The Hinge of Love

I have heard people tell me that the scripture is all about love. The have told me that the christian life is all about love. I could not agree with them more. A quick reading of 1 John 4 gives you a good overview of the importance of and essence of love. The two great commandments that sum up the rest of the commandments are to love. Love God, and love your
neighbor. When the hit song said "All you need is love" it was correct. Love is the very essence of God, as John wrote; "God is love." This doesn't mean that love is God, but that is a topic for another time. All love that is real and Godly hinges on Christ. The word tells us "That we love because Christ first loved us." Now we know that God loves us
because while we were yet sinners Christ died for us, the ungodly. Any love that is outside of Christ is a mockery of true Godly love. Think of when Christ first called His disciples, he dashed into peices their former view of love. When one wanted to bury his beloved father, Christ said let the dead bury their own dead. He redefined love for that disciple. Or when Jesus said if you don't hate your family you are not worthy to follow me, he redifined love to His hearers. Christ put our former view of love in its place. Our first love must be Christ! It is then that we will be capable of loving our family with a true godly love. If our first love is Christ, then it will be natural to love our enemies. If we forsake our wives, husbands, children, parents, and friends for Christ, then the ultimate love will dwell in us. Then we will be able to dispense that love back to those whom we once thought to be number 1 in our lives. If our first love is Christ then the ultimate love dwells in us. Any love outside of Christ is not born of God. Any good we seek to do for someone that is not fueled by the love of Christ certainly has a form of Godliness, but it denies the power thereof. False religons that will not accept the work of Christ on the cross, God's ultimate dispensation of love, only make a mockery of true love because the deny the very source of it. Ghandi did clearly have a form of Godliness, but in denying Christ, he denied the power thereof. It was a man centered humanistic love, and if you look at his work today you will see that the only one who was glorified by his work was himself. We hear of how great he (Ghandi) was. Now when I think of Martin Luther King whose work was centered in Christ, on the basis of scripture, that all people are of one blood, I think of a glorious work that God did in this country. MLK was merely his servant. Of course our textbooks today do plenty to glorify MLK without acknowledging God, but as Christians we know better. So in conclusion, love is the very essence of God's existence, and that love is only manifest in Christ and ultimately in His willing death on the cross. If one denies the magnitude and nescessity of that action, clearly they do not recognize the love from God, the only true love.