Inspiration: Words, Part 2

Today I have another words-related inspiration post for you all. I have a longer quote to share, but it's one that I found really helpful and encouraging. I'm pretty sure I'd heard it before, but I read it recently in Mark Dever's book The Gospel and Personal Evangelism and it immediately became a favorite. It's worded a little confusingly, so you may want to read a tad slower than usual. It has such a wonderful truth behind it.

I think this is such a wonderful way to explain the command to "love your neighbor as yourself." The greatest thing we can be pursuing ourselves, or want for ourselves, is to love God. And so loving our neighbor means causing them to love God. This has implications for evangelism (we love people when we tell them about the life-changing message of Jesus), but it has implications for everyday life, too.

Loving my neighbor doesn't just mean talking with them or asking them questions or being kind. Those things are all good things that we should do and that honor God. But it's possible to be nice to someone without making them love God any more as a result, and if we do that, we've been nice, but we haven't loved someone else as much as we could've. On the one hand, this inspires me to want to care for people and seek to help them pursue and love God. But on the other hand, this quote overwhelms me a little. Encouraging people to love God more seems really hard to do, doesn't it? It does to me. I mean sometimes, it's hard enough for me to just get my eyes off myself and consider others, not to mention actually going beyond saying something nice and seeking to encourage them to love God. And this is a hard thing to do, but the good news is that we don't have to do it alone! We have God's power to help us do this, and we can seek to truly love others, by making them love God more, in His strength.