Loving Right

The older I grow the more I see many hurt in the hands of those who love them. The book I’m reading at the moment is centred on that theme. It’s not a Christian book or anything, it’s a ‘un-put-downable’ novel by Sheila O’Flanagan. It has made me wonder what we are doing wrong when it comes to love.

The major problem is that sifuna ukuqala ngokugcinwa ngakho (we want to start with what should come last). What makes me say this is the order that God gives in His Word when it comes to loving.
“Jesus replied: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’” Matthew 22:37-38

We want to start loving by loving others. But as with everything in life, love begins with God. I need to first know God, who is love, this means in knowing Him, having a living relationship with, I get to know what love truly is. 1 John 4:8 puts it this way: “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” This also means we cannot love on our own terms and still claim it to be love (see John 13:34). The true definition of love is found only in God, everything else is a counterfeit.

So the first and greatest commandment is to love God with my everything, with a love that He’ll teach me as I walk with Him daily. This will determine my ability to be successful in relationships: how well do I know God? How do I love God? When you love God, you do and don’t do certain things to people, not because of them, but because of God. You won’t lie or cheat, you’ll forgive even when you don’t feel like it, you’ll repay evil with good, you won’t let the sun go down while you’re angry and so on and so on not because the person you’re expressing love to deserves it, but because your knowledge and love for God drives you more than your feelings do.

The one thing I value most about the power of knowing and loving God when it comes to relationships is how it has the ability to change our character, if we’ll allow it. Our character (which births our behaviours) is the root cause to many problems we experience in relationships. Being in a relationship with God and obeying his instructions (which is an expression of your love for him) destroys pride, stubbornness, greed, arrogance, selfishness, harshness, dishonesty, impatience, jealousy, pessimism and the like in our lives which are enemies to healthy relationships.
It also goes without saying that if a person hasn’t first known and loved God, they’ll have a pretty hard time loving you right.

Then we come to loving others, and Jesus says we ought to love others as we love ourselves. The trick here is that I first have to love myself. For the proud and arrogant, this is an easy task, but for the rest of us, this is a real mountain to climb. Why? Because I know absolutely everything that’s not right about me and sometimes it outweighs the good in me, making it very hard to show myself some love. A relationship with God helps truckloads here because in knowing God you get to know how He sees you, how He defines you. When I love myself on the basis of who He has made me to be regardless of what I’ve done and failed to do, I’ll get better at it. See why loving God comes first?

And let’s be honest, it is mighty difficult to love someone who doesn’t love themselves. You always have to be there to uplift and approve them, to motivate and encourage them, to compliment and make them feel good about themselves, and if you don’t do those things, they fall apart. It’s too much weight on anybody. Sure relationships are characterised by a certain level of dependency, but it doesn’t completely nullify independency and the ability to take care of yourself, emotionally and otherwise. In the book, the husband lies and cheats, ending up with two wives who both don’t know about the other, all because of abandonment issues he didn’t deal with.

The way I love others is a reflection of how I love myself. Paul puts it this way in Ephesians 5:28-30: “In this same, way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church for we are members of his body.”

So let’s go work on our relationships instead of constantly complaining about them. Let’s get the order right. Attend that mid-week service, get in more time reading your Bible and praying, let your guard down and let God in. Treat yourself to your favourite thing this week, eat right (if you can manage, lol), get in shape, speak well to and about yourself. Get yourself right with God, get yourself right with yourself, and it will be easier to get yourself right with others.