How is love connected with obedience?

The author of the 4^th Gospel: The Gospel of John wrote his Gospel to readers so that they would be convinced that Jesus was the Christ and in believing in Him they could have life.  He describes this life as a life of faith; and he describes a life of faith as a life of love and obedience to Christ.

Dr. J.I. Packer was once asked, “What is the relationship between loving God and obeying God?”  I think his answer is profound.

“If a person loves someone else that person will respond to the one whom he or she loves. That person will take note of what it is that the loved one likes and dislikes, and they will make it their business to provide for the other one’s pleasure the things that the loved one likes and to avoid the things that the loved one dislikes and finds painful. It’s just the same in our relationship to the Lord Jesus, our Savior, whose disciples we are, and to his Father from whom come the laws that uh, testify to what can be a source of pleasure to God and what is bound to be a source of displeasure. And so love to the Father and the Son necessarily entails trying to please them. And you please them by doing what they ask for, and that’s obedience to the teaching that they give as to how one lives a holy life. So in the New Testament, Paul says in a number of places that uh, you labor to please God, and that’s one of the signs that you love him. And in 1 Thessalonians he tells folk who are already pleasing God, do it more and more because that’s the way to advance in love. And that means in godliness, and that means in fellowship with the Father and the Son, which after all, is going to be quite literally our eternal life. It starts here; it goes on forever in glory. But pleasing the Father and the Son is, if I may put it this way, the name of the game from start to finish, except that there isn’t any finish. This goes on forever.”