Two Things — Ami Loper

When one of our daughters was very little, she had a compulsion about clutter. We would go to get her out of the van, unbuckle her from her car seat and beckon her to us. She would spend the next several minutes picking up the minutest scraps of paper and Cheerios. I'll admit that it was sometimes a convenience to live with a cute, smiling picker-upper, but eventually we realized that her stalling wasn’t just about picking up or being cute. It was really about hearing our instruction and finding the cutest way to circumvent it.

It was cute, we laughed, and friends marveled, but it did her heart no good to do a good thing instead of the right thing. It did nothing to set her up well for a life in which obeying the Lord without hesitation or excuse is the only way to thrive.

I'm sure, like me, you have found yourself doing good things instead of the right things that God has called you to do. I can get so distracted by what others think I should do or by what seems new and exciting at the moment and before I know it, my focus on what God has called me to is abruptly hijacked.

Two things. That's it. There are really only two things we really must do in life: We must love God and we must love others.

Nothing else in life will amount to anything; nothing else can be taken into eternity except these two things. So why do we spend so much time and effort on the unessential? 

And even in these two things, we often try to do one without the proper attention given to the other. But one cannot be well done without the other.

You cannot love God well (1st Commandment) without coming into contact with His heart and when you do, you will know His loving desire for the people around you (2nd Commandment).

And you cannot love others well (2nd Commandment) until you have an intimate knowledge and love of God (1st Commandment) and are able to let that love flow through you. Only then can you reflect that love to others. If you try to reflect to others a love you do not know, you will only be passing along the faulty image of God that you've created.

So what about all the other things we do in life? What about jobs and family and friends? These are gifts from God. These are the backdrop where that second thing is lived out, the canvas on which we demonstrate the love of God to others through our loving actions.

It's always good to take a regular inventory of the things that you have picked up (or have been placed on you) as your responsibilities. Are they really part of what God wants you to be doing? Are they furthering one of your two essentials? Is what you are doing, bringing you to know and love God more intimately and are you using your life to make His love more fully known to those around you?

“And he said to him, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets’” (Matt 22:36-40).

If you haven’t yet, check out the FREE RESOURCE,” God’s Love Is…” printable resource by clicking HERE!

And make sure you didn’t miss the blog titled, “Dive Deep”! Find that one HERE!