Romans 12:9-10 “The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery, You shall not kill, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,” and any other commandment, are summed in this sentence, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law. This episode discusses how important loving our neighbor is and also acknowledges how hard that can be sometimes. Music:"Adding the Sun" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Love Is The Fulfilling Of The Law
Romans 12:9-10 “The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery, You shall not kill, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,” and any other commandment, are summed in this sentence, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.
I read this verse this morning and I thought it was a great one to talk about. I loved every part of it and so I wanted to share it with you. The first part is saying all the commandments can be summed up in one sentence. “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” There are not a lot of commandments, there are only ten. However, how many of us remember all ten? I am not sure I could recite all 10 of them. So, when I read this and saw that all I really need to focus on is loving my neighbor I thought that was pretty great. It is certainly easier to remember than trying to remember all 10 of them.
I realize as I am writing this, that although loving my neighbor is easier to remember it is not always easier to do. I think if we read the commandments we might look at ones like “Thou shalt not kill” and think, I can do that. I can go through life without killing someone. That is not to say you won’t want to every now and then, but you are fairly confident that you don’t have to worry about that one. However, there is actually so much more to that commandment. Maybe you won’t kill someone’s physical body, but would you kill their spirit by teasing them or picking on them? Would you kill their reputation by talking badly about them behind their back? There are more than one way to kill someone and sometimes we don’t think of it like that. However, you would not be doing any of those things if you were loving your neighbor.
What about “Thou shalt not steal?” This is one that is easy to see how we wouldn’t do it if we loved our neighbors. If we loved those around us then we wouldn’t steal from them because we would care about them. We also wouldn’t rob stores because we would see that they are our neighbor and we wouldn’t want to see them hurt. We wouldn’t want to see them lose their business. We also wouldn’t want to hurt our friendship is we loved them. We would care what they thought of us and we wouldn’t want to let them down.
The reason I said that although only having one commandment to remember is easier to remember, but not necessarily easier to do is because loving others can be hard at times. Loving our kind neighbors is not hard. For most of us, it is easy to love someone who is nice to us and who treats us well. We love people who are outgoing and have great personalities. We love people who we connect easily with and who are easy to talk to. However, what about the grumpy old man next door, or the grumpy old lady next door? Are we supposed to love them? How do we love someone that is grumpy? Or a better question, how do we love someone who isn’t nice to us? What if we have a neighbor, or a relative that has always treated us badly? Surly God can’t want us to love that person? He does, he wants us to love everyone.
Do you see now why I said this commandment may be more difficult than all the others combined? It feels impossible to love some people and I get that. If you have been hurt by someone, especially if it was a family member then trying to love them can feel impossible. If this is you, I would say, don’t start there. Start where it is easy. Love those that are nice to you and that are easier to love and then work your way up, slowly to those that are harder to love. I have said this before and I will keep saying it until we actually believe it, God doesn’t need our perfection. He doesn’t need us to love everyone perfectly. However, He does want us to try. He does want us to love more than we hate. Knowing that God is not looking for perfection, can you try to love your neighbors a little more? When it says neighbors, He don’t just mean your physical neighbors, He means all those that you meet.
Does knowing that loving your neighbors fulfills all the commandments change how the way you view loving your neighbors? Does it make it seem more important to try to do this? I love how the verse above says, “Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.” The thought of love as the fulfillment of the law is a beautiful thought. It is also a sad thought if we think about how much love is missing from this world. When I look around I don’t see love all around me. I see anger, division, resentment, hatred even. Then if I think about love being the fulfillment of the law I think that we aren’t not doing a great job fulfilling the law. We can get really overwhelmed if we think about the whole world and how much the world is lacking in love. But, what if we just focused on our small part of the world? What if we didn’t worry about others and we just focused on ourselves and how well we were loving our neighbors.
Let’s focus on what we have control over and let’s strive to love the best we can. What can we do to love our neighbors more? What can we do to love those that seem unlovable? If love is the fulfillment of the law, how can we incorporate more love into our lives? Let’s ask the Lord to show us the answer to this question. If we know we are struggling to love someone because of past hurts, bring it to the Lord and ask Him for help. He can help us do the impossible. God is calling us to love more. He is calling us to share His love with the world. He wants us to be His reflection in the world. Every week at prayer group the Lord is telling us that He wants us to be His instruments here on earth. He is showering us with love so we in turn can shower others. What is one thing you can do today to love someone a little more?
Dear Heavenly Father, I ask you to bless all those listening to this episode. Lord, we want to love our neighbors, we just don’t know how, please help us. We want to love all those around us, even those that seem unlovable. Lord, we all have that person or people that we can’t seem to love because we can’t forgive them for all the things that have happened in the past. Heal our hearts, soften our hearts, help us to forgive and to love all our neighbors, regardless of circumstances. Just because we love someone doesn’t mean we need to spend time with them. If someone hurt us we don’t have to let them back into our lives, we can love them from afar. Lord, help us understand all of this. If there is more we could be doing please put that on our hearts. Please send the Holy Spirit to open our eyes to the ways we are not loving our neighbor and then give us the strength to start loving our neighbor more. We love you Lord, you love us so freely and we want to imitate that, please help us. You are truly amazing and truly an example of how we should love. We are so grateful for all you do and we ask all this in accordance with your will and in Jesus’ holy name, Amen.
Thank you so much for joining me on this journey to walk boldly with Jesus. Tomorrow’s guest is Andrea. She will share her witness about how God has saved her life and also helped her through terrible anxiety attacks. This is something so many people are struggling with right now and if I know her story will help a lot of people. If you struggle with anxiety or you know someone who does, please share this episode with them. Andrea opens up about what it felt like and what she did to combat it. This weeks format is a little different. After her witness we spent some time just talking and I asked some questions as I know several people struggling with anxiety right now and thought they could use some additional information. I am sure everyone will get something out of this testimony. I look forward to sharing it with you tomorrow. Have a blessed day!