Mark 12: 30-31 “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.' The second is this: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no commandment greater than these."
As I was I was sitting in church the pastor was speaking about these two scriptures and he said the most important commandment in the Bible was to love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. As I sat and pondered this scripture, I thought about those who have never been shown love in their life, those that were raised in homes where their own parents had never truly been loved and so as a result, they passed down through generations what they thought was love, but in reality, it was very conditional, perhaps unkind, critical, harsh and maybe even performance based. If you were good, you were a good child and if you were bad, you were a bad child; there was never anything in between. I begin to think about how I came to be able to love my God in the way this scripture commands; what I did was I just made Him my priority and when everyone else around me disappointed me, I turned to Him and He was always there for me. I truly thought that I loved Him with all my heart, soul, mind and strength, but then here comes the second greatest command, to “love your neighbor as yourself.” And so the question became, if you have never been taught how to truly love, do you really love yourself? As the pastor asked this question, he said of course it’s easy to look in the mirror and like what you see, but that is not what this scripture is talking about. The real question is, do you really love yourself like God loves you, do you really see yourself as He sees you and do you love yourself and your life?
Psalm 18:19 says, “He brought me out into a spacious place; he rescued me because he was pleased with me and delighted in me.” According to this scripture, David truly believed that God loved him, that God took pleasure in him and that God delighted in him. I wonder how many of us actually believe this? To be honest with you, I’ve struggled with this thought; I believed that God really loved me because he gave me the most beautiful gift in the world, someone who loved me unconditionally, someone who delighted in me, someone who took pleasure in me, someone who made me feel like I was the most important person in the world, my sweet Elisha boy. When God took that gift away from me, I began to look at myself and believe I had something to do with his death, that maybe if I had done something different, things would not have turned out how they did and I really wondered if God really loved me. Even though He was so near to me, even though He was speaking to me daily, I had a head knowledge, but I was having a very difficult time believing He truly loved me and applying this truth to my life.
1 Peter 4:12-13 says, “Dear friends, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that has come on you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice inasmuch as you participate in the sufferings of Christ, so that you may be overjoyed when His glory is revealed.” Day by day, moment by moment, God is working in us an eternal glory that is being revealed to every single person around us and He never gives us more than He has equipped us to endure, He has never left us, not for one moment, He has never forgotten us, He understands every heartache and, as a matter of fact, I have finally been able to see that He truly does love me and has my best interests at heart. I can’t explain to you how that shift has occurred; maybe it was my glimpses into Heaven and finally believing His promises to me about my future home with Him, but I can tell you this, as a result of my unrestrained, uncompromising, pure devotion to Him, I can certainly feel it returned from Him to me one hundred fold.
– Melody
