Develop yourself to the best of your ability
Deuteronomy 6:5
וְאָ֣הַבְתָּ֔ אֵ֖ת ה’ אֱלֹהֶ֑יךָ בְּכׇל-לְבָבְךָ֥ וּבְכׇל-נַפְשְׁךָ֖ וּבְכׇל-מְאֹדֶֽךָ׃
You shall love your Hashem with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.
Sometimes you come across people who try to convince others of their faith by pointing out that the other person must believe in G-d because G-d wants them to. Bu it is not a choice a person can make. You can’t decide now I believe or now I don’t, any more than you can with hope or with love. It is there or it is not there.
To make it clearer, you can compare it to laughing at a joke. You must laugh at it or not, it’s not a choice you can make, it’s either there or it’s not.
There is no point in telling people to believe. All you can do is portray G-d credibly and you must act credibly yourself. Your words and actions must be sincere and true.
How do you show that G-d is believable? Someone who is believable is trustworthy. A wonderful Tehillim/Psalm to read His trustworthiness is Tehillim 89:
My faithfulness and steadfast love shall be with him…(vs.25) I will maintain My steadfast love for him always.
My covenant with him shall endure. (vs.29) but I will not take away My steadfast love from him.
I will not betray My faithfulness.
I will not violate My covenant,
or change what I have uttered. (vs. 34, 35)
G-d makes a covenant with His people, and He is faithful to His covenant. Look at history, which ancient peoples still exist today and live in their own land? Are the Babylonians still there, the Persians, the Medes?
But Israel, through all tribulations, has been protected by G-d and returned to her own land as promised. Isn’t that the greatest possible proof of His trustworthiness?
This faithfulness of G-d is noticed by the nations and then they make His Name great.
And the nations shall know that I am G-d —declares the Sovereign G-d —when I manifest My holiness before their eyes through you. I will take you from among the nations and gather you from all the countries, and I will bring you back to your own land. (Ezekiel 37:23)
This brings us back to the commandment to love G-d. Just as faith is something that is not something you can influence with your will.
But when we have faith and see that He is trustworthy, by looking at the history of His people, among other things, and reflecting on that, love arises.
Also thinking about what He is doing for you personally in your life, that He has given you life, when we think about His greatness, then love for Him grows.
We cannot force faith or love with our will, but we can use our will to consciously think about Him.
Just as we cannot force a laugh over a joke, but if we don’t understand a joke and think about it and understand what the joke is trying to say, we can begin to find it funny.
That our behavior may be trustworthy.
And may our meditations on Hashem increase.
By Angelique Sijbolts
Sources:
Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning by Vicotr E. Frankl
How Can We Be Required to Love G-d?
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