MAKE LOVE A PRIORITY

Indeed loving people isn't easy. Yet this is what the Bible commands. "For this is the message you have heard from the beginning: we should love one another" (1 John 3:11). ​We spend time on what we deem important. For many of us these choices are valid: time with family and friends, work, prayer, serving the poor, fighting for rights, protesting wrongs. But as the Scripture reminds us, "And if I donate all my goods to feed the poor, and if I give my body in order to boast but do not have love, I gain nothing" (1 Corinthians 13:3). ​Even though we have the freedom to set our own priorities, Jesus made a point of defining certain ones of them for us: "'Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.' This is the greatest and most important commandment. The second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself'" (Matthew 22:37-39). Love, then, is not a gray area the Scriptures. Jesus gave love priority over all other Christian virtues (1 Corinthians 13:13). Every thought, response, and act of goodwill must first pass through the fine filter of love, or it means nothing at all.