The virtue of charity requires that we put our loves in the right order.  And specifically, that we love God first, and then our neighbor.  But part of the reason that is difficult is that there is so much confusion about what it really means to love God.

Today, most people use the term love to mean affection—having very strong, positive, personal feelings.  I love my children, or I love my new car, or I love Christmas.  Alternatively, when they think of love as charity, most people think of helping the needy—giving money, working at a soup kitchen, visiting the sick. 

The difficulty is that, unlike your neighbor, God doesn’t actually live in the house next door, and He doesn’t need any help—which makes immediate feelings of affection or the offering of charity to Him seem out of place.  We can’t give God a hug or a bowl of soup…so how do we love Him?

Well, the first thing we must do is change our understanding of what it means to love God.  John says, “For this is the love of God, that we keep His Commandments.”  In Deuteronomy, thousands of years earlier, God instructs Israel to “love the Lord your God, that you may obey His voice….”  And Jesus himself tells the disciples, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”

This is an odd notion of love, don’t you think?  You’d never say to your friend, “If you love me, you will obey me.”  Why is it that loving God is not just higher than loving our neighbor—it is a totally different kind of love?  Answer: Because man is totally different from God—we are not equals.  The virtue of love requires that we love God first because God is greater than our neighbor; we love Him by our obedience, because He is greater than we are.

Once we understand that, we can see that loving our neighbor is not the same as loving God, but it is a way of loving God.  And, importantly, we can start to understand why we’re supposed to love our neighbor (but not God)…simply as we love ourselves.  We’ll consider what that looks like tomorrow.  For now…

Have a wonderful day.