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| Do Everything with Love |
Love was a central theme in all Jesus Christ did and taught. When He was asked what the greatest commandment is, He answered that the first commandment is to love God “with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind” and that the second was to “love thy neighbour as thyself.”
“On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets,” he explained. (See Matthew 22:37–40.)
Jesus showed love and compassion to everyone He met. He taught His followers to feed the hungry, care for the sick, welcome the stranger into their home, and visit those in prison. When we do those things for others, He taught, it is the same as if we have done them for God.
As He taught about love, Jesus made it clear that simply loving our family and friends isn’t enough. To be a true follower of Jesus we must love people who are outcasts, people who are strangers to us, and even people we see as our enemies.
You can draw closer to Jesus by practicing love for God and for those around you. Missionaries can show you how. |
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| The Good Samaritan |
Jesus often taught using parables, which are stories that illustrate a moral lesson. One of His most famous parables is known as the parable of the good Samaritan.
When Jesus taught that the two most important commandments are to love God and love your neighbour, a listener asked, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus answered with a story about a Jewish man who was attacked by thieves on a highway. The thieves stripped the man of his clothing and injured him, leaving him “half dead.”
A traveler soon walked down the road, and when he saw the wounded man, he passed by on the other side of the road. The next passerby did the same. But the third stopped and bound up the man’s wounds, brought him to an inn, and paid the innkeeper to care for the man.
In Jesus’s time, there was serious contention between the Jewish people and the Samaritans. The first people to pass by—described as a priest and a Levite—would have been the wounded man’s neighbor in a more traditional sense of living in the same community and worshipping together. But in Jesus’s parable, it was a Samaritan who stopped to save the man’s life, acting as his neighbor in the way that we are commanded to love our neighbor. (See Luke 10:25–37.) |
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