1 John 2:9 Whoever says he is in the Light and [yet] hates his brother [Christian, born-again child of God his Father] is in darkness even until now. 10 Whoever loves his brother [believer] abides (lives) in the Light, and in It or in him there is no occasion for stumbling or cause for error or sin.11 But he who hates (detests, despises) his brother [in Christ] is in darkness and walking (living) in the dark; he is straying and does not perceive or know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded his eyes.
Maybe you see yourself described here, living in the dark, straying and without purpose or understanding, feeling separated from God —maybe even wondering if God is listening to your cries for help, while you live in the dark?
So often we live in the dark only because we don’t look toward the light. We don’t really look to God but we look for free-ways out of the dark. What I mean is many times we just want God to fix things in our lives but we are unwilling to take responsibility for our part. We take freeway after freeway and we keep ending up back in the same dark place. We take freeways because we want to escape the very way needed to eliminate the dark and that way is love. The freeway to the light is love.
It is certain by what John said that we have to love in order that we live in the light, yet we have all kinds of excuses for breaking God’s law of love. We have to know that when we break God’s law of love we have stepped from light to dark. We can’t live with God who is love, and the enemy who is hate at the same time —and we certainly cannot expect God to do anymore than He already did. God already gave us the perfect example, the perfect sacrifice of love —His Son, and now the choice is ours. We have to choose the light or the dark —to love or to hate.
We know the most important command is to love God, and if we love God then we are going to take on the responsibility of keeping His law of love, thus walking in the light.
God is Love, God is about Love, and how we treat each other in love is obviously important to God and so to walk in the light, to be apart of Him, to have the prividledge of calling ourselves Christians we have to commit to Love.
Jesus said next —the second most important command is to love your neighbor as yourself (Mark 12:30-31), yet we love our neighbors as our enemies . When we don‘t do what Love would do, for example when we take each other to court, when we judge, gossip, backbit… we separate ourselves from God. That is when we are in the dark, and still out there in the dark we call out to God as though we are in the light, as though we have chosen Him. We call out to Him as if we are a Christian —and we are not if we refuse to love.
We can’t live in the light, with God unless we agree with God and agreeing with God is loving Him enough to honor Him by obeying Him. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind is to actually take the time to get to know God and find out His affections. If you do you will find the one you despise is one whom God loves, whom God is in fact in love with —as much as He is in love with you. You will find that it hurts God when you hate one of His children.
If we love God and are concerned with what God cares about we will seek Him to do His law of Love. If it is important to God that we love one another, then we should care about His feelings and make that effort. Of course we can’t do anything without God, so the effort is to go to God and get to know His affections and then ask Him to help us to have that same affection, that love He has for that person we are having a hard time loving.
Then we will live in the light, then we will live without error, we won’t stumble in sin, and then we will have eternal salvation! Halleluiah!