Loving God, Loving People

“Loving God, Loving People”

By Zach Wood

Matthew 22:37-39 NIV

Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’  This is the first and greatest commandment.  And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”

Last week, I was reading a YouVersion Bible App devotional by Danny Gokey and he made a statement that was simple, yet so profound.  He shared, “So many times I think we overthink our calling and over complicate the Gospel, when really our purpose in this life comes down to two simple things; loving God and loving people.”

It was so powerful and spoke volumes to me!  The more I thought about this statement, I considered how we so often do over complicate things every day of our lives when it comes to being a light for God.  What if we put this concept into practice from the time we get up in the morning to the time we go to bed and focus on nothing else but this?  What would our lives really look like if we simply focused on loving God and loving people?  What if that became our sole mission every day?

This concept has challenged my thinking in the past week and I continue to consider how I simply need to put this into practice as I live my every day life.  Loving God is actually pretty easy for me to do.  Even though I often don’t understand Him, I love Him very much.  However, loving certain people is difficult for me.  It is easy for me to love people who are easy to love, but very hard at times to love people who are not nice and who have treated me badly. 

Think about this passage and how important it was for Jesus to share it.  We need to not only love God with all our heart, but we must also love others.  We cannot say that we love God and then treat others like trash.  It just doesn’t work that way.  We absolutely must do our best every day to love others, regardless of how they treat us.  And, that is hard!

What would our world look like if we made it our passion every day to love God and love others?  We don’t need a seminary degree to do this.  All we need is a willingness to love and respect not only our Father, but also others who we come into contact with.  Let us not over complicate the calling God has given to each of us.  We all have different abilities, gifts and talents for sure, however, we all have the ability to love God and love others.  This is something we can all do, regardless of our education. 

Loving God and loving others.  It is not a hard concept to grasp, but it is a challenging concept to live out.  Why don’t we make it our mission and passion to fully love God and love others as we live every day of our lives? 

Who is with me?