“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. All the law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” Matthew 22: 37-40
We’ve all heard
it said “Love God with everything you have, and love others as much as (or more
than) you love yourself.” If you’re like me you’ve heard it so much that it’s
lost the impact and intensity it should have in our minds. So I sit here and
try to literally force myself to grasp the entirety of it. Can I get my mind
wrapped around what that would actually look like? Not really but I’m still
trying. 🙂
“Love
others more than you love yourself.” I’ll admit, I love myself a lot, and have
gotten quite good at taking care of myself. I’ve rarely been in the position of
being dependent on anyone or anything to take care of me. I don’t think I love
myself in an arrogant or conceited way, but in the way that says, “I have to
make sure that I’m taken care of… that I have what I need. Survival of the
fittest right?
If I don’t take care of
me, then who’s going to?” Loving others more than myself just doesn’t make
sense. It goes against all logic, and everything I naturally tend to do. It
requires giving up control. For me this ties directly into the area of fear vs.
trust. If I pour myself out for others, then who is going to pour into me? The
root is fear. Fear that if I focus on others instead of myself, then I will
fall through the cracks and I won’t be taken care of. How do I shift my fear
into faith? Ah, that really is the question of the hour! Do I really trust that
if I give up control of my life and focus on loving others, that God will step
in and not let me fall? Do I have faith that if I truly obey, and love as sacrificially
as God has asks me to, that He won’t forget about me? My humanness wants to
have an absolute guarantee that everything will be ok, I want to be able to see
it, touch it, feel it first.
But then where is faith? It doesn’t take any faith
at all to believe when I have all the answers. My faith won’t grow unless I use
it. When I was in
Mexico,
God gave me
Romans 8:24 ”
For in this hope we were saved. But hope
that is seen is no hope at all! Who hopes for what he already has? But if we
hope for what we do not have, we wait for it patiently.” I think I’m
finally getting what that really means. For the first time in my life I’m about
to step outside the realm of things I can control and actually walk in the
promises that I always just quote, really live them out. It’s a huge leap of
faith for me and it’s TERRIFYING, but I’m tired of just living life within the
realm of what I can do myself. I want to see God work, I want to experience
things that are bigger than me, and that’s never going to happen if I stay
locked in the boundaries of myself and what I can accomplish on my own. I am
limited…God is not.
God has all the
resources of the universe at His disposal, and He wants to use them to show us
how much He loves us. But He’s not going to if I’m still holding on to control,
thinking that I can do a better job of running my life than He can. He waits for us to step out in faith, to admit we need help, and trust Him to show up…then He rocks our world!
Matthew 6:25-34
“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about
your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear.
Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes?
Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns,
and yet your heavenly Father fees them. Are you not much more valuable than
they? Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life? And why do you
worry about clothes? See how the lilies of the field grow.
They do not labor or
spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like
one of these. If that is
how God clothes
the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the
fire, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? So do not worry,
saying,
“What shall we eat?” Or “What shall we drink?” Or “What shall we wear?”
For the pagans run after all these things,
and
your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his
kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as
well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about
itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”
