October 15 Daily Devotional

Bible Reading

Devotional

It is often said that the love commandment is a summary of the law. This may be misleading. If by summary we mean a short saying that catches the essence but fails to give the details, we should not speak of the love commandment as a summary. It is a summary of the law only in the sense in which the sea is the summary of all the rivers. The command to love covers a wider territory than all the commandments.

It is the sum total of a person's duties.

God demands no more and no less than that we love him above all and our neighbors as ourselves. If, starting tomorrow, all people began loving God above all and loving their neighbor as they now love themselves, we would have a new world; the kingdom of God would have come.

We must love God with our intellect, our will, and our emotions. We must love him with our whole being. It is impossible to explain what that means. We must study the lives of the lovers of God as we get to know them in the Bible. Especially the life and deeds of Jesus will teach us what it means to love God.

We are commanded to love our neighbors as ourselves. This means that we must have the same concern for those whom God places on our way as we have for ourselves.

These two commandments are connected. The second is "like" the first. That is to say, when our relationship to God is right, our relationship to our neighbor will also be right. But if we cannot love our neighbor, we do not love our God.

God commands love. God does not merely say: "Go to church and do your work. Be honest and chaste and truthful." He says we should love. Nobody can love simply by making up his or her mind to do so. We can discipline ourselves to abstain from many bad things. But we cannot discipline ourselves to do the one good thing that is required—love.

We can only love when the Spirit of Jesus controls our lives.

REFLECTIONS

Frame a prayer around your need to be more loving, asking that the Spirit will control your life more completely.

Andrew Kuyvenhoven's Daylight, a modern devotional classic, was originally published by Paideia Press in 1977. This updated edition is copyright 2009 by Faith Alive Christian Resources. You can order a copy of this revised version of the book directly from the publisher.

A man of many accomplishments, Andrew Kuyvenhoven is probably best known for his contributions to Today (formerly The Family Altar), a widely-used monthly devotional booklet associated with the Back to God Hour. Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations for this updated edition of Daylight are from the Holy Bible: Today's New International Version copyright 2001, 2005 by the International Bible Society.