Matthew 22: 36 – 38

³⁶"Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?" 

³⁷Jesus replied: " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.

^{38This is the first and greatest commandment. ³⁹And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.}

Dear Billy,

Hey, let me share with you a truth that I am still in the process of learning and that I believe has not only freed me from man’s humanistic expectations of me but has freed me from my humanistic expectations of myself.  I believe that the motivation for being on the mission field (the motivation for any Christian in this world actually) must come from a genuine love relationship with God. 

Many times missionaries are motivated by their desire to love and rescue the people in the field where they are serving.  This, at first glance, looks like a very worthy motivation.   But it’s not.  God doesn’t want us to try to love these people with our own version of love.  God is love.  It’s only through His love, God Himself, that He wants us to love others.   In this way, He gets all the glory and praise, not us.   In fact, He needs to be the One who is doing the loving…we are just supposed to be the vehicles.  If we do not have a grasp on this truth…and it’s a grasp that gets tighter and tighter as one falls more and more in love with Him… then our missionary service will be self-motivated, self-centered, and even self-destructive.   God wants to show His love for people…through us.

I have found that when we love people with a human love (to even call it love seems wrong, but for lack of another word, I’ll use it.  Let me know if you can think of a better term)… anyway, when we love people with a human “love”,  there are conditions, expectations, even manipulations that we, knowingly or unknowingly, press on others because we are looking and hoping for certain results.   When the outcome is their inevitable failure, we may become discouraged, angry, disgusted, bitter and even downright judgmental. 

In our efforts to try to teach them to obey our Lifegiver, and rightly so, we jump right over teaching them how to fall in love with Him.  Could it be because a list of rules is easier than a relationship?  Could it be because we ourselves have chosen the easy-rules path?  Could it be we have not taken the time to fall in love with our Maker either, and that’s why we don’t display His love…we don’t know how…we haven’t even gotten a grasp on it yet?  What is that old saying, “Don’t put the cart before the horse.”?  

So as a result of our “work for the Lord”, we have people trying to please us, to satisfy us, to copy us…instead of God.  What happens when we fall short or they fall short?  Both are inevitable…humanistic “love” isn’t suppose to work.  As I said before, some of us become discouraged.  Some of us become angry.  Some of us become disgusted.  Some of us become bitter.  Some of us become judgmental (as if we are not at all to blame).  And some of us just decide to get a divorce and leave the field altogether.  To “&^%$#” with it.  But if we are loving people with His love, then there will be mercy, compassion, forgiveness, patience, understanding ….a life full of grace.   Isn’t that how we want God and other people to treat us?

We tell people to love God with all their hearts, soul, body, mind, and spirit, yet we aren’t even willing to do it ourselves.  Wouldn’t our crucified lives be better teachers?  Eventually, people are going to disappoint us.  And we are going to disappoint them.  The truth is we may have only duplicated in them our own screwed up understanding of what it means to love God. Instead of surrendering to God so he can make us lovers, we are surrendering to ourselves and making ourselves liars. God knows we need to be crucified…our distorted ideas of love need to be crucified…so that it’s not us who live but Christ lives in us.  Didn’t God already explain us that?  It’s not about doing.  It’s about being (crucified) in Him and letting Him do the doing.  No wonder so many missionaries and pastors get tired and tired of.  And that’s a good thing…because only then may we stop long enough and question our motives. 

Why are we doing?  Why are we loving?  To please ourselves, others, or God Himself?