Who Would Ever Admit To Being an Unloving Person?

The Ten Commandments won't budge! They are the “how to's” of loving God and loving neighbor. Jesus summed them up in Mt 22:36-39, “"Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?" 37 Jesus said to him," 'You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.' 38 "This is the first and great commandment. 39 "And the second is like it: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' Now, there's a little bit of a dilemma in Jesus' summation of God's commands into the simplistic “Love God and love neighbor” formula, that was not intended. The dilemma is simply this: People have a tendency to ignore the specifics of love as spelled out in the Ten Commandments and just paint the commands in the broad brush of their own personal definition or feelings about love. Quite frankly, when we do that we create quite a mess. We seek to live by our own generalizations of love. Go ahead ask anyone what they think it means to love and you will get many different answers. Since love is defined in a multitude of ways by a multitude of people we wind up with a church that loves by feeling, rather than fact, and vaguely rather than specifically. We wind up with cafeteria style love. Picking and choosing what we want to love and how we want to love rather than loving the way God intended. I'll say it again, The Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount tell us how to love specifically! Jesus was not replacing the Ten Commands with two! Get that straight. He was simply summing them up. He said in Mt 5:17 "Do not think that I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I did not come to destroy but to fulfill. 18 "For assuredly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law till all is fulfilled. 19 "Whoever therefore breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. Why is such a person called great in the kingdom of heaven? Because to be great in the kingdom of heaven is to love God and neighbor, and the Ten Commandments show us specifically how to do this! If we limit our understanding of righteousness to our definition of love,we will likely fall into the trap of works righteousness. We will fool ourselves into thinking we have been “good enough” to get into heaven. Think about it, who would ever admit to not being a loving person? So we have a whole lot of people who say they love God and neighbor and think they love God and neighbor, but if they would take a serious look at the Ten Commandments which tell us how to love God and neighbor, they would see how far short they come. And how pale our pile of works righteousness really is! And if they still fool themselves into thinking they have kept the Ten Commandments, well, there's always the sermon on the mount, or to carry it even further, the instruction that Jesus gave to the rich young ruler to sell everything he has, and give it all to the poor, and then follow Jesus. It's time to admit it, as we look at the mirror of the Ten Commandments, we can honestly see how far short we have fallen in loving God and men. Forgive us Jesus for our shortcomings. We throw ourselves at Your feet asking for your mercy and grace. Mercy for salvation from our sins and grace for the power to love in accordance with the specifics of Your Word, rather than our own generalizations!