The way we know we’ve been transferred from death to life is that we love our brothers and sisters. Anyone who doesn’t love is as good as dead. Anyone who hates a brother or sister is a murderer, and you know very well that eternal life and murder don’t go together. This is how we’ve come to understand and experience love: Christ sacrificed his life for us. This is why we ought to live sacrificially for our fellow believers, and not just be out for ourselves. 1 John 3: 14-16, MSG.
Holy Father, gracious God, we have come into Your presence to get a glimpse of Your love. Please help us to learn to love others the way You love us. In the name of Jesus we pray. Amen.
I decided to use the Message’s version of this text, because I love the down-to-earth manner in which Eugene Peterson brings home the text. He brings it into our real world. The place where we live, and eat, and work. He shows us what love is supposed to look like, when nobody is looking. In other words, he keeps it real! One of the topics of great discussion in our religious world, is centered around the keeping of the law. We argue until we are blue in the face about this topic, and then we each go our own way, determined to continue living just how we were living before the argument. Today, I would just like to submit some thoughts for your consideration: how hard would living according to God’s law be, if we loved one another? Would the law even be a topic of discussion if we were loving God with all of our hearts, and our neighbors as ourselves? Before you answer, let us just look at an equation based on love:
Commandments One through Four = Love to God + Commandments One through Ten = Love to our Neighbors =Love.
“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: 37-40).
” ‘Let me give you a new command: Love one another. In the same way I loved you, you love one another. This is how everyone will recognize that you are my disciples—when they see the love you have for each other’ ” (John 13: 34, 35).
“My dear friends, I’m not writing anything new here. This is the oldest commandment in the book, and you’ve known it from day one. It’s always been implicit in the Message you’ve heard. On the other hand, perhaps it is new, freshly minted as it is in both Christ and you—the darkness on its way out and the True Light already blazing! Anyone who claims to live in God’s light and hates a brother or sister is still in the dark. It’s the person who loves brother and sister who dwells in God’s light and doesn’t block the light from others. But whoever hates is still in the dark, stumbles around in the dark, doesn’t know which end is up, blinded by the darkness” (1 John 2: 7-11).
“Don’t run up debts, except for the huge debt of love you owe each other. When you love others, you complete what the law has been after all along. The law code—don’t sleep with another person’s spouse, don’t take someone’s life, don’t take what isn’t yours, don’t always be wanting what you don’t have, and any other “don’t” you can think of—finally adds up to this: Love other people as well as you do yourself. You can’t go wrong when you love others. When you add up everything in the law code, the sum total is love” (Romans 13: 8-10).
How hard is that? “The proof that we love God comes when we keep his commandments and they are not at all troublesome.” (1 John 5: 3).
May God’s Holy Spirit convince us of this message of love!