A lawyer asks of Jesus, which is the greatest and most powerful commandment? He replied, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the greatest and most important principal and first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as you love yourself. These two commandments sum up and upon them depend all the Law and the Prophets” (Matt.22:37-40). It is love not religion that pleases God!
When we enter into relationship with God the Father, through our Lord Jesus Christ’s sacrificial offering on the cross, the Holy Spirit comes and lives within us to teach, encourage, and transform our lives into His likeness. We are born again, and our connection with the Triune God begins to grow and flourish, as we become God lovers in our hearts, souls and minds. Lord Yahweh’s powerful and pure love gifts us with comfort, peace, and healing through this beautiful two-way relationship we have with Him.
Then we are told to love our neighbor, as we love ourselves! Now, we must be honest and admit this is not so easy for us humans to attain! Even when we know who we are in Christ and love ourselves, it is a human dilemma to love the lovable and reject the unlovable! Furthermore, God loves everyone and most humans have predetermined preferences of what we like and what we don’t like in other humans. Because of this, the prevailing love of God must be worked into our lives, as we choose to humble ourselves, forgive others, seek to understand others, and learn the reality that God’s grace is sufficient for us and His merciful power can transform us into His likeness! You see, God longs to consume all that lives within us that is not of Him and replace it with His overcoming love.
Jesus also said, your ancestors have been taught ‘Love your neighbors and hate the one who hates you.’ But I say love your enemy, and do good’(Matt.5:43). Only through the power of God’s love can we love our enemy! Paul understood this struggle between flesh and spirit, when he said in Romans 7, “The things I want to do, I’m not doing, but the things I don’t want to do, I’m doing! Oh, wretched man that I am, who shall release, save, and deliver me from the body of this death? “Then he proclaimed the answer, “O thank God! He will through Jesus Christ the Anointed One our Lord!” God is at work to gradually transform every believer who will surrender and yield to the Holy Spirit. In all we do, God has the power to give us His pure motives of love that gives us the energy to walk in love in this fallen world.
Loving your neighbor or your enemy, doesn’t necessarily mean you will have warm feelings or a two-way relationship with them. A true relationship takes two people that are both willing to press on, walk together, love, care and give to each other. But it does mean, that you will be given the opportunity to have patience, consistent kindness, gentleness and long-suffering worked into your life, towards the sometimes lovely and the unlovely(1Corinth13). It also means that you will learn how to” pray for your enemies and that will reveal your identity as children of your heavenly Father. He is kind to all by bringing the sunrise to warm and rainfall to refresh whether a person does what is good or evil. What reward do you deserve if you love the loveable? Don’t even the tax collectors do that? How are you any different from others if you limit your kindness only to your friends? Don’t even the ungodly do that? Since you are children of a perfect Father in heaven, you are to be perfect like him” (Matt.5:43-46tPt).
“And become useful and helpful and kind to one another, tenderhearted, compassionate, understanding, loving-hearted, forgiving one another readily and freely, as God in Christ forgave you” (Eph4:32amp).
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