Send to Kindleby Jim Hughes
Matt. 22:37-40 Jesus replied, “You must love the LORD your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. A second is equally important. ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the other commandments of the Lord are based on these two commandments.”
Have you ever loved the Lord with all of you? Can you honestly say that He is so powerfully wonderful to you that you desire nothing else in life but to love and be loved by Him? Let’s face it. We rarely love the Lord in that way. We may have momentary flashes of such intense love for Him, but it soon fades away amid the many happenings of our lives. We try to love Him as we should, but we find ourselves acting in an unloving way. So, are we excused? Should we resign ourselves to being failures at love? I don’t believe so. I believe we should continue to strive to love Him; we should continue to do those things that would feed the flame of love: daily devotions, faithful worship, faithful involvement in the life of the church, and faithfully serving the Lord in all we do.
We struggle with loving the Lord as we should and fail to love others (and ourselves) as we should. We fail mainly on an earthly plane because we first fail on the heavenly plane. We can’t love others as we should unless we first love God and then ourselves as we should. Love requires respect. Until we respect the object(s) of our love, we will never really love. There are many infatuations that we think are love, but they aren’t the real deal.
Love is best defined by God because He is love. Check out what He says love is in I Corinthians 13:4-8. Love is not an emotion we feel at the moment, it is a life we live every moment. It is connection with God that never comes unplugged. It is letting the Lord be the source of all we are. It is striving to be more and more like Him as we journey through life.
About the Author:
Spending his formative years in Ft. Wayne, IN, Jim followed the love of his life to southeast Iowa where they married and have spent the majority of their lives. Jim has pastored several churches throughout his life and has worked many years in local factories to help support his family. The father of two married adult children and one son still at home, Jim is a first-time author.
C Through Marriage came into being through many years of pastoral and life experiences. The book first took on a life of its own over 20 years ago when I sought to address the much publicized moral failures of prominent leaders in the church. In the chapter on Chasity, I include the guideliness that I developed then to protect one’s self from such failures.
I am a firm believer in order to make sense out of life you have to use much common sense. We need to get back to the basics of what has worked for many, many generations. If is isn’t broke, why try to fix it? I strive to return to the basics of what really works in all my writings.
