Do you love God for nothing?

I hate it when the devil asks good questions, but I have to admit he asks a good one in Job 1. " Does Job fear God for no reason?" The implication is that Job fears God for the benefits he has received. He was a man who was rich. He had many children, much livestock, servants a plenty, the esteem of others around him. God had taken good care of him. So....the devil asks a logical question, "Does he fear God for nothing? If you remove the blessings would he still fear You?"
I think we have to ask similar questions of ourselves. Do we love the Lord only for the gifts He has given? Or do we love Him simply for who He is? Would we still love the Lord if He removed every blessing? Now it may be impossible to answer that question with certainty. In fact, we may not be able to answer it until God removes those blessings (should He decide to do so).
Author Arthur John Gossip (I think I would have changed my last name) aptly states, "So many people's religion is a fair-weather affair. A little rain and it runs and crumbles; a touch of strain and it snaps. So long as God's will runs parallel to ours, we follow blithely. But the moment that they clash, that life grows difficult, that we do not understand - how apt faith is to fail us just when we have most need of it!"
So how do we arm ourselves for adversity? I think we need to have a theology of suffering. Romans 5 offers some beginning counsel when it declares, " More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us." Every Christian should know that God uses suffering to expose our weakness, so that we will look up to Christ and find Him strong and sufficient for the moment. That's actually how our character is developed.
But more than a theology of suffering, we must have a love relationship with the Lord. We must daily find delight in Him. We must be growing with each passing day to know Him more intimately. Then when the storms of life come and everything we see seems to contradict what we know of God, we can cling to those understandings which have been engraved into our souls.
Oswald Chambers expressed this well in a question. He asked, "Will I trust the revelation of God by Jesus Christ when everything in my personal experience flatly contradicts it?"By God's grace the answer to this would be "yes" if we have been more enamored with the Giver of the gifts instead of the gifts themselves.
Do you love God for nothing? Do I? Let's use this day to examine our hearts and let's use our Bible reading to grow in our knowledge of and love for the Lord Jesus.