10-25-10
Jesus said, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.” (Mt. 22:36-40)
People who love Jesus will love others much more. It is impossible to love Jesus and not love people more. The greatest anointing of the Spirit is to walk in the two great commandments by loving Jesus with all our heart and our neighbor as ourselves.
Love for others, like loving God, flows from regularly encountering God’s love for us. “We love Him because He first loved us.”(I Jn. 4:19) To walk in genuine love as defined by God is much more than sentimentalism. It takes seeking to love Jesus with “all” our heart, mind, soul, and strength. To walk in love requires the Spirit’s power to energize us; we regularly need our emotions stirred and strengthened by the subtle impressions of the Spirit. “The love of God has been poured in our hearts by the Holy Spirit.” (Rom. 5:5)
Only by loving Jesus and ourselves are we able to consistently overflow in love for others. We must love God first and ourselves to have power and energy to properly love our neighbor. We can only love our neighbor in the overflow of loving God, for only in being loved by God and in loving God can we properly love others.
“But I tell you who hear me: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. (Luke 6:27-28,32-33) This demanding commandment requires a comprehensive re-ordering of how we think and process life. We by nature are self-consumed, so it takes the power of the Spirit to walk this out.
We are not called to love others “instead of” ourselves but “as” ourselves by using the same standard in measuring love for others as we use for ourselves. We are to seek our neighbors’ benefit “with the same focus and energy,” as that we seek for ourselves.
To love others as ourselves is to value their longing for significance, acceptance, and success as being as important as our own. Because all people are created in God’s image, they deserve to receive love from us just as we receive love from God.
We are not to dismiss loving ourselves, but we enhance it by loving others with new depth. We will experience God’s tender compassion as we show it to others. Loving others is the greatest work of the Spirit and it’s the ultimate proof of His work
in the human heart. As we love God and ourselves, we overflow in love for others. It is the visible measurement of our invisible love for God.
Blessings,
Gary