In the Word it is said in many places that they should keep and do God's commandments and His precepts; and by doing the precepts of God is meant the same as by loving the Lord above all things, and the neighbour as ourselves. For what a man loves inwardly, or from his heart, this he wills; and what he wills, he does. And to love God is to love His precepts, because they are of God, even as they are God.

Hence it is evident how little the followers of faith alone know what love is. They grant, or assert, that faith lives from love, and that faith is dead without love, and yet they do not know that love and deeds are one. They say also that there is love in faith; and yet they are ignorant that there is no love in faith, if they do not live according to the Lord's precepts in the Word; and that love in faith is from no other source. Natural love is not the love of the Lord and of the neighbour but of self and the world; and these loves are altogether destructive of faith, indeed, they falsify the truths of genuine faith, which are in the Word.