“If anyone comes to Me, and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he is not able to be My disciple” (Luke 14:26).
On the face of it, this seems a contradiction of those scriptures dealing with love for one another; indeed, does not Jesus Himself admonish us that the second greatest commandment is that each of us is to “love your neighbour as yourself” (Matthew 22:39)?
In the scripture above, Jesus is using a figure of speech to describe the all-consuming quality of the love that we are to have for God, which is “with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” (Matthew 22:37). The only way He can describe the type of love for God that is demanded, is to compare it to the natural love for family that exists in the heart of each one of us; so great is the gulf between the love that should be attributed to God and natural familial love that Jesus describes the latter as “hate”.
In fact the love that we are to have for God is to be so vastly superior to the love that we have for the people and things of this world that the only way Jesus can emphasise this difference is to describe the one as “love” and the other as ”hate”.
Love for God is spiritual in nature, whereas love for one another is natural in spirit; the one is from our spirit and the other is from our soul. If our love for God is not of that all-encompassing quality then it is not good enough. Our cross is to overcome, and put off, the natural man of the flesh and to put on a new man, one that is being created and developed according to God through righteousness and holiness of the truth (Ephesians 4:24). And;
“The one who does not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me” (Matthew 10:38).
Love for God only grows with intimacy.
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