To love God is to obey God. Does that sound right to you?
If not, I would encourage you to read the Bible from beginning to end. Pressed for time? Perhaps just take the time to read the first letter of the Apostle John (near the end of the New Testament).
We learn in this letter, and in the whole of the Scriptures, that to love God is to keep his commandments. Love for God equals obedience to God. Love for God assumes a commitment to what God has revealed as good. How can it be any other way? When we love someone, we want to please them. Since God has revealed what pleases him, our love for him can only result in a desire to do what he has revealed.
Christianity is not moralism but it is most certainly about morals. A significant part of the hope of Christianity is that God is going to renew our moral character. Through the prophet Jeremiah, God made this promise about his people of the future: "I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people."
Think about it this way. In the beginning God created our first parents, Adam and Eve, as free moral creatures, able to choose good and evil. He created them to live in a relationship of love with him. In that context he gave them one command: "Do not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil." Why did he give this command? Clearly, to test their love for him. Their obedience to the command was the test of their love.
But instead of loving God, our first parents chose to love themselves. They broke the command by eating of the fruit. Why? The Scripture is clear: because they wanted to "be like God, knowing good and evil." They wanted to replace God as the arbiter of right and wrong. They wanted to be command-makers rather than command-keepers. This self-love separated them from God's love and brought them into a state of death, along with their descendants (including you and me).
What this means is that when Jesus Christ comes to restore us to God's love, he comes to change our basic demeanour. He comes to kill within us the desire to be like God. He comes to bring to our hearts a new desire to love God through obedience to his commands.
This also means, by logical necessity, that a desire and drive to be obedient is an integral part of the Christian life. Through the Holy Spirit, God teaches us to submit to his good commands as revealed in the Scriptures. We can even say, also by logical necessity, that if we have no desire and drive to be obedient then we have no business calling ourselves Christians.
