May 18 Daily Devotional

Bible Verse

"You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment" (Matt. 22:37-38).

Devotional

Love to God forms the main and chief requirement of God's law. Now, it is both infinitely wise and infinitely good in God thus to present himself as the proper and lawful object of love.

It is wise, because, if he places the object of supreme affection lower than himself, then that would elevate an inferior object above himself. If you love an object other than God with a sole and supreme affection, then that amounts to deifying that object so that it sits as God in the temple of God, showing itself that it is God.

It is good, because a lesser object of affection can never meet the desires and aspirations of an immortal mind. God has so constituted man, implanting in him such a capacity for happiness and such boundless and immortal desires to possess it, as can find their full enjoyment only in infinity itself. He never designed that the intelligent and immortal creature should sip its bliss at a lower fountain than himself.

It is infinitely wise and good in God, then, that he presents himself as the sole object of supreme love and worship to his intelligent creatures.

His wisdom sees the necessity of having one center of supreme and adoring affection to angels and to men, and one object of supreme and spiritual worship to angels and to men.

His goodness suggests that that center and that object should be himself—the perfection of infinite excellence, the fountain of infinite good—so that, just as from him all the streams of life went forth to all creatures, it is only reasonable and just that to him should return, and in him should center, all the streams of love and obedience of all intelligent and immortal creatures... that, just as he is the most intelligent, wise, glorious, and beneficent object in the universe, so it is fit that the first, strongest, and purest love of the creature should soar towards him and find its resting-place in him.

Therefore, love to God forms the grand requirement of God's law. It is the fundamental precept of God's law. It binds all intelligent beings. No consideration can release the creature from it. No plea of inability, no claim of inferior objects, no opposition of rival interest can lessen the obligation of every creature that has breath to "love the Lord his God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind."

That duty grows out of your relation as the creature to God as your Creator, moral Governor, and Preserver. It grows out of the fact that God is in himself the only object of infinite excellence, wisdom, holiness, majesty, and grace.

Moreover, this obligation to love God with supreme affection binds you, the creature, regardless of any advantage which may result to you from so loving God. It is most true that God has benevolently connected supreme happiness with supreme love. It is most true that God has justly threatened supreme misery where supreme affection is withheld. Yet, independent of any blessing that may come to you from your love to God, the infinite excellence of the Divine nature and the eternal relation in which he stands to the intelligent universe render it irreversibly obligatory on you—and every creature—to love him with a supreme, paramount, holy, and unreserved affection.

We have not known thee as we ought,
nor learned thy wisdom, grace and pow'r;
the things of earth have filled our thought,
and trifles of the passing hour.
Lord, give us light thy truth to see,
and make us wise in knowing thee.

We have not feared thee as we ought,
nor bowed beneath thine awful eye,
nor guarded deed, and word, and thought,
remembering that God was nigh.
Lord, give us faith to know thee near,
and grant the grace of holy fear.

We have not known thee as we ought,
nor learned thy wisdom, grace, and power;
the things of earth have filled our thought,
and trifles of the passing hour.
Lord, give us light thy truth to see,
and make us wise in knowing thee.

We have not feared thee as we ought,
nor bowed beneath thine awful eye,
nor guarded deed and word and thought,
remembering that God was nigh.
Lord, give us faith to know thee near,
and grant the grace of holy fear.

We have not loved thee as we ought,
nor cared that we are loved by thee;
thy presence we have coldly sought,
and feebly longed thy face to see.
Lord, give a pure and loving heart
to feel and know the love thou art.

We have not served thee as we ought;
alas! the duties left undone,
the work with little fervor wrought,
the battles lost or scarcely won!
Lord, give the zeal, and give the might,
for thee to toil, for thee to fight.

When shall we know thee as we ought,
and fear and love and serve aright?
When shall we, out of trial brought,
be perfect in the land of light?
Lord, may we day by day prepare
to see thy face and serve thee there.

(Thomas Benson Pollock, 1889)

Be sure to read the Preface by Octavius Winslow and A Note from the Editor by Larry E. Wilson.

Larry Wilson is an ordained minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. In addition to having served as the General Secretary of the Committee on Christian Education of the OPC (2000–2004) and having written a number of articles and booklets (such as God's Words for Worship and Why Does the OPC Baptize Infants) for New Horizons and elsewhere, he has pastored OPC churches in Minnesota, Indiana, and Ohio. We are grateful to him for his editing of Morning Thoughts, the OPC Daily Devotional for 2025.