You shall love the Lord, your God,
with all your heart,
with all your soul,
and with all your mind.
Our loves are not often properly ordered, and they certainly aren't perfectly ordered. In what ways do we fall short? At our worst there is an implicit reversal where we love ourselves first, and God and neighbor only insofar as doing so makes us feel self-actualized. This can take the guise of religiosity, as when we pray only for things which bring us pleasure.
This is the greatest and the first commandment.
The second is like it:
You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
When our loves are disordered they can take the shape of helping us to craft images of ourselves as people who are concerned for others, without actually being concerned for them. It is the sort of spirit that could pray for someone and yet not lift a finger to help them.
Sometimes we really do try to love ourselves and our neighbors genuinely. But when we do this without reference to God, and to the fact that we are all created to find fulfillment only in him, our efforts at love can be partially effective at best. We may meet a temporal need while at the same time cementing a sinful predisposition by being unwilling to have a difficult conversation. We certainly know what this sort of love looks like in ourselves. We do some things which are good and helpful but we hold parts of ourselves back because of the fear that if we give ourselves entirely to God we somehow be miserable.
Jesus tells us that our lives are designed to work when we place God first. They will never quite work if we simply have God as one facet or priority among many in our hearts. When God is first we are able to love our neighbor as ourselves because we first know ourselves to be loved, and toward what end, our eternal destiny in heaven. Without the entirety of heart, soul, and mind our prideful egos will still have purchase to negotiate a sphere of our hearts that is only our own, not open to God. And such parts of us will never find fulfillment.
We can see if we are responding to this call to love in a genuine way by whether or not it takes concrete action in our own lives. Do we, in the places where God has planted us, with the means and gifts he has given, chose to live lives of service? Or do we instead look to our own interests and those who are naturally close? We can see how much God is first in our loves by how we treat those on the peripheries, the aliens in our land, the poor who stand in need of our assistance.
You shall not molest or oppress an alien,
you shall not act like an extortioner toward him
you shall return it to him before sunset;
When God is first we are able to love all people made in his image, not just those whom it serves our own sensibilities to love. In loving them, especially those who cannot repay us, God himself is loved. Without that love, our love is nothing (see First John 4:20).
We don't think of ourselves as serving idols. But to the degree that God is not first in our lives, a degree that we can see reflected in how well we love our neighbors, then idols must still be ruling us. To whatever degree that is true we must still turn from them to serve the living God.
and how you turned to God from idols
to serve the living and true God
and to await his Son from heaven,
whom he raised from the dead,
Jesus, who delivers us from the coming wrath.
Serving the living God, the God of the living, sets our whole lives in order. It is what is meant by seeking first the Kingdom. We need not fear that we will be miserable if we do this. For we will receive all else besides. We will discover the fulfillment that only living for God's purpose for us can give.
My God, my rock of refuge,
my shield, the horn of my salvation, my stronghold!
Praised be the LORD, I exclaim,
and I am safe from my enemies.
No comments:
Post a Comment