The Doctrine: If ye love me, keep my commandments (John 14:15).

The Application:

Recently, someone posted a comment on an article I wrote elsewhere challenging the idea that people have control over their eternal lives. She said that if people could choose their eternities, they’d have no reason to live righteously.

I explained that we choose our eternities through the choices we make during our mortal lives. If we choose to reject Jesus Christ as our Savior, we choose to reject the promised blessings that would have come to us had we accepted, and those blessings include items in this life and the next as well. When we choose to obey the commandments and to accept the gifts of Heaven, we choose both temporal and eternal rewards for ourselves.

I felt the poster had it backwards. If our eternal placement were random and out of our control, we’d have less motivation to make good choices in our lives.

I then explained there were two reasons for living righteously. One was to receive promised blessings. The other, more important reason for living righteously was love.

Jesus taught: If ye love me, keep my commandments. (See John 14:15.) While rewards can serve as a motivation, especially in weaker moments, or when we’re young or just getting started in the gospel, the real reason we should obey the commandments is because we love God and the Savior, and we want to please Them, to be like Them, and to honor Them. Love is a higher law.

Parents often train their children by initially offering rewards for good behavior. However, there comes a time when children need to learn to behave whether or not there is an immediate reward. It’s how they behave when we’re not looking and not rewarding that tells us who they really are and what they really believe. If they eventually choose to obey a rule because it’s the right way to live, we know they have a “testimony” of that rule that is not based on external rewards. Wise parents wean their children from rewards and guide them to internalized behavior.

Heavenly Father expects us to do this for ourselves. The rewards for good behavior are not always instantly received. It might be years or even a lifetime before we receive our promised rewards. What keeps us obedient in the meantime? It is love.

The better we know God, the more we trust Him, the more our love for Him grows. When we really love God and Jesus Christ, obedience is easy. Ezra Taft Benson promised, “When obedience ceases to be an irritant and becomes our quest, in that moment God will endow us with power.”

–Terrie Lynn Bittner