Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ gave us two commands which are central to our lives: to love God with all our hearts, souls and minds, and to love our neighbours as we love our selves (Matthew 22:36-40).
In this passage of Scripture Jesus is telling us to love God with everything we are and in order to express love to our fellowman we must love ourselves. The one thread contained in these two central commands is love. Jesus is saying that love is essential to our lives, everything depends on love so much so that we are told in 1 John 4:8,
“Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.”.
God is love and we are to possess hearts to love like Him. It is because of God’s love for us that Jesus came to earth to make atonement for our sins. We cannot say that we love God if we neither love our neighbour nor our own selves because it is the same God who has created both neighbour and self in His own image. So that, if we hate our neighbour then we hate God and if we hate ourselves then we hate both God and neighbour (see 1 John 4:20).
Pray that God will fill your heart with His amazing love so that you may love Him with all your heart and with all our soul and with all your mind, and that you may love, accept and see your neighbour as a person created in His own image, a person that is loved by God.
Two Central Commands ©2013 Shelley Johnson
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