Who Do You Love More?

Everyone has heard of the phrase “love your enemies” or “love your neighbor”, and we all think that that is just what Christians are supposed to do. What if I tell you that loving your neighbor is not the most important thing for a Christian to do?

Matthew 22:36-40 says ³⁶ “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” ³⁷ And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. ³⁸ This is the great and first commandment. ³⁹ And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. ⁴⁰ On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” Now why is it in this exact order? What on earth is so important about them?

Even before a Christian first believes, God loves them, and has from the beginning of time. All He asks of us is to love Him back, which is that very first commandment, and it is because we love Him that the second commandment is possible. We can’t love our neighbor or our enemy if we do not love God, because we don't even know what love really means. But this begs the question; what do we do if these are in conflict? What happens if loving our neighbor gets in the way of loving God?

Recently, I had to make a choice. I had several friends at my high school that were almost completely against Christianity in everything they do. They swore all the time, read smut and were blatant about it, and their morality was quite against Scripture, but what can I expect from people dead in sin? Of course, why I even associated with them in the first place is obviously questioned. I had fallen away, backslid in heart, and honestly forgot that what the American culture deems as a good person and what God deems as a good person are two different things. They were nerds like me, and we loved fangirling. I found comfort and assurance there, but I could tell, I was changing. My internal morality was changing to what theirs was.

For some reason, God put it on my heart to reread the verses of the day for the last few weeks, and the more I read, the more convicted I felt. Verse after verse of not associating with ungodly people in those intimate friendships, or of putting the Lord first in everything showed me that I had a choice to make. Who was more important to me, God or my friends? During my freshman year, I had been alone. I had no close Christian friends in my grade or at my school. I remember praying for God to give me friends. Sure enough, He gave me these friends in sophomore year, but God gives and takes away, blessed be the name of the Lord (Job 1:21), and He asked, who do you love more?

So if these two commandments are in conflict, which do we do? Well, the Lord gave us a commandment to love him with all our heart, soul, and mind, and said it is the greatest. As Americans, we often forget that as Christians, we have a King, and this King is Lord over everything. He is Lord over our love lives, our friendships, our school lives, our Church lives, all sciences, over history, English, math, over everything that ever was or ever will be. This is the supreme of all commandments, given to us by our King; therefore, it is to be obeyed above all else. Because loving God means to be willing to sacrifice everything and anything for Him, just as Jesus did for us; even if means dying.

So when these two commandments are in conflict, you have to ask yourself, “Who do I love more, them or God?” And when you stand up for God, you are showing them real love, as well as tough love. God punishes us for our sin in order that we repent and then change, and then a parent's love is quite similar. Sometimes loving someone means saying "I love you, but I don't love what you do." That choice must be made. Which will you make?