Love God

“And He said to him, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.  This is the great and foremost commandment.  The second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:37-39).
What would happen if everyone in your family today said, “We are not going to go to church anymore?  I will never pray again, or read the Bible again, I am through with God.”  How would we respond?  Would we quietly go with them or would we say, “Oh, no..not me.  I love Jesus so much.  I love Him with everything I am, with everything I own, I am going to keep following Him.  I hate to see you go, but, I love Him more than I love you.”
    We have to make absolutely sure that we have our own relationship with God and that we love Him and each other more than we love our families or ourselves.  Because there is coming a day we will stand before God alone and He is going to examine every facet of our life and what He finds is going to determine where we will remain eternally.  And we will hear one of two things.  “Well done faithful slave,” or “Depart from me, I never knew you…” (Matthew 25:23; 7:23).  The Lord may say:  “I know your wife, she really loves me, I know your children and they love me so much.  But, I don’t know you….you never loved me.”
    Listen, there is nothing more important in our life than knowing that we love Jesus and He is the most important thing in our life.  And because we love Him with all my heart, we love each other in the same way.  You know how you are willing to go out of your way to show your love for your husband, wife, kids or a friend?  Isn’t that so cool?  And sometimes, it’s the simplest things that mean so much. Right?  Last week, my sixteen year old daughter text me and she told me she loved me.   Cool, right?  But you know the first thing that popped into my mind?  What did she do or what does she want? But, that wasn’t it.  She just wanted to tell me she loved me.  And we do stuff like that when we love each other.  We don’t mind making sacrifices and going out of our way to show love.  Well, if I love Jesus with all of my being, my life is going to change as I go out of me way to show Him how much I love Him.      “If you love me, keep my commandments” (John 14:15).  Are we crazy in love with God?  Is He the most important Person in our life? 
The second part of what Jesus commanded was that I love my neighbor as I love myself.  Who do we think about the most during an average day?  Am I a lover of people or a lover of self?  There are two things I want us to remember about loving each other the way God said we should and when I say each other, I mean loving our neighbors as we love ourselves.  #1. Understanding.  Without doubt, absolutely, imperative, essential to my loving God is to understand why I must love my neighbor as myself.  And what Jesus said, the way He said it, it is crystal clear that if I don’t love my neighbor in the right way, I can’t love God like I should.  “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love” (1 John 4:7-8).
    #2.  Practice.      Perfect practice makes perfect.  I cannot possibly love my neighbor without perfect practice.  “Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.   No one has seen God at any time; if we love one another, God abides in us, and His love is perfected in us” (1 John 4:11-12).  John is not simply making a statement that God loves us.  John is giving us the standard by which we gauge our love for each other.      If God SO loved us….the word “so” is an adverb of manner and it mandates the love that God has for us is the same kind of love we have for each other.  And the end result of that kind of love is that God will love people through us.  We love God, we love people.  Judge ourselves.




Submitted by: Lennie Reagan