Loving God

 "Whoever loves God must also love his brother." 1 John 4:21

When we were young, my brother Robert and my sister Tina were always quarreling. Robert would sometimes maltreat Tina and annoy her endlessly. Then my mom read the passage in 1 John 4:19-21 to them. It reads, "Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister." My mom was amazed because they stopped their quarreling overnight! The Word of God is alive, and if we believe it, we can see miracles, big and small.

In loving others, there's a lot of self-discipline involved. We have to take control of our emotions and not allow our emotions to control us. I learned this the hard way. A long time ago, one of our employees did not take care of some crafts I made and use for workshops and demos on TV. I found it dumped in a box in the stock room even if there were written instructions to take good care of it. I got so furious, I hit her on the shoulder. Even if I apologized as soon as I calmed down, she brought me to the barangay (a small administrative division here in the Philippines), and then to the Dept. of Labor when the barangay did not take her side. I learned that acting on your emotions lead you to make poor choices and decisions, and can land you in unpleasant situations.

Our friends and family won't take us to the barangay or to a court when we quarrel them, but we still cannot allow anger and frustration prod us to say hurtful things. Our brother or sister, wife or husband, they are not our enemies, that we have to protect our ground, and fight them for every wrong they commit. If we encounter people who are rude, unkind, disrespectful, we can be like David who chose which battles to fight. When his brother insulted him in 1 Samuel 17:28, he just turned away. He knew he had bigger battles to fight with a REAL enemy!