Love is the Only Way

Jesus taught us that we should love God with all our heart soul and mind, at that we should love our neighbor as ourselves,( Mt 22:34-40) but what does that truly mean. There are three key words in the command and I want to take a look at each one of them.

• God - There is not a whole lot to interpret here. God is the God of Abraham and Jacob, the God of you and me, the Trinity. I think you know who we are talking about.
• Neighbor - I think this is an important word to know what Jesus was saying here, it tells us who we are to love. Do we only have to love our friends or do we have to love everyone.
  In Luke 10:29-37 when the lawyer asked this very question he found that the neighbor was a not a brother or religious leader but a Samaritan someone who the Jewish people of that time had no love for at all.
  In Matthew 5:44 we are told to Love our enemies so it can be reasoned that our enemies are our neighbors too.  It would seem that we are commanded to love everyone as we love our selves.
• Love - So here it comes down to it. What does Love mean. Certainly it does not mean we should have romantic love for everyone.  I think the key here is the phrase "As yourself". How do you love yourself. Certainly we care about our own happiness so we should care about the happiness of others even our enemies. Certainly we care about our health and well being so we should care about others. 

But love is more that a thought, Love is an action so we need to show that love as we would feed ourselves are we not commanded to feed others. As we clothe ourselves are we not commanded to clothe others. Its a tall order and hard to fill. Good thing we have a Saviour to help us, to save us.