Love -- Why It Is Important

The reason why it is so important to love others is that there are a lot of people out there who have never learned how to love themselves -- and they are hurting and most of them don't like themselves very much.

I remember for a long time I hated myself, and I thought even less of others, but people loved me until I could learn how to love myself. When I learned to love myself, I learned to love others because I never really hated others, I hated the me I saw in others. As the my own self-loathing vanished, my loathing for others vanished with it.

I said last week sometime that “Until I was able to fall in love with God, I was unable to fall in love with myself. Until I was unable to fall in love with myself, I was unable to fall in love with others” and it’s true. But that love may come in baby steps. At first I didn’t love me, but I loved the God -- who is love -- that was in me, and if nothing else I could love that. Just as at first, I didn’t not love the other person as much as I loved the God I learned to see in the other person.

It is a big step for a lot of us to learn to see God in others -- many people live seventy or eighty years or more and never see God in others, and they probably never see God in themselves. When we learn to see God in others, it’s huge, but it’s a huge first step, not the goal. I do not just want to see God in another person, and I don’t just want to love the God I see in another person, but I want to love the other person as God loves them because God loves them. That’s the journey! It’s loving others for no other reason than God loves them, and I love God so much, that I want to love what God loves, because being in love is like that. If they are important to God, then they are important to me.

Maybe that’s all heaven and the Kingdom of God is, whether that is in heaven or on a new earth. Maybe it’s all just spending eternity learning how to love each other more because God loves us more, and as our love for God grows, our love for others grow, and we are all, some of us for the first time, loved -- completely loved for no other reason than we are, and we are because brought into being.

There was a time, before anything, when God had the idea of you " and God was so in love with that idea, that God had to make you real so God could love you more. Then God became human, so that God could love you more. God died on the cross so that God could love you more. God is love -- IS love -- love is not what God does; love is what God is.

So, the reason why it is so important to love others is that there are a lot of people out there who have never learned how to love themselves. There are a lot of people out there who have never been loved. There are a lot of people out there who have been used and abused and treated like a means to an end to get food, clothing, shelter, or something less tangible and it has been called love by the one doing the using, but the one being used usually knows it is not love, and it is lacking -- and they are hurting and most of them don't like themselves very much, and may not even think they deserve to be like by themselves or others.

These people may be rude. They may yell at us for no reason. They may butt in line at the grocery store, or cut us off in traffic. They may be jerks at work, steal your clients, and try to undermine you every step of the way. They may be hard people to like, but they are the people we need to learn to love the most. Be patient with them. Be kind to them. Don’t be snippy, or rude, or keep track of all the insults or hurts they have caused you. Pray for them.

Because I’m going to let you in on a not very well kept secret -- the judgment is love. God does not punish us or damn us for the many “sins” we may commit, but if we find ourselves condemned, it will be for our failure to love.

If I see a homeless person begging for change and my thought is “Get a job” or “bum” I’m failing the test. If I see people on food stamps and I judge them harshly, or I despise the poor, I am failing the test. If I think that my money is better spent on a flat screen HDTV than on someone who is hungry, or who needs medical care, or who is poor, I’m failing the test. I am condemning myself.

Now there’s a part of me that thinks hell is not a place as much as it is an awareness -- it is the awareness of all the good we could have done with our lives, of all the people we could have helped with out money, our time, our talents, but refused because we were too self-centered and selfish, and having to live with that knowledge forever. We get to see and feel the true consequences of our actions and we have to live with that forever, even if we are in the Kingdom. But the good news is, we’ll have eternity to learn how to be loved and to love, and all that pain from the knowledge of the pain we caused others, directly and indirectly, will gradually evaporate. And hell " that hell we carry within us " will one day be gone. It will be destroyed by love.

There is nothing in this world so bad that love cannot overcome it. There is nothing in this world so broken that love cannot fix it. Because God is love, so where love is, God is there -- and God has all power and love never fails.