The Graceline

One day a lawyer came up to Jesus and asked, “Teacher, which command in God's Law is the most important?”

Jesus said, “Love the Lord your God with all your passion and prayer and intelligence. This is the most important, the first on any list. But there is a second to set alongside it: Love others as well as you love yourself. These two commands are pegs; everything in God's Law and the Prophets hangs from them” (Mattthew 22:36-40 MSG).

Ever since I came to trust the Lord as my life and my salvation from sin and myself, I have tried hard to love Him with all my heart. For a long time, I tried to demonstrate my love by doing stuff FOR Him. I lived to sacrifice myself to Him by serving what I believed to be His purposes and by serving people. I was miserable. My son even told me as much one day. He said, “Dad, I have never known a man who has served God more faithfully than you, but you have been miserable doing it.”

What he said was like a dagger in my heart because he was right. I was miserable because I really didn’t understand a vital principle. Before we can love God, we must first be loved BY God. “This is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us… We love because He first loved us” (1 John 4:10 & 19).

Truth out of balance is heresy. Grace without truth is license. Truth without grace is legalism. See what I mean? I have come to realize that I was lied to about God. I don’t mean that pastors, teachers and churches intentionally lied, but some gave me an unbalanced perspective of God. For example, “it is better to give than to receive.” I interpreted that to mean giving was good. Receiving was bad. There was no balance. In reality, you cannot give until you receive, or else you have nothing to give. Understand?

I was trying to love God without ever receiving His love for myself because I believed receiving was wrong. I was out of balance in the giving department for so long that I felt unbalanced when I began learning how to receive. At times now I don’t feel like I’m loving Him enough because I’ve slowed way down on doing things FOR Him and have just been allowing Him to love ON me. That brings me to another overlooked part of our Scripture passage that no one seems to talk about.

Jesus tells us to love others as well as we love ourselves. I contend that most people do just that. They do love others like they love themselves because most people do not love themselves. The world, the flesh and the devil constantly remind us of how inferior we are. Think about it. Doesn’t advertising thrive on making us feel less than okay? It tells us we need such and such to be better, thinner, stronger, prettier, healthier… most everything we think we are not. We are constantly made to feel that we don’t measure up and are therefore unworthy of unconditional love.

Jesus tells us that we are fearfully and wonderfully made, that we are precious in His sight, that He loves us with an everlasting love, that we are the apple of His eye, that He is just crazy wild about us. Zephaniah gives us a glimpse of how God feels about us, His Beloved. “Cheer up, Zion! Don't be afraid! For the LORD your God has arrived to live among you. He is a mighty Savior. He will rejoice over you with great gladness. With His love, He will calm all your fears. He will exult over you by singing a happy song” (Zephaniah 3:16-17 NLT).

At the risk of sounding simplistic, I agree that what the world needs now is love, sweet love. If God loves us the way He says, why do so many people live as if they were unloved? Could it be that we have believed the serpent’s lie in the Garden of Eden? Satan told Adam and Eve that God was not good and could not be trusted. He told them that God didn’t want them to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil because they would then know as much as God and He would be jealous. They believed the lie that God could not be trusted, and we all have pretty much believed it, too.

After Adam and Eve ate the poison fruit, they hid in the bushes. Why? Because they were afraid. They didn’t trust God and fear consumed them. But the Bible tells us, “There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love” (1 John 4:18 NIV). The apostle John said, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life. God did not send His Son into the world to condemn it, but to save it” (John 3:16-17 NLT).

Question for you: Can you trust someone you don’t love? Sure you can. You trust a doctor you don’t love to perform surgery on you, do you not?

Another question: Can you truly love someone you don’t trust? I don’t think so. Adam and Eve didn’t trust God when He told them that eating the Tree would kill them. What was the result? Fear. They ran and hid from God. Did God love them any less because they didn’t trust Him? No. But because they didn’t trust God, they would not allow Him to love them.

Last question: Does God have a problem loving us, or do we have a problem trusting God? You think about that!