A God Beyond Belief by Lance Moore

Author:Lance Moore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Published: 2019-10-18T00:00:00+00:00

Jesus and the Great Commandment

What did Jesus say about love? Many things. And one of the most famous is: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself.”83 Before the Beatles said it, Jesus really did teach that love is all you need. For Jesus, the law of love summarized all the words of the Law and the Prophets who had come before. Listen how Jesus defined love: “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.”84 Love, in the Christian worldview, is inseparable from self-sacrifice. If we are not self-sacrificing, we are not truly “loving neighbor.” As Dr. Martin Luther King put it, “The true neighbor will risk his position, his prestige and even his life for the welfare of others.”85

That’s a high order. In our culture, the word “love” is so tangled up with sex and pleasure that for many folks, saying “I love you” has as much spiritual value as pronouncing “I love ice cream.” True love is a decision, a commitment to a set of selfless actions. Or as the rock group Boston sang, it’s “More than a feeling.” Love, according to Jesus, is not emotion, but action — a series of decisions to do what is good, right and true. We confuse true love with a lust for superficial beauty, rather than a commitment to substance. Poet John Donne wrote, “Love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies.” Perhaps he had Narcissus in mind.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.