To Love One is to Love Many

Devotion 7 - To Love One is to Love Many

Matt.22:37-39 – “Jesus said to him, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the first and great commandment.  And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.”

This Scripture is commonly known as the great commandment – to love God and to love our neighbor. However, just like the lawyer in Luke 10:29, we can ask, “Who is my neighbor?”

Jesus answered by giving the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30-37). To keep things in perspective, we define our neighbors as those who are in our immediate vicinity and circumstances of life.

Learning to walk in love starts from somewhere and the most appropriate places to start are always our home, our ministry and workplace. To love one is to love many. To grow in love, we need to first love those who are in our circle of life. It is easy to love those whom we don’t meet so often but it’s a different thing to show love to those we meet every day.  If we cannot develop love for them, we will never be able to develop genuine love for others outside the circle. It is at most ‘diplomatic love’ (showing kindness and acts of love because it is the right thing to do, but which may not necessarily come from the heart). 

Our Capacity to Love

When we succeed in loving one difficult person, a greater capacity to love is ingrained and imparted into our lives. That same capacity that we developed becomes the capacity for us to love others. The victory to love one becomes the same power to love others. Conversely, our lack of love for that one person around us becomes a stumbling block to our capacity to love others.

Rom.5:5- “Now hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us.”

This verse describes a distinctive Christian experience. When we are born again, we are born again with the capacity to love as God loves, because He has poured into our hearts His love through the Holy Spirit. That means every time we come to the point where we feel we cannot love due to our hurt and pain, it only reveals that our capacity to love has been weakened.  We need to recognize that it is not the other person’s fault but rather our inability to draw on grace; grace which increases our capacity to walk in a greater measure of love. We need to come to the Lord to restructure our own hearts. Unfortunately, we tend to restructure the circumstances instead of restructuring ourselves.

Matt.5:44-48 – “But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven; for He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same…Therefore you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect.”

 

The word that is translated “perfect” literally means “be complete”. In the context of the scripture, the focus is love. Jesus is discussing our responsibility to love not only our neighbours, but also our enemies and those who do us harm.  The parallel passage in Luke 6:36 gives us a better understanding of this verse. In the same context, Jesus said, “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.” To be like our Father, we need to be merciful and love with a mature, complete kind of love that doesn’t restrict itself to those who love us back.

 

Loving only those who love us back is incomplete love. Instead, our love should be complete, just like the Father’s love is complete. Jesus’ main point is that we are to treat others with the same kind or quality of love that God gives, rather than a demanding a life of sinless perfection or moral equality with God.

Our inability to develop love for one person who is near us becomes a scar in our heart that will remain wherever we may be. To learn to love the world, we must first learn to love one person at a time. When we have succeeded in loving those around us, we will grow to love the world. God is Love. We are made in God’s image. We are made to love as God does. Love is our highest existence and our main reason for existence. The meaning of life is Love.

We must believe in the power of love as much as we believe in the power of the Holy Spirit, in the power of the Word and in the power of the Name of Jesus.

May God increase His love in each of our hearts.