“And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” Mark 12:30-31
Sisters in Christ,
What is love? It says in 1 Corinthians 13:4-8 that “love is patient and kind, it doesn’t envy or boast ... love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things … love never ends.” We see in Colossians 3:14 that above all else, we should “put on love” because love binds everything together in perfect harmony. Over and over in the scriptures love is found to cover all offenses (Pro 10:12), to be the fulfilling of the law (Rom 13:10), and to ultimately point to the One who is Love.
In every instance of love in the Bible, we can see the character of our Almighty God because God is love (1 Joh 4:16). Love is from God (1 Joh 4:7-8) and when we love, it shows a greater knowledge of this Lord of all Creation. These biblical descriptions of love reveal more and more of who our God is, and how great a love He has shown to us through Jesus (Joh 3:16-17).
Jesus, the Son of God, gave Himself up for sinners like us: undeserving, ungrateful, unaware (Rom 5:8, Eph 5:25, Luk 6:35). He exemplified the greatest love as He laid down His perfect life for us (Joh 3:16, Joh 15:13), bore our sin and shame on the cross, and covered a multitude of sins (1 Pet 4:8) so that we might, by His great love, be made alive in Christ, saved by grace, and called children of God (Eph 2:4-5, 1 Joh 3:1).
Let us pray for one another this month to know the love that we have been so graciously given through Jesus. Let’s ask the Lord to help us love Him with our whole heart, soul, mind, and strength. Pray that He would pour out His love into and through us as we love our neighbors like Jesus, sacrificially and in deed and truth (1 Joh 3:16-18).
Jesus says in John 14:21 “Whoever has My commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves Me.” It can be tempting to make a checklist of “to-do’s” as we strive to follow the most important commandments in Mark 12:29-31, but we must always remember that it is Jesus that first loved us and gave Himself as a ransom for many. We love because He first loved us (1 Joh 4:19). In every opportunity, we can love fully and completely because God has poured that love out on us, and He continues to show us how to love through His Word, His Spirit’s leading, and by placing us around “neighbors” that need to be shown the love of God. His love changes everything.
In His Grace, Jaime Angel