“A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another.”” John 13:34………………….
We are commanded by the Lord to love Him with all our hearts and to love one another, but I am afraid when it comes to loving others that some of us if not all of us may not be making this love issue big enough and at the same time may not be making this love issue small enough. How so?
Undoubtedly some of us are not taking seriously enough the command to love one another, and perhaps not emphasizing enough in our thoughts, words, and actions that this is an unconditional Christ-like love to which God calls us in loving one another, thereby far surpassing and not even being comparable to the worldly non Christ-like love those who have not submitted their lives to Christ as Lord show others. In this respect, we may well be not taking this love issue, this love command to be most precise, as seriously as we should, and may not be making it as big a deal as it should be in our everyday lives.
What does this all have to do with a fork anyway as indicated in the title of this message? One day while sitting at a table of new sisters and brothers in the Lord at a church group meeting, a new friend got up from the table, went over to the breakfast buffet area, grabbed something for herself, and returned with a fork for me. In the grand scheme of things, this might seem like the absolutely smallest act of love in the universe. But please hear me out. I had gotten some food earlier I planned to take with me since I’d already had breakfast. I had not gotten a fork. I had not mentioned a word of this to my friend. But instead of being self-consumed like all of us are so prone to be, she had noticed my getting up, noticed my getting food, noticed my needing a fork, and figured without even asking me she would go ahead and get one for me. As insignificant as this might seem in the grand scheme of acts of love, and of loving one another, what she expressed in this was the love, the care, and the thoughtfulness that comes through Christ. She had been thinking about me, wanting to bless me, wanting to help me, wanting to reach out to me, wanting to show love to me, wanting to care for me, and was so attentive to another that right down to the detail of a missing fork she had decided to express Christ’s love to me.
God’s greatest commands are to love Him and to love others, and there is nothing bigger and more important than this when it comes to the issue of love. But we must not forget love can be expressed in its biggest way in the Lord going to the cross to take our sins and our sin penalty on Himself so all who repent, believe in Him as Son of God and Lord who died on the cross for us and was raised from the dead, truly turning their lives over to Him, are forgiven and given eternal life, and love can be expressed in the tiniest ways right down to the giving of a fork to someone who didn’t even ask for it.
Love for God and love for others should be at the very foundation and at the very core and as the very fabric of every single breath we take, of every step we take, of all that we think, feel, say, and do. Will we fall short in this? Absolutely, as humans, most certainly we shall. But shall we not aim always in the direction of obeying God’s commands when it comes to love – right down to a very fork? Most assuredly, YES! May no act of love for another to which the Lord calls us be too big for us to express, and may no act of love for another to which the Lord calls us be too small. After all, it’s all about the love of the Lord Jesus Christ, isn’t it? And this love, His love, is the love in which we are commanded to walk, to live, to breathe, as we walk down the pathway of following Christ who is Lord!