Hey, hope you’re all doing okay! This week’s word is ‘command’. Today, we don’t really hear the word command, unless you’re in the army or something. In school, you hear ‘rules’ and at work, you get asked to do something, rather than commanded to do it…I guess it’s due to courtesy, or maintaining a ‘positive workplace relationship’. But that gives us room to debate what our boss might have told us to do or delegate.
There’s a lot of commandments in the Bible; things that we’re told to do without questioning it. For example, there are the 10 commandments (which I’m not going to go into detail about). They’re not completely meant for us, like keeping the Sabbath day holy; that was meant for the Israelite’s. But for example, having no other God. That’s an important one. How often do things creep into our lives that start to take over from the number one place God should have in our lives? This commandment is still relevant to us today, because the Lord gives it in Mark 12:30. To love the Lord with all our heart, soul, mind and strength…that’s a lot. That’s the number one place in someone’s life.
The second commandment given in Mark 12 is to love your neighbor (v31). Is there anyone in your life that you dislike or are in an argument with? Well, you’ve been given the commandment to love them. I’m not saying you suddenly have to be their best friend. But don’t talk about them behind their back, be civil, and so on. It’s something the Lord commanded us to do.
We’re living in a day of grace, and the commandments that are given may seem impossible. And they are…if you’re doing it through your own strength. But in the day of grace, you have the Lord’s guidance and help. So that makes it possible. He wouldn’t have given us impossible things to do.