“The King will answer and say to them, ‘Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of Mine, even the least of them, you did it to Me.’”
Matthew 25:40
Do you ever have a passage or scripture that just grabs you? Verses like this just stop me cold. Why is that? It is because verses like these show God’s heart. We talk of His greatness. We talk about His holiness. But, when God wants to tell us what He cares about, it isn’t His creative power or Divine glory that He points to. Without minimizing either of those, He points us to how we treat one another. He points to love.
He doesn’t point to a feel good love either. It isn’t a love based upon emotions or mutual gratification. It is a love based upon sacrifice, upon a commitment to love that doesn’t look for a way out due to circumstances or cost. It is a love that doesn’t care who sees or notices. It doesn’t even care if anyone else cares. He just wants us to love.
It makes me ask two questions. 1) Who am I loving? Do I just love the lovable? 2) Who am I not loving? Do I have excuses for why I don’t love those who need to know the love of God most?
For some of us, it becomes easy to NOT love those who we think are squandering what God has given them. For others, we find ourselves struggling to love the intolerant or narrow minded. I don’t know which you are, but I don’t think those excuses hold water compared to Jesus’ love for us. Do they? Jesus loves us when we are wallowing in messes of our own making. Jesus loves us through our selfishness and spiritual blindness. I want to love like Him. He tells me that doing so means that I truly love the people I touch and love Him with all my heart. How can I not?
Something to think about,
Pastor John
Pastor John D Jakes 
Leave a Reply