When I was a kid in Sunday school, I had to memorize some of those nasty little verses in 1 John. Those verses say, "If a man says he loves God and loves not his brother, he's a liar, because if you haven't loved your brother whom you have seen, how can you love God whom you've not seen?" I thought the whole thing was a bunch of pious nonsense. I could see absolutely no relationship between loving God and loving my brother or my neighbor.

As time passed, I discovered that John was on to something. In the Scriptures, Christian love is not objective. Christian love is subjective. Christian love does not reside in the personality being loved. It resides in the person doing the loving. My basic premise was wrong; it is not such a simple thing to love God.