Love for God's Commands.
I. People talk of "going to heaven" as if admission to future happiness had nothing to do with the bent and tone of their minds and their inward being here on earth. But salvation is the consummation of that eternal life which begins for Christ's true servants in this world. This essence of eternal life is union with Him who is the Eternal, and is the Life. To possess it, in however imperfect a measure, is to be in moral fellowship with the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit. There is nothing arbitrary in the Divine awards. Alike for weal and for woe, there is a true continuity between a man's character as formed and settled in this world and the portion assigned to him in the next. Perdition is no vindictive infliction for bygone evil, but the inevitable, one might say the natural, result of obdurate persistency in evil, or, as it has been expressed, a free will self-fixed in obstinate refusal of God, and therefore necessarily left to itself; and salvation must similarly be the complete development of a moral and spiritual condition which may be described as the renewal of the soul by the joint operation of grace on the one hand and of responsiveness to the aid of grace on the other, which condition must at any rate have been inaugurated if the soul is to depart in what is called the state of grace. In short, we must be grateful for salvation if we would be saved.
II. And how is this to be done? By loving what God commands that is, by putting our wills into a line with His will; by giving Him our hearts; by sympathising, if we may so speak, with His intentions towards us and for us. Thus to love what He commands is accepted by Him as in substance love for Himself.
W. Bright, The Morality of Doctrine,p. 154.