Understanding Love

“If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen? And this commandment have we from him, That he who loveth God love his brother also.”- 1 John 4:20-21
Is it easier to love God than our brother isn't it?
In some respects it is, in others maybe not.
We look at our brothers in different ways. They're just people like we are. They're sinners like we are. They're undeserving as we all and just as needy as we are, they are us in a lot of ways.
Love others as yourself, as you would be loved not conditional upon your thinking you are an amazing, wonderful, deserving person. If you hate yourself are you to still love your brother? Or is hating yourself license to hate others?
That can't be right can it?
Do we like others in proportion to how much we like ourselves?
I know people who think they are the most wonderful things in all the world and people should almost literally bow down to their superiority and you know what- they generally don't seem all that loving towards others.
To me it almost seems the more self-love there is the more conceit there is and the more contempt for others.
Two opposite extremes perhaps. Hating yourself and the world around you, loving yourself to the point you can love no others. There has to be a middle ground and I believe that middle ground is found in loving others as we desire to be love.
Time and again we see movies we call sappy those that have happy ever after endings after much drama, many tears and anguish, lives in the gutter brought up out of the gutter. We want the same but realism often tells us our circumstances won't change miraculously. We might feel like we're in a hopeless situation and often times we are because life isn't a dream. Those who rise above are the few.
God wants us to rise above, to reach out to him.
The way we count success isn't the way God counts success.
Apart from God we are nothing and we try to be something but we flounder. We can create amazing worlds for ourselves and yet apart from God they are worthless.
How are we to love our brothers? How are we to love others? How are we to act?
We are to love God and love others and to do that we have to know what love is. The Bible tells us God is love. So we are to act as God does. God cares for others in such an amazing way it's all but incomprehensible to us.
“If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen? And this commandment have we from him, That he who loveth God love his brother also.”- 1 John 4:20-21
With love as the common denominator it has to be amazingly important.
Is love something we have automatically or is it something we cultivate?
Love is something I think I'll study for a bit.
May God help us as we seek to understand love, as we long to be loving to our fellow man, as we desperately seek to love Him most of all.
By His Grace and Mercy now and always.
Amen.