Day 3: Love People

Jesus wasn’t done when he gave us our most important and foundational truths to follow. After explaining that our primary calling is to:‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ In Matthew 22, he explains that there’s another half to his greatest commandments.

And the second [commandment] is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

Here Jesus ties a bow on the core principles of our faith: love God, and love people. And like any good basic training plan, these two truths play brilliantly off of each other. Loving God births our ability to love people. It’s a simple “if-then” equation. If the love of God is real in our lives, it will be evident by our love for others.

I have a wall of art in my office. And by art, I mean “art.” It’s a combination of illegible scribbles, outside-the-line tracings, and stickers thrown on paper. To you, it probably doesn’t look like art. But to me, it’s comparable to any exhibit in any art gallery you’ll find, all because my love for my children means that I love the things they create. I love my two children with “to the moon and back" love; therefore, the things that matter to them matter to me.

It's the same with the first and second greatest commands of Jesus. As we love God with all that we are, a natural response is to love what he treasures and what he has created. And that means loving my neighbor, which is EVERYONE that reflects God’s image and were created by Him. This includes your family, friends, and also those people that are hard to love or that you may disagree with.

“Love God, love people” is a neat and tidy phrase, but in our current world that is filled with broken relationships and division, this is nothing close to easy. But this is the way of Jesus. He introduced an upside-down kingdom, which calls us to love even our enemies. He gave us the ultimate example of this as written in Romans 5:8:But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

If we are going to be followers of Jesus, we must get these two things right and truly love God with everything that we are and, as a result, love our neighbors, all our neighbors, as ourselves.

Application:

Let’s practice this. Try this FaithFit workout that focuses exclusively on the words of Jesus. We’ll train this muscle of loving people and grow in our ability to truly follow the basics.

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