The Most Important

3/5/2016

Mark 12.29-30 29 Jesus answered, “The most important is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 30 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.’ 31 The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” – Jesus

Loving God is one thing; at least with God there is some sense of propriety of worship or at least, perhaps, a sense of reverence; a sense of holiness. With man, well that’s a different story. For all his glory, man is fallen. And fallen, is fallen… with all the fallenness that fallenness brings.

The person, smitten with someone of attraction, will soon find out that for all that attraction, the other has bad days, bad breath, bad moods and perhaps bad tempers, bad thoughts, and sometimes, even a bad outlook that is less than attractive. Whatever enchantment possessed, soon gives way to the way of all mankind: imperfection. And that’s just for the ones we consider to be attractive… where does our affection go for the ones we find less than attractive!?

Jesus said that love for God is only part of the equation. The rest of the math is love for man. God we don’t know, man we do. We know man because we know ourselves, and with fallenness comes the reality of our own imperfections and our lust to be better than we know ourselves to be. We are masters of denial and cover up, but even on our best days is the reality that we are, in reality, not all that and a bag of chips, despite the efforts we go to, to convince you O fallen soul on your own, of how good we are…

Unlovely, attempting to love the unloving – what a concept. And yet that is the very reality our God calls us to in Himself: to be filled with His love in order to love those we know to be at their deepest core: bad, fallible, faulty, faulted, fickle, frail, feeble, and capable of ferocious ferocity of self-preservation on a level that boggles the mind. It’s those He calls us to love.

But not to love in our own strength and ability: we’re fallen too, and too fallen to love. No, the greatest commandment apart from loving Him is to love them: the ones who are as bad as we are. That calls for the only thing even more important than the most important; it calls for His love to be alive and well in us. We can love what we think about God, or what we think we think about God; but the real brass tacks are His love for us to love Him, and His love to so indwell us that we find ourselves really loving our fellow man and seeking his highest good. Perhaps even above our own.

Father, it seems to be the hardest thing to do: to love You by loving and caring for my fellow man. Help me fulfill my God-love by loving with my human-love. I’m trusting You to see me through… amen.