Godly Priorities

God’s priorities for us:

FIRST PRIORITY

Love God First

Matthew 22:37–38 NIV

Jesus replied: “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment.

This is the root of what it means to be the kind of man that God created you to be. It influences everything we do, everything we are.

And being able to do this involves appreciating how much God loves us.

1 John 4:19 NIV

We love because he first loved us.

Your love for others will be boosted by your love for God

The most important thing your family or friends needs is you being a consistent, wise, and loving presence. (So why does that aspect of ourselves often get considered last?)

And that means - deep diving into your personal relationship with God.

May mean reorganizing your priorities - but it’s worth it.

SECOND PRIORITY:

Love Others As Yourself

Matthew 22:39–40 NIV

And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

In terms of being a father or a husband, the same expectation is on us.

Ephesians 5:33 (NIV)

However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself

This second priority, there’s a bit to unpack. Three main points.

We have to love ourselves

For some people, this will be ‘duh’. And for some people, this will be ‘no way, nu uh.’

And this applies a bunch of different ways.

we have to take care of ourselves

we have to forgive ourselves

we have to want ourselves to be better - and to want the best for ourselves

You’ll only be able to actually, truly love other people as far as you’re willing to love yourself.

AFTER that line of loving yourself - you’re straying into different territory. You’re doing something other than love.

If you don’t think you’re worth loving, then you’ll act like you have to convince other people to love you. You’re not loving people, you’re just bribing people.

THINK LOVE MEANS, only as much as you can do good things for other people - THEN either expect too much from others, or nothing. And neither one of those is love.

But your capacity to really love people will always trail behind your capacity to love yourself.

And here’s a wonderful thing -

God teaches us what real love means

We said it at the beginning - WE love BECAUSE HE loved first.

1 John 3:16 NIV

This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters.

And this is GREAT news, because Father’s day can be a painful time for some people. Some people didn’t have a dad - or wished they didn’t.

In Christ, we have this ability to reboot our experience. To have that loving father who WOULD actually die for us - and did actually die for us.

Whatever kind of life you’ve had, whatever experience - God can do better with you.

And even better - He can show you how to be better towards others as well. That ties into our third one.

We have to always be trying to love other people, no matter what

If you have a cough, you take medicine. You break a bone, see a doctor.

Imagine if you held the same standards to yourself as you held to your relationships. My arm is annoying - i’m just gonna get rid of it. I have a bad cough, my lungs must have an infection. I have to make sure to ignore them as much as I can.

IF YOU HAVE HEALTH ISSUE - amputation is last case, worst case scenario. It’s not your first choice when something is irritating. ‘I keep banging my toe on that table - if I had them take the toe off, that would stop!’

Loving others as ourselves means being willing to fight as much for someone else as we would for a part of our own body.

There’s a caveat here. You’re only gonna be able to fight for someone as much as they’re willing to fight for themselves. Like they say - lead a horse to water.... / some horses are content to die of dehydration.

But love others, as many times as you possibly can.