Matthew 22:37-40 Jesus replied: "'Love the Lord thy 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 prophets hang on these two commandments." These are two basic commandments that, humanly speaking, cannot be separated. The apostle John reminds us in his first letter, I John 4:20, "If any one says, 'I love God,' yet hates his brother, he is a liar." He goes on to remind us that man is made in the image of God. To not love our brother is to not know who God is. To go a bit further, we also can say that we cannot even know what God is about. According to John 3:16, God gave the ultimate sacrifice, His only Son, because He loved the people of the world that much. Neither Jesus nor the Apostle John is suggesting that we love everything that people do. God sees what people do as a product of what they have become because of sin. We need to, with God, love people for what they can become through a saving relationship with God through faith in Jesus Christ. As this becomes true in our thinking and attitudes; I believe He will also give us a desire to do what is necessary to love people into the Kingdom. We will also find ourselves falling more and more in love with God, because we are beginning to move in the same direction.

Falling in love with God