No Greater Love

 

Let’s take a quick study of Jesus as He teaches about love.   In John 15:13, He says, “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one's life for one's friends.”  Yet in Matthew 12:29-31, Jesus answers the question “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”

“The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.  Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’  The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’  There is no commandment greater than these.”

If the greatest commandment is to love God with all that you are and the next is to love your neighbors/friends as yourself, how can the greatest love be to lay down your life for your friends?  Is Jesus saying we must die to show the greatest love and that somehow dying is linked to loving Him and our friends? 

Oswald Chambers clarifies this with the comments, “What God wants is the sacrifice through death which enables us to do what Jesus did, viz., sacrifice our lives.  Not ‘I am willing to go to death with Thee,’ but, ‘I am willing to be identified with Thy death so that I may sacrifice my life to God.’  We seem to think that God wants us to give up things! ... God nowhere tells us to give up things for the sake of giving them up.  He tells us to give them up for the sake of the only thing worth having, viz., life with Himself.”

I think Jesus is saying that loving God with all that we are requires us to believe that everything He directs in our lives, our actions, our internal thoughts, our repentance, and our focus on what’s importance, changes as we die to what we want and live to what He wants.  This is the sacrifice of our life.  People try this all the time in their own effort and they fail often.  It is only by being close to God that we are changed because our desires change.  When the desires of our heart change to only wanting what God puts in there, we are changed dramatically.  Most importantly, it comes without our effort.  I personally believe that if we can get that first greatest commandment right, the second will come naturally – we won’t have to force it. 

This also means that we believe that loving God and inheriting His direction, His thoughts, and His characteristics is what is best for our friends.  We unwavering believe that more God anywhere, especially within us, is the best thing for the world.  And so, if we sacrifice ourselves, identifying through the death and resurrection of Jesus, and submit as Jesus did to God’s will in our life, we are showing the greatest love for our friends.

The best thing and the most love I could ever show towards anyone, is to be closer to God.  The next best thing and most love I could ever show them, is to encourage them to be closer to God.