Love God, Love People
I am reading To Love as God Loves by Roberta Bondi, and this paragraph from the first chapter keeps coming to mind as I consider the state of the world and our country.
Bondi writes, “They believed, in spite of society’s pressures, that love is the goal of the Christian life and humility is what it takes to bring us toward it. Love and humility were not the pious attitudes of idealistic but impractical men and women who could not cope with ‘real life.’ Rather, as they understood them, love and humility provide human beings with a realistic and powerful way of disarming such a violent society as theirs and ours. Without them, they believed that life dissipates into nothing, and, paradoxically, the self and its power to act are lost altogether. Only as we learn to love God and others do we gain real freedom and autonomy in a society in which most people live in a state of slavery to their own needs and desires.”
The “they” she is referring to are the early church fathers and mothers who lived from the fourth through sixth centuries. It was a different time from ours. And yet, these men and women needed to figure out what it looked like to follow Jesus and reflect the truth of his kingdom to the world around them, not unlike where we find ourselves today.
Her words made me think of Peter’s words in 1 Peter 4:7-11 (NLT),
“The end of the world is coming soon. Therefore, be earnest and disciplined in your prayers. Most important of all, continue to show deep love for each other, for love covers a multitude of sins. Cheerfully share your home with those who need a meal or a place to stay. God has given each of you a gift from his great variety of spiritual gifts. Use them well to serve one another. Do you have the gift of speaking? Then speak as though God himself were speaking through you. Do you have the gift of helping others? Do it with all the strength and energy that God supplies. Then everything you do will bring glory to God through Jesus Christ. All glory and power to him forever and ever! Amen.”
And Paul’s in 1 Corinthians 13:1-3 (NLT),
“If I could speak all the languages of earth and of angels, but didn’t love others, I would only be a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I had the gift of prophecy, and if I understood all of God’s secret plans and possessed all knowledge, and if I had such faith that I could move mountains, but didn’t love others, I would be nothing. If I gave everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body, I could boast about it; but if I didn’t love others, I would have gained nothing.”
And Jesus’s in Matthew 5:43-48 (NLT),
“You have heard the law that says, ‘Love your neighbor’ and hate your enemy. But I say, love your enemies! Pray for those who persecute you! In that way, you will be acting as true children of your Father in heaven. For he gives his sunlight to both the evil and the good, and he sends rain on the just and the unjust alike. If you love only those who love you, what reward is there for that? Even corrupt tax collectors do that much. If you are kind only to your friends, how are you different from anyone else? Even pagans do that. But you are to be perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect.”
Bondi writes, “When they heard the commandment to ‘be perfect’ they understood it to be another way of phrasing the one Great Commandment, ‘you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind . . . [and] your neighbor as yourself.’ To be a perfect human being, a human being the way God intends human beings to be, is to be a fully loving person, loving God, and every bit as important, loving God’s image, the other people who share the world with us.”
We often sum it up - Love God, Love People.
Not just the people we like, but all of them: the ones we agree with and the ones we don’t, the ones who see things our way and the ones who don’t, the ones who are kind and the ones who aren’t.
Loving like God loves is one of the hardest things we’ve ever been asked to do. We can’t do it alone. We need Jesus, and we need each other.
What does it look like to love others in such a way that they notice something is different about the love you offer?
What does it look like for love and humility to be guiding principles in your everyday spaces?
~ Melissa