Priority in Relationships

I was watching a gospel music video and a song was being sung to God expressing great love for Him. The lead vocalist brok from the regular singing as he moved to another part of the song and shared a brief bit of wisdom that stuck with me.

“You’ll never love anyone right, until you love Him right.”

Scandalous advice in this day and age where a lot of advice is being given to love yourself first and foremost. What was stunning about the advice, though, was just how much it range true. One of those close to Jesus wrote to communities of believers about how we’re only able to love because we have received love.

When you think about it, there’s a logic to that. you come into the world and your first sources of influence can determine what values like ‘love’, ‘trust’ and ‘care’ look like. You’re not necessarily bound and obliged to love in the way they have but they certainly have a significant contribution in shaping the approach to people.

New life by faith in Jesus Christ gives us the opportunity to start afresh when it comes to the defining influence on our lives. Receiving the love of God in Christ. Seeing it in the life, death, burial and resurrection of Jesus is a great starting point to really know what love is. Getting to grips with that, growing in the knowledge of that, appreciating that and then depending on that does wonder in shaping and giving us the basis to love others, God first and then others.

In essence to love is a response to being loved first. Being loved when we didn’t deserve it. Being loved when we rebelled against it. Being loved when others only manipulated, abused or neglected us. Being loved with an everlasting, ever-giving, ever-building love that is not mere sentimentality.

This is why there is powerful truth in the sentiment that you will never love anyone right, until you love God right. And that occurs in the light of appreciating just how much we are loved by Him.

(Photo by Everton Vila on Unsplash)

For His Name’s Sake

Shalom

C. L. J. Dryden