And you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength.’ The second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ No other commandment is greater than these.” Mark 12:30-31
We began this week learning that we should love one another as Jesus loves us. And we can love one another, because He first loved us! Isn’t that God, He calls us to do the impossible, but also equips us then to achieve it. Oh, how we need the power of Holy Spirit, to truly love one another. But today’s verse reminds us that’s it’s not all about others, it’s also about how we see ourselves.
I like to call these Bookend Lessons, where the first point and the last point, so that all the stuff in the middle holds together. We started with Jesus loving us, and ending with us needing to love ourselves and for some of us, that’s a problem. The reason it’s a problem is that we see ourselves through other peoples eyes and opinions and comparing ourselves with others. All that adds up to not seeing ourselves honestly and accurately and we become deceived. We either think more highly of ourselves as Paul put it or see ourselves as a “less than”. Both are detrimental in their own ways, but most importantly it keeps us from seeing ourselves as God sees us.
Once we accept His gift of salvation, God then sees us as He sees Jesus. I tell my congregation when they get up in the morning to remind themselves that they are the righteousness of God through Christ Jesus (2 Corinthians 5:21). We are loved (Col. 3:12), forgiven (Eph. 1:7), a new creation ( 2 Cor. 5:17), above and not beneath (Deuteronomy 28:13) and that’s just a few! When we realize how much God loves us and experience how transforming it is, we begin to see ourselves through the eyes of Jesus who loved us so much He died so that we would know more than a conqueror through Him who first loved us (Romans 8:37). It is then we can truly love our neighbors and show them the love of God that will transform our neighborhoods and communities. And as Diana Ross sang, What The World Needs Now Is Love, True Love
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