[Pearls Ep. 119 – Friday Follow-up]
In Sunday’s Gospel passage Jesus commands us to love one another as He loves us.
There’s an important prerequisite to that – first we must cultivate a love of God, and then we can share that with others – we can’t give what we don’t have. Jesus himself tells us the first great commandment is to love God with all our heart, soul, and mind. (Mt 22:37)
So the question is – how do we love God? That is a very real and practical question. In the nitty-gritty of everyday life, how do we go about expressing our love of God. Of course we can do just that, we can raise up the prayer, “God, I love you.”
But in terms of concrete actions, how do we express our love of God?
Well, God’s role in our relationship is to love us. That seems simple enough. What is our role? It is counter to what we are wired to think, which is that to love God back we must do something for Him. In fact, our role – how we love God – is to simply receive His love. We love God by letting Him love us.
In this is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us first. (1 Jn 4:10)
How do we let God love us? How do we receive God’s love? By spending time with him in mental prayer and by trusting Him. By having faith in Him.
This requires putting aside our pride, our need to achieve, our need to be in control. To receive God’s love, we must let go of our efforts to control our lives and our endeavors to attain our vision of happiness.
We think that we know what will make us happy. “If I can get this person to like me …. If I can get this job promotion … If I do this for my kids …. If I can get past this illness or this emotional hurdle.” These may be reasonable desires, but we must trust that God knows exactly what we need for happiness. God knows all the deepest desires of our hearts, even those unknown to us.
We should say with the psalmist:
As for me, I trust in your merciful love.
Let my heart rejoice in your saving help:
Let me sing to the Lord for this goodness to me,
Singing psalms to the name of the Lord, the Most High. (Ps 13:6)
And Jesus himself tells us:
Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat [or drink], or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds in the sky; they do not sow or reap, they gather nothing into barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are not you more important than they? (Mt 6:25,26)
That is not to say that we don’t also express our love in action, as Jesus tells us to feed the hungry and comfort the widow. But this is our response to God’s love. First, we must receive God’s love. Again, we can’t give to others what we have not received ourselves. We go into much greater detail on this in the first week of 30 Days to Christian Meditation.
As we look ahead to the weekend and the Sabbath, it’s a great time to simply let God be God – make Him top priority this weekend and trust that He’ll sort out all the details from there.
Blessings on your journey with Christ –
Steve and Karen Smith
Interior Life
Postscript – Jesus’ New Commandment (Jn 13:31-35)
When Judas had left them, Jesus said,
“Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in him. If God is glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself, and God will glorify him at once. My children, I will be with you only a little while longer. I give you a new commandment: love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another. This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”