Love First

"Jesus said, 'Love the Lord your God with all your passion and prayer and intelligence.' This is the most important, the first on any list. But there is a second to set alongside it: 'Love others as well as you love yourself.' These two commands are pegs; everything in God's Law and the Prophets hangs from them."
Matthew 22. 37-40 The Message
I get really pissed off when good Christians say stupid, mean stuff that they think is helpful when it's really not. I could go into multiple examples, but I am afraid I would get emotional and angry and well......that's not good for my complexion.
The balancing act that needs to be perfected is the one that teeters between loving your neighbor and being able to speak the truth. The problem is that most Christians forget that even while we are expected to speak the truth....it must be done in love.
Speaking the truth in Love.
It may sound cliche', but when we realize that more feelings are hurt and relationships damaged from self-serving acts of verbal terrorism we might actually think before we speak.
Didn't your mother ever tell you to do that? It's pretty good advice.
The scripture says that God' law pegs on the two statements: Love the Lord your God with all your passion and prayer and intelligence, and Love others as well as yourself.
When I read that it tells me that even God's law must flow from a place of love. Which, on HIS part, I don't think there is any debate. The question rises when we as Christians feel it is our responsibility to become some sort of moral policing agent that passes judgment on other people because of their own interpretation of God's law.

In Searching For God Knows What Donald Miller states:
Growing up in a small conservative church in the South, you hear

more about morality than you do about Christ. If you were immoral,

if you danced, drank, or cussed, you were made to feel that God no

longer liked you. And if you were moral, you were made to feel not

one with Christ, but right and good and better than other people....

While morality is not the issue necessarily, the issue that is the motivation behind this post today not being specifically stated (I may be more explicit some time soon), the meaning that I hope to extract from Miller's excerpt is to say that we often say things out of a very one-sided bad interpretation of the Gospel that has more to do with our own version of the Truth than Christ's commandment to love.

Here's to following Christ......