The greatest commandment is to love God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength. Not one of us loves God with all of our faculties let alone doing it every moment, so we fail on the foremost demand. The second greatest commandment is to love our neighbor as ourselves, another thorough requirement that we don’t ever entirely obey. The count is 0-2 when Jesus pitches His mandate that we love one another just as He loved us.

God commands love. We rebel when we offer worship to Him apart from love, when we serve others without love, and when we do love but only half-heartedly. God accepts no substitutes for love or lukewarm loves. Throw in the “just as Jesus” clause and we have struck out looking on three straight sins of omission.

Let us consider the “just as Jesus” clause further. He loves us when? He loves us all the time, including when we don’t obey His commands to love. He loves us in immaturity, in weakness, in sinfulness. He loves when we don’t qualify for love. That is Jesus love.

It is one thing for us to love God fully; He deserves love. It is one thing to love our neighbors, or enemies; we might get away with loving them only one afternoon. But to keep on loving one another, the anothers we’re stuck with, the little need machine anothers, the anothers who question or misrepresent or needle us, this makes Jesus’ love unbelievable, and glorious.

We confess our sin and we also trust that He forgives us because He loves us. We believe this because He tells us it is true. He also tells us to love one another just as He loved us. The greater we see our sin the greater we must love other sinners. Christlike love abounds, sacrifices, and targets the undeserving. If our love doesn’t, then our love hasn’t put the ball in play.