Week Two: Observe Your Intentions
Day Seven: Love vs. Hate
Choose to Be Loving
In John, Jesus gave His disciples a new commandment: to love one another. Many centuries earlier Israel had been commanded, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” That’s pretty simple—we can look at the way we take care of ourselves and use that as a pattern for taking care of others. The part of the New Commandment that was new was “Love one another as I have loved you” (John 13:34). This was a new standard of love, the same standard the Lord gives in Matthew when He calls us to love as your Heavenly Father loves; “Be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect.”
We noted yesterday that we too easily try to get even, thinking that retaliation is being fair. And to a worldly part of us it seems quite fair to be good to people who are good to us and bad to people who are bad to us. One of the problems with this kind of behavior is that we let other people decide whether we will be good or bad to them by how they treat us. Then we lose the opportunity to independently grow in love and happiness while we wait for them to change first. It is very easy to fall into this kind of thinking. “If only you would be more reasonable, I wouldn’t get upset. If you weren’t so selfish, I could love you more. If you fix yourself, then I will be a better person.” We get stuck in believing that our happiness and self-worth is dependent on the behavior of others. The Lord is offering us a much different approach. This approach requires us to love our neighbor first, consequently and necessarily changing our own behavior.
God is love - pure love. His love is completely directed at making every human being ever created as happy as he or she is willing to be. It doesn’t matter how far we fall, how stubbornly insistent we may be on practicing evil, the Lord is still working eternally to guide us toward experiencing heavenly happiness. With those who have their hearts set on a selfish life, He leads them to more moderate states so that their choices do them less harm. With those disposed to good, He constantly increases that goodness. His care and unending compassion are part of why He is referred to as our Heavenly Father - because He, in essence, is our perfect father. This is a message of hope.
It is true that He gives us freedom and lets us stray from the path, for otherwise we could not have free will and be truly human. And while we may stray, the Lord in His unending love, never gives up on us. He is always blessing us. When we are challenged by the stubborn nature of our selfish loves, He invites us to lift up our eyes to Him and reflect on His eternal purpose for us, which is happiness. We can imagine what our relationships would look like if we, our spouses, our friends and our neighbors practiced a life of loving and caring. Practicing love like the Lord modeled while on earth changes lives and will change the world.
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