One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them and answer, he asked him, "Of all the commandments, which is the most important?" "The most important one," answered Jesus, "is this: Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. 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.
Sometimes we forget that to love someone is a choice. I'm not talking, of course, about marriage and dating and all that. I'm talking about real, sometimes difficult, though always worth it, Christ-like love. The verb, not the emotion. We get very caught up in our opinions, our feelings. I think this, and I believe that. Social media has turned into a town hall for soapboxes. So eager are we that everyone knows what our position is, that we forget entirely about our posture.
As Pastor Thad Norvel writes, "Orthodox Christian belief insists the Gospel is necessary because of God’s position on our broken ways of living (sin). But the heart of the good news is God’s posture toward us as we continue to break things, including ourselves....Right position without the posture of God revealed in Jesus is not the Gospel."
And what does the posture of God look like, of course? It looks like this...
Jesus' words are called commandments for good reason. They don't come easily to us all the time, they are not as innate as we would like them to be. But if we don't start working on better posture, collectively, as a society, your position isn't going to matter.
Neighbors are everywhere. They come in all shapes and sizes and colors. For those as broken-hearted as I am about the murder of Deputy Darren Goforth this weekend--a murder that occurred in our neighborhood, that was cowardly and hateful and too close for comfort--you have a choice.
My choice is to love.
The hate stops here.
XOXO.....Kelly
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