Title: Love One another (Mark 12:28-34)
Contents
'Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.' He did it. (Mark 12:30)
Love is the perfection of life and the completion of religion. In this love, all mankind is dissolved. Religion, philosophy, joy, sorrow, friends, enemies, life, and death all melt in love. Everything melts because love is the fire of life that never stops burning. This love can be divided into passive and active.
Passive love is not harming one's neighbor and not doing evil. Also, active love is loving your neighbor as yourself. We cannot say that our Christian love has fulfilled its duty in passively respecting and not infringing on others. The Christian's love must mature to the point of actively loving one's neighbor as well as one's own life.
If there is one thing we have loved the most above all things in this world, it would be me. We did not hesitate to sacrifice anything in this world to love Me. However, in the verse of the text, Jesus told us to love our neighbor by transferring the entire love that we have loved so far. In order to love and follow Jesus Christ, we must keep the commandment to choose ourselves and to love our neighbor completely.
Why? It is enough to take good care of ourselves and love ourselves. Why should we love our neighbors too?
1. Because you are a child of God.
Matthew 5:44-45 "I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. In this way, you will become sons of your Father who is in heaven, because God He makes it shine on the good and the good, and he teaches the rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.” As God's children say, when we love according to the will of God, our status as children of God is revealed.
In the world, the father of blood is smart and good, but when the son does not resemble his father and is stopped, the world condemns him as bad. They call me a child of Horo.
Then, when can we say that our status, transformed into children of God, is best revealed? That's when we love each other. Even to those who do evil toward us, we are becoming more like God when we are generous and unchanging. That thought tells us who we are. Indeed, we have a great identity. We had a tremendous status that could exclaim, "I am a child of God and God is my Father. Because I am a child of God, I can now inherit the eternal kingdom of heaven." The fact that God is my Father is so great that I have to get up and dance even from my sleep.
But to what extent do we accept that fact as our own? We need to put into practice that feeling that God is our Father. It is to show the specific characteristics of being a child of God by showing the love that we love even for those who hinder us. If you do not show this love, you are not a child of God. They are just strangers who do not know God at all. 1 John 4:8 says, "He who does not love does not know God, for God is love."
2. Because we love the Lord.
We get hate back with hate. Retaliation breeds retribution. This is the principle of life in this world. We are commanded by power. Another person pointed at me. That person made a fuss about me. So our instinct is to retaliate against that person. I want to get it back with hate.
Is love really possible when society has structural contradictions and is full of structural evils? We have a hard time fearing that the love I love will not be used, humiliated, and ridiculed for this goodwill. We are concerned about what happens if they reject our goodwill or love. But Christians love because they obey Christ. We must love our neighbor because the basis of love is the love we love our Lord. If I love the Lord with all my heart, mind, and sincerity, then when I love my neighbor because of loving the Lord for that love, there is no failure in that love. That love doesn't fall. If you love depending on how they treat you, that love will fail. In 1 Bel 2:23, when Jesus was reviled, he did not curse in return. We do not love because of circumstances, but because the Lord has commanded us. I love you because you loved me.
Therefore, today's verse can be interpreted like this. “You shall love the Lord your God first with all your heart, with all your mind, and with all your soul, and this is the greatest and first commandment; for this love you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” We must love because of the love of the Lord. You must not move anyone else. Did I Love the Lord? That's why I decided to love my neighbor. If that is the case, then we must look to the Lord and try to love Him. Please don't be sensitive to the reaction of how you treat them. We must be sensitive to the Lord's commands. I love only Jesus. Look to the Lord When He loved us, we were still sinners. It was a time when there was no response to the love of the Lord. Romans 5:8 says that while we were still sinners, God demonstrated his love for us in that Christ died for us.
3. Because giving is love.
People feel happiness when they have the emotion of love. It is true that money and science bring us convenience, but they do not bring us happiness. Happiness comes only through the emotion of love. That is why the loving couple is happy. Happy parents who love their children. Couples who love their children look happy and look beautiful. As long as they have children and love, they are happy. On the other hand, a person without love is in fact the most unhappy person. The Lord said, "In your measure you shall be measured." Love is like this, when you throw it against the wall, it comes back. Love really has the principle of reaping what you sow. What this love is and the principle of returning it by hitting the wall is what Jesus said, "There is more happiness in the one who gives than the one who receives."
Of course, there may be the thought that we love our neighbor in order to receive salvation through God's grace. Salvation and blessing come naturally. This is the principle of love. This is to be given the prize money given to that heaven, our hope.
Where do our misfortunes come from? Where does the unfilled depression and sadness in us begin? It is not that unhappiness itself makes us unhappy. It is because there is nothing we need to love enough to overcome the discomfort within us.
Truly, when we love the living God with all our heart, all our mind, and all our soul, that person is overflowing with happiness. Because I love you, there is emotion. There is joy because of love. Because we love, we live each day feeling the abundance and abundance of life. Where there is no love, no amount of money will inevitably bring despair. They will disappear like mist. What is the object of our love? Where there is no love, there is always complaining and resentment. If we have faith that is not expressed in love, it is not true faith. Only faith that stands on the truth that only love accomplishes great things is true faith. As possessors of this kind of faith, when we share the love of Jesus Christ toward our neighbors and shine the light of love, we can live a life in which we can fully enjoy our privileges as children of God.