Looking For Alaska and Rabia al-Adawiyya

Over the last two days I read a book called Looking For Alaska by John Green. It was an amazing book and I highly recommend it. There was one thing in the book that struck a chord with me. This prayer was actually said by a Muslim woman, but it doesn't matter, I can use her words in my Christian faith just the same.

She prayed: "O Allah! If I worship You for fear of Hell, burn me in Hell,
and if I worship You in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise.
But if I worship You for Your Own sake,
grudge me not Your everlasting Beauty.”

She is so right. As Christians we spend far too much time worrying about whether we are going to get into Heaven or burn in Hell that we can sometimes forget the most important thing. That is simply loving God. It is wrong to love God out of fear of the afterlife.

We don't need to worry about what happens to us when we die so much as we need to worry about what is happening to us right now. Obviously as Christians we want to go to Heaven, but we shouldn't love God just for that. We should love God because He is God. We love Him because he is powerful, gracious, forgiving, kind and most of all because He loves us!

God has done so much for us in the past and continues to do things for us every day. He gives us strength when we are weak, hope when we lose faith, and comfort when we are abandoned by everything else. How could we not love Him? And of course we do love Him, we just sometimes lose sight of why.

If we love God for all of those reasons, if we love God because HE IS GOD, then we will receive His Kingdom.