Love will keep us together

10/5/2011

Weather Report From Heaven: Sunny and bright, with an abundance of light and lots of singing and rejoicing.

Bible Verse of the Day: Matthew 22:37-39 " Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the greatest commandment. And the 2nd is like it; Love your neighbor as yourself."

My wife had surgery yesterday and I was thinking about what true love is as she was taken off to surgery and then I came home to my young children and they were so concerned and upset for their mommy. They love her so much and couldn't function properly without her. Neither could I. Our family unit was out of whack all day without the love, expressed in many ways at many times during the day, of my wife and their mother. My wife is great at expressing her love to her family in her acts of unselfishness. She lives out her love for her family by putting the needs of the kids and me before her own. She loves by example. Tonight we had a mother of a classmate from my son's school deliver food to us so we wouldn't have to cook or clean. Talk about living out the love thy neighbor creed. That was an amazing example of love to me. This woman didn't even really know us, but as a result of a prayer circle, was led by the Spirit to do this as an act of kindness. My son's school is filled with this type of loving attitude from the faculty, to the parents and then to the children. They are learning all about love in the sense of living it out in their daily lives towards one another within that school community. It is so cool to be a part of such a special place. They exemplify the type of love that Jesus was teaching about constantly in His earthly ministry.

I have always thought of love from the context of what it means in my life. To me, love is a devotion to someone or something that will cause you to prioritize it, to fight for it, and if necessary to even die for it. Jesus tells us in the scripture above that the one thing that we should be prioritizing in our lives above all else is to love God with all we have. That love will bind us together. I find it fascinating that He leads with loving with our hearts. When we love with all of our heart, we are vulnerable and there is a commitment to make it work out. In poker parlance, we are all in. Jesus is saying that the love of God is something that we need to be all in for in our lives. He knows that the benefits of that relationship will be a blessing to us of utmost importance. When we love God as best as we know how, we are illustrating our humility and dependence upon Him to lead us throughout our lives. We benefit from the time spent with Him just like with any other loving relationship we have. We are more easily able to discern His will for us in difficult circumstances, in tough decisions, and in managing both successes and failures in our lives. How do we accomplish loving God? I believe the answer is in prayer. When we pray to God, we are actually loving Him. We are exhibiting the importance of Him in our life by our willingness to spend time with Him in conversation. When we make God a priority, we show how much we love Him. We should take time out of our days to be alone with Him in prayerful thought. Call me crazy, but I find that when I start my days this way in the early morning ,they tend to go better. I often find that something that I prayed on, or that was revealed to me, inevitably comes up during the day and I am better prepared to handle that circumstance. There are many potential hindrances to our prayer life, including busyness, distraction, disappointment and neglect. But just like in our relationship with our wife or kids, if we continually put off spending quality time with them, our relationship will suffer because of the neglect. Love is best defined by another four letter word, time. As a mentor of mine once said, don't tell me why you don't have time for something, tell me why it's not a priority in your life. We all have the same amount of time in a day, and how we prioritize it says a lot about what and who we love. Jesus, in the bible verse above from the book of Matthew, calls this the greatest commandment of all. He knows that we will have to make sacrifices with our time occasionally in order to spend quality time with God, but the benefits will be so much greater than the cost, that He is urging us to make this priority #1. God delights in our willingness to spend time with him and will richly bless us by imparting His wisdom and love upon us. We can fake many things in our lives, but we cant fake showing up. Showing up for God is worth our time. In fact, it is the most important thing that we can ever do.