November 5

Read: Matthew 22:37-39

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind (Matthew 22:37).

Supreme Love For God

Jesus said, “If ye love me, keep my commandments” (John 14:15). To love God means to put His will first in our lives.

Some of us love God when we can also love ourselves and other things at the same time. But the perfect love of God becomes manifest when a heavenly love and an earthly affection come into conflict. In The Pure in Heart, W. E. Sangster tells of Henry Martyn, who gave up a brilliant career at Cambridge University to become a missionary.

After his decision to go to India “he fell deeply in love with a girl named Lydia. He told her of his love and that he was under orders from heaven for India. Would she go with him? Together, they could do great things for God. All his heart pleaded with her to go.

“She would not go. If he stayed in England, she would marry him. If he went to India, he must go alone. So the question hammered in his brain: ‘India or Lydia? Lydia or India?…’

“He chose aright. He went to India and he went alone. He never knew that kind of affection again. He cried out in his pain: ‘My dear Lydia and my duty called me in different ways. Yet God hath not forsaken me… I am born for God only. Christ is nearer to me than father, or mother, or sister, and he might have added, than Lydia also.”

Take my fiends and earthly friendships, Take them, take them one and all; Give me Christ, my precious Saviour, He is sweeter than them all.

— N. B. Herrell