Greatest commandment

In a world that often defines love as an emotion or a romantic feeling, Jesus defines love as a deliberate choice of the will.

To all the girls, remember this: loving God with all your heart is the first choice, and loving your neighbor as yourself is the second choice. Both are inseparable and of equal weight.

Love is framed not as an emotion, but as a consistent daily walk of obedience and care for others.

In this day and age, is it clear to a man and a woman what love and a loving relationship truly are?

Back in the 1980s, the practice of courtship — ligawan — was common. Now, I don’t know.

We’re in the modern age — just a few clicks on social media and that’s it; both a man and a woman are “in a relationship.”

There was a 58-year-old man who became smitten with, developed feelings for, and courted a 25-year-old woman.

At first, the older man believed the young woman when she said she wasn’t ready for a relationship, as she had just broken up with her live-in partner of four years. But then, to his surprise, the young lady was already in a relationship with a handsome young man about her age.

I hope that older man is still alive and that he just focuses on whatever he’s currently busy with. As the saying goes, “If it’s not meant to be, it won’t come to pass.”

It is incredibly painful for an ugly old man to fail in love. Believe me, because if there’s any man alive today who has failed in love many times over, it’s me. As it is written in the Bible, any woman who claims to love God, whom she cannot see, yet refuses to love an ugly old man is a liar.

In the Second Letter of John, verse five, it says: “And now, my lady, I ask you not as though I were writing a new commandment but the one we have had from the beginning: let us love one another.” The call to love is not a new, trendy theological idea. It is the foundational commandment from Jesus.

And it is true, my dear ladies: you cannot claim to love an invisible God while ignoring or mistreating a visible neighbor. Jesus takes two separate Old Testament laws, one from Deuteronomy 6:5 (the Shema) and the other from Leviticus 19:18, and fuses them into a single way of life that cannot be divided.

We can clearly see in the Gospel of Matthew 22:34-40 that Jesus binds the two commandments so tightly together that they cannot be separated. He shows us that our relationship with God is directly mirrored in how we treat the person right in front of us.

Therefore, loving one another is not an addition to our faith; it is the very measure of our love for God.