Welcome to the In Touch podcast with Charles Stanley for Thursday, July 31st.

If we truly love God, we'll do what matters most to him.

And what is that?

It's simple.

We show our love by obeying him, because obedience is the test of our love.

When you say to someone, I love you, what do you mean by that?

You say, well, that depends on whom I say it. If I say it to just a casual friend, maybe, it means

one thing. If I say it to my children, I mean something else. But when you say, I love you,

what do you really mean by that? Well, suppose

somebody says to you, I love you. What do you think they expect from you as a result of that?

Do they have any expectation at all or they're just saying, expressing something they feel in the inside?

In fact, the truth is, if you had to define love, you might have a

little difficult defining it. And if you look around, you look at the world and the way the world

expresses all the different ways they say they're loving people, most any of us would be confused

by what love really is, because oftentimes people say, I love you, and horribly mistreat us. Sometimes they say, I love you and horribly mistreaters.

Sometimes they say, I love you, and it's sort of a casual joking kind of thing. But you know,

with God loving, it's not joking. There's nothing that has any lack of seriousness in it

when God begins to talk about love. Sometimes we say, God, I love you. Lord, I love you. I wonder what we really

mean by that. Well, sometimes it's real unclear to us what we mean. And we say, well, Lord, as best I know

my heart, I love you. But with him, none of this is unclear. It's very, very clear what he means when he says to us, I love you. And he wants it to be

very clear to us when we say to him, I love you, Lord. He wants us to know exactly what we're saying,

what that means. And for it to be meaningful to him, there's something that is required when we say it.

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