Who Do You Love

If you really love God then you will love everybody.

1 John 2:7-11  Dear friends, I am not writing a new commandment for you; rather it is an old one you have had from the very beginning. This old commandment--to love one another--is the same message you heard before.  8  Yet it is also new.

Jesus lived the truth of this commandment, and you also are living it. For the darkness is disappearing, and the true light is already shining.

9  If anyone claims, "I am living in the light," but hates a Christian brother or sister, that person is still living in darkness.  10  Anyone who loves another brother or sister is living in the light and does not cause others to stumble.  11  But anyone who hates another brother or sister is still living and walking in darkness. Such a person does not know the way to go, having been blinded by the darkness.

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Oh no, not that commandment again, do we still have to love everyone? We were told to love a thousand years ago way back in the book of Leviticus and now Jesus comes along and starts telling us to keep on loving. (Leviticus 19:18)

You need to realize that the Bible is a love story, it is the story of a loving God falling in love with his creation and desiring to have a relationship with man. The Bible teaches us everything we need to know about love and how to make relationships work the way they should. If you do a search on the word love in the four gospels you will find the word mentioned 73 times in 53 verses.

If you really love God then you will love everybody else. Jesus made it even more obvious that "the greatest of these is love" (1 Corinthians 13:13), he redefined love and took it to the next level and then he challenged us to love in the same extreme way that he did.

Who Do You Live For
1 John 2:15-16  Do not love this world nor the things it offers you, for when you love the world, you do not have the love of the Father in you.  16  For the world offers only a craving for physical pleasure, a craving for everything we see, and pride in our achievements and possessions. These are not from the Father, but are from this world.

The people of the world belong to the age of darkness, they do not live in the light and they make their decisions according to their own desires. They long to have many possessions, to be busy indulging in pleasure, achievements, or status.

Christians belong to the new age of light, the eternal kingdom where God’s values rule and his will is done. We are not to love the world or it's idea of what is important or pleasing. The only thing that we should love in this world is our Savior and our neighbor.

John 14:31  But I will do what the Father requires of Me, so that the world will know that I love the Father. Come, let's be going.

I need to live like Jesus wants me to live so that the world will know that I am in love with him. Jesus knew the requirements that the Father had put on him and he was willing to be obedient to prove his love for God the father and for his neighbor.