Begin with two minutes of stillness and silence before God.

If you’ve read along with me the past two days, you know that we have discussed the unending and faithful love of God from the Psalms. Understanding how much God loves us leads us naturally to today’s passage. We are made in God’s image, and we’ve established that He loves faithfully, so as His image bearers, we should grow to reflect His love to others. While we will never love perfectly on earth as God does, Jesus tells us how we can try. In this passage, He gives direct, detailed examples of how to carry out the second-greatest commandment of loving your neighbor as yourself. Jesus’s words here go against every fiber of our fleshly nature. It’s easy to think about loving others who love us or make us feel loved, but it is difficult to truly love others who don’t share the same affection for us.  Sometimes it seems impossible. In Christ, we no longer live by the flesh but by the Spirit and it’s by the power of the Spirit in us that we have any hope at all of fulfilling what Jesus says about how we should treat others. He tells us to go above and beyond to love, bless, give, and show mercy, even to those who may hate us, hurt us, and never have consideration enough to repay us for the good we’ve done. This is how we mirror the love of our Father that we read about in the Psalms and when we do, we evidence the One to whom we belong. We can love because we are loved unconditionally by Him.   

Take two minutes to reflect in silence.

Reflection: 

• Who is the Lord calling you to love? How can you obey Him in that, even today? 
  
• Keep in mind that loving others begins with having a heart of compassion, like our Heavenly Father, and understanding that everyone we see is an image bearer of God.  Let that compassion begin in your home and overflow into all of your spheres of influence.    
  
• Prayer: Dear Father, thank You for loving us with faithful, unending love.  Your love made a way for us to be called Yours and to be in fellowship with You.  Thank You that we never have to do this life alone, for You’ve promised to be with us.  Help me love like You, even when it’s hard.  Please show me what steps to take to love people in my life that I haven’t loved well up to this point, and please forgive me when I mess up.  I only want to be a light for You.  In Jesus’s name, Amen.