequent reception of the Sacraments is key. Reading spiritual books, especially the lives of the saints, is beneficial as well because it provides examples of how to love God and how to love our neighbor.
The other thing is that while we are here on this earth we won’t be able to fully understand everything about God. Praying to understand better and love Him more is something that we all constantly have to do. We are all on our paths to Heaven, and they’re not always easy, but we have the consolation that God will never leave us and never stop offering His grace to us! The Blessed Mother and the saints will never leave us either! What a gift we have been given. God bless.
 
We can love Him but it’s nothing compared to His love for us. We love Him because He loves is first. Our love for God is our response to His love for us.

We cannot love Him enough as humans. But we can ask for His help, for the grace to love Him, as how He wants us to be.

God bless.
 
That kind of love is a gift, that’s molded into us over time. The more we seek Him, the more we come to know Him. The more we know Him, the more we come to love Him. But in this life, as (name removed by moderator) and others have said, we’re often able to see and love God in and through our neighbor, who we can experience and relate to directly, one on one.
 
Ioana said:
If we’d love Jesus wouldn’t we cry at the thought of His Passion?

Would we do anything for God if He didn’t comfort us?
Click to expand...
I would caution someone reading this.
  1. Love is a decision, not an emotion. If we do not cry at the very thought of His Passion it does not mean that we do not love Him.
  2. Lack of comfort from God, or a lack of consolations from Him, should not dictate whether or not we “do” things for God. We should worship the God of consolations and not the consolations of God.
Like our love for Him, His love for us is not evidenced by the presence or lack of consolations, good or bad feelings. Faith is not a feeling. Love is not a feeling. We must love God and neighbor, but this doesn’t mean we must have these “external factors” of emotions. Emotions are fleeting and we cannot make our decisions based on something so nebulous as an emotion which may come and go like a puff of smoke. Faith and Love are more than that. As the Holy Scripture says, God is Love - he is surely not just an emotion.
 
This brings to mind John 21:15-17 where Jesus asks Peter “do you love me?” If you look at the Latin and the Greek, you will see that there are different words used for love.

These verses help to show us that Jesus understands our limited capacity for love in our fallen nature, and meets us where we are at. He accepts our love that we have the capacity to give at our level, and gives us His love at His level.
 
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I’ve heard this before. Surely (no offense) this makes God seem a bit cold. Just because say I or any person does good for somebody or whishes them good doesn’t mean we love them, I’d think (maybe wrongly) that love is more than that. In human terms it is also enjoying spending time with that person, and wanting the best good of that person. It is an emotional investment in a person on our part (in our terms but God is immutable and impassible). Ie for us people at least it is a combination between liking somebody and wanting their good.

I don’t think that God has mere uncontrollable passions so maybe neither must we, but surely He doesn’t ( for reasons not to do with sin) not like us. So in God (so I read) love is an act of free will and so is the ultimate agape in everybody but surely this kind of love fosters the growth of all other more commonly thought of types automatically.

Also since we are human how can we possibly bring about God’s good? He couldn’t possibly get anything from us.

*sorry if this sounds snobbish and passive agressive and I know it has little to do with the original post
 
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