Luke 10:27, "'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind'; and, 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'"
This 1 command, the golden rule, is the summation of the entire Bible & all God wants for us. We can love because He first Loved us!
A couple of points I read today in "Jesus the One and Only" Bible Study:
Read Luke 10:25-41 by clicking here It's the Parable of the Good Samaritan and Jesus at the Home of Mary and Martha, back to back. Beth Moore points out that the man who loved His neighbor was the one who hadn't just come back from spending considerable time with God as the priest and Levite had on the road down from Jerusalem in the parable. In Luke 10:25 you see that an expert of the law was questioning Jesus who would've picked up on why the priest and Levite would be traveling that particular route. They would've been coming back from "performing their brief tenure of service in the temple. We would expect that at no time would they have been more humbled, grateful, or willing to meet someone's needs. That's not what happened..."(Moore). It's pretty incriminating to view 2 people who "served in the temple but refused to help a dying man".
Flip to the very next story, when Jesus visits Mary & Martha's home. Beth calls Mary "a servant far too busy helping to hear from the heart of God." What Martha was doing was a good thing, but if she had prepared before Jesus was actually in her home she too would've been at Jesus feet learning which is the better thing, according to Luke 10.
What I gathered from these two stories being back to back is that God wants us to be balanced, to spend time with Him, loving Him completely and totally and He wants us to love others as ourselves which is ministering or service to others. It is a balance. God wants us to Love, give, & live a balanced life.
Another quote from Beth: "In our fight for right priorities, many things vie for the top of the heap, but only one is necessary. Ultimately, our relationship with Christ is the one thing we cannot do without.
Christ's message is not that we should neglect family and responsibilities to pray and to study the Bible. If that were true, the man in our previous lesson would have died. His message is that many things are important, but one thing is necessary: Him. Incidentally, Mary turned out to be one of the greatest servants of all, lavishing Christ with her most expensive offerings (see John 12).
...look at three simple words from Luke 10:42 "Mary has chosen" That's how it will always be. A choice. Right priorities will never choose us."
All our purpose in this life must be balanced or purposely positioned on the fulcrum that is Christ and our complete devotion to Him. What is the load and effort (our purpose & the efforts of our individual purpose) that the fulcrum (God) is supporting is best and most useful when directed by Him. As I wrote about a couple of days ago, balance is something the Lord is teaching me how to do. This includes what to balance and what to take off the scales. How we spend our gift of time is eternally important for ourselves and for those we influence. Balance with Christ at the Center, effecting our entire life.
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