On Buttercup and Pleasing God

Entirely too late last night, I was thinking about how, exactly, we can show God we love him. His love for us is awesome, infinite, inconceivable; we haven't the faintest hope of even realizing its depth and width and height with our mortal minds. We say we love Him back. But how do we show it?

It seems to me that our first instinct is to sacrifice something for Him, because that is often how, as humans, we show love for each other. We sacrifice valuable time to spend with each other; we give gifts; we share vulnerabilities. The Bible says that no man has greater love than the one who lays down his life for his friend, therefore the deeper the love, the deeper the sacrifice. Right?

This is, as I said, our first instinct. To show that we love God, we try to give up things for Him, to sacrifice something to prove we're His.

But is this what God requires?

I don't know if you've ever read the book (or seen the movie) The Princess Bride. It's one of my favorites of all time. In it, there is a character called Westley, who is the farm boy of a very beautiful character named Buttercup. He's madly in love with her, but, being her farm boy, he only says one phrase to her. Whenever she asks for something, he just looks into her eyes and says "As you wish.".

One day, early on in the book, Buttercup learns that when he says as you wish, what he means is I love you.

I won't spoil the rest of the book for you, because it's marvelous and I'd sooner you discovered it on your own. (-: But, I hope you won't miss the connection to our relationship with God.

As much as He appreciates our sacrifices, it is not ultimately what he desires of us. Surprised? I was. Yet the Scriptures are quite clear; He wants more than our sacrifices -- He wants our obedience. It says in the New Testament that to obey is better than sacrifice.

The more you think about it, the more it makes sense. We can sacrifice a lot of things for Him; we can give Him our time and money and everything valuable to us. Yet unless we obey Him, we have not given Him the thing that he most desires from us. We know in James that it says that faith without action is dead; in the same way, when we claim to give our lives and hearts to Him, and yet do not do what He says, we have not truly done so.

So, when God asks us to do something, and we respond with "As you wish", He hears it the same way Buttercup heard it from her farm boy. To Him, it sounds better than "I love you."

I hope this has made at least a little sense to you; God's love for us is so completely beyond what we can imagine that we could spend our whole lives learning how to love Him back and never, I think, do more than scratch the surface. Yet, for some reason, He desires our love, so strongly that He created us to do so, and, eventually, it'll become an eternal occupation.

I don't know about you, but I'm rather looking forward to it.