Love God, Love Others
Written by Anneke Toliver
The religious leaders loved to bait Jesus. They were often questioning His authority, His motives, His reasoning. They didn’t believe He was who He said He was, so they were always trying to catch Him in a quandary.
This time, following Jesus’ silencing of the questioning of the Sadducees, the Pharisees approached Him with a question about the law:
“When the Pharisees heard how he had bested the Sadducees, they gathered their forces for an assault. One of their religion scholars spoke for them, posing a question they hoped would show him up: “Teacher, which command in God’s Law is the most important?”
Jesus said, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your passion and prayer and intelligence.’ This is the most important, the first on any list. But there is a second to set alongside it: ‘Love others as well as you love yourself.’ These two commands are pegs; everything in God’s Law and the Prophets hangs from them.”” Matthew 22:34-40
Love God, love others. Period. Everything else hinges on these two commands; they wrap up the whole law.
There are two things that I’ve been thinking through in regard to this.
First, if we as the church truly asked the Spirit to grow love for others in our hearts and flow outwards to our neighbors, our world would be a vastly different place.
Our culture, our country, and often, even our small bubble of believers would change drastically if we loved others like we love ourselves. Earlier this week I saw a quote on Instagram by a pastor named Derwin Gray. He said this: “You cannot love a person beyond the label you assign to them. That’s why Jesus tells us to love our neighbor as we love ourselves.”
When I look at someone and view them as anything different than myself—anything less than another human made to reflect the image of God, another person in need of grace—I’m unable to love as I’m called to love.
Secondly, Jesus tells us that the first commandment is to love God.
Love Him with all our hearts, all our souls, all our minds. I find that I tend to focus on this idea of loving others the way we love ourselves, but I forget that that’s not actually the first thing Jesus says. He tells us to love God first. I can remind myself and my kids and whoever else to love others until I’m blue in the face, but that kind of love only flows out of a heart that loves God first and foremost. The world tells us that we need to love ourselves more so we can love others.
Jesus, who knows human hearts better than we know them ourselves, said something much different. We already love ourselves; we must love God so that He can cultivate love for others in us.
Yes, focus on loving others like I love myself, but first, love God.
“What is Galentine’s Day? Oh, it’s only the best day of the year. Every February 13th my lady friends and I leave our husbands and our boyfriends at home and we just come and kick it breakfast style. Ladies celebrating ladies. It’s like Lilith Fair, minus the angst, plus frittatas.”
- Leslie Knope
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Galentine’s Day Collection
Hello again, Dive Collective! It has been so long since we’ve seen you, studied with you, sent you any news. So much has happened since we decided to take a break, and we will be telling you a lot about that in an upcoming podcast episode!