Here’s wishing a happy Valentine’s Day to everyone! So, what better day can there be to write about love? Especially God’s love—an amazing, unfathomable love. God is love; it’s part of His very nature. Each day of life we are blessed to experience we should remind ourselves of the first four words of the Bible, “In the beginning, God…” It all starts with Him. He is our heavenly Father. That gives us a proper perspective. Then, we can smile as we visualize His warm embrace. God loves us!
Jesus was once asked, “Teacher, what is the greatest commandment?”
Our Lord replied quoting from Deuteronomy (v. 6:4-5) and Leviticus (v. 19:18) to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself. Then He said something rather remarkable, “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (Matt 22:40 KJV)
Contemplate that incredible statement. All the laws, all the “Thy shall” and “Thy shall not’s”, all the rules, and all the life principles as taught by the prophets are contained in those two commands. Now, for all you grammar groupies and English teachers out there, how many verbs are there?
Just one.
Love.
Whoa. We’ve just discovered the Cliff Notes version of Biblical law compliance. Every rule and principle that we are to obey are satisfactorily accomplished by the motivating action of either loving God and/or loving others. Every. Single. One.
Later, Jesus declared to a group of would-be followers, “Whoever wants to be My disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow Me.” (Luke 9:23 NIV)
Now, imagine if Jesus had said that in today’s culture and environment. Nearby, there may have been some willing supporters in the marketing and advertising business desiring to help our Lord with the launch of His ministry. They’d be frowning and furiously shaking their heads.
No, no, no! Look. You want followers, right? Statements like that will drive them away from Your Twitter feed. You need “likes” and “shares”. We need to rebrand this. Say something about how great Heaven is or how you can become prosperous or maybe getting head-of-the-line privileges when seeking miracles. Put some positive spin on it. If You must say something a little challenging, then pitch that “yoke is easy/burden is light” kind of thing. But whatever You do, don’t mention a cross! Heck, in our current “all about me” culture, that part about “denying yourself” is going to be tough enough to sell. In fact, we can only fit so many characters in a tweet, so let’s just drop that part too. Carry a cross? Every day? No way! You’ve got to leave that part out. Who wants to carry a cross?
Who indeed?
Have you ever thought of what picking up and carrying your cross daily meant?
There will be some repercussions of following Christ. He warned us of this—if they’ll persecute Me, they’ll persecute you. In some countries, the level of persecution is unto death so certainly this aspect applies, but let’s look at this cross-carrying task from a different perspective.
Consider the greatest commandment in a geometric sense. We are to love God with our heart, mind, soul, and strength—with all we’ve got. God is the Creator and we are the created. It is a north-south relationship where He is above us and we are below. Thus, our love for Him is in the vertical sense.
We love our neighbors as ourselves and as our peers. It’s an east-west relationship so we love one another in the horizontal.
When you put our vertical love for God and our horizontal love for others together it forms a cross—a cross of love. “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.” (John 3:16 NASB). This is the radical love of God that enables us to love because He first loved us and gave Himself up for us. God demonstrated His incredible love for you and for me at the cross. Now, we are to go and do likewise—by following Christ’s new command to love one another as He loved us. (John 13:34 & 15:12).
This is the cross that we are to pick up and carry each day. It is a cross of love. It reminds us that we are His followers. Let’s face it, there are some people that are hard to love. Enemies are hard to love. People who want to harm you are hard to love. People who have hurt you or cheated you are hard to love, but that is our requirement. As the apostle Paul encouraged us, “Do everything in love.” (1 Cor 16:14 NASB).
If we are to be His disciples, we are to deny ourselves by remembering the first four words of the Bible and putting God first. We pick up our cross of love each day and we follow Jesus. No one said it would be easy, but it will be joyful because you know Who you are following. Besides, imagine if everyone were to become His followers—what kind of amazing world would that be?
Happy Valentine’s Day!
