How to get the most out of life

HOW TO GET THE MOST OUT OF LIFE

Lk. 10:25-37

When the lawyer asked Jesus, "Master  what must I do to inherit eternal life" he was not only asking about immortality, living forever, but a quality of life that was worth living forever - and not just any type of life.

Jesus answered by asking the lawyer what was written in the Bible and how he interpreted it.  He replied, “You must love the Lord your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbour as yourself.”  Jesus told him he had answered correctly.  So the answer in one word is love.  In order to understand this a little better, the Bible takes this great concept and breaks it down into three dimensions.

Let us look first at the one closest to home – love of self.  The commandment says, “Love your neighbour as yourself.”  The first requisite for loving our neighbour is to love ourself.  It is saying that we can never have a good relationship with anyone else until we have a good relationship with ourselves.  We must stress the word good, for there are some people who have a bad relationship with themselves.  They are so much in love with themselves that they have no time for anyone else.  They are thoroughly selfish and proud.  They would regard themselves as God’s gift to the world.  I’m sure we have all met people like these.  But this is not the type of love of self that we need to be thinking about!  Then there are people who go to the other extreme and have a very low opinion of themselves.  Thank God I have met fewer of these.  This is not the way we should love ourselves either.

How then are we to love ourselves?  Saint John tells us, “Dearly beloved, we are God's children now.” (1 Jn. 3:2.)  He is not saying that we will become God’s children, but that we are God’s children.  We should constantly keep this thought at the forefront of our minds.  Once we realise we are children of God we must strive to live the kind of life and become the kind of persons we can respect.  When we fail to do that, it does not mean we are no longer God’s children.  It simply means we are not being true to ourselves.  We should ask forgiveness and pray for the strength to change the way we live.  This is what the Bible means when it speaks of loving ourselves.  This has to be the first rung of the ladder we must climb if life is to be worth living.

The next rung is to love our neighbours in the same way as we love ourselves.  This can be very difficult.  There are some people in this world we just don’t like and we never will like them. They may have gossiped about us and made life intolerable.  Perhaps they are down-right rude or bullies.  We have every reason not to like them.  The Bible has no problem with that.  It does not tell us that we are to like them.  The problem comes when we are told these are the people we have to love!  It is not a question of emotion, but one of will.  To love people, in the biblical sense of the word, means we treat them with respect, regardless of how we feel about them.

Jesus illustrated this point with the story of a man who was beaten and robbed, and left beside the road half dead.  Three people came along and saw the man.  The first two passed by and did nothing, but the third man, whom we know as the Good Samaritan, stopped and helped.  We do not know how he felt about the man.  We only know how he acted towards him.  He offered his services.  He treated the man with kindness and respect.  If he had been in the same position, that is how he would have liked to be treated.  That is what it means to love your neighbour as yourself.  That is one of the things that make life worth living.

Lastly, the third rung of the ladder is to love God with every fibre of our being.  I am convinced that loving God begins with an honest evaluation of life.  In one of his letters, Saint Paul challenges us, “Name something you have that you have not received.”  (Cor. 1:4:7)  We would find it hard.  The air we breathe, the food we eat, our very next heart beat is all a gift from God.  Everything we have is from God, even life itself.  Surely that is a good enough reason why we should love Him?  When we come to the spiritual world and see how much He loved us by dying on the Cross that we should be saved, that surely is more than enough to convince us that He is to be loved above everything else.

Lord Jesus, to get the most out of life we must do three things … we must love ourselves, love our neighbour and love You with all our heart.

MY WEBSITE IS HERE