You ever use the internet? It’s pretty wild you can find information and entertainment and someone willing to argue with you about literally anything. It is also an amazing distraction machine. You think you have one quick thing to look up and in the blink of an eye you’re 12 pages deep on some clickbait article and they still haven’t told you why you never see “former celebrity” anymore. And social media has the desire for “one more swipe” down to a science.
How much more productive could we be if we could ignore all the distractions? This happens in our lives as Christians too. We have been given fairly simple instructions on how we should live as followers of Christ. Jesus put it plainly in Matthew 22,
35 And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. 36 “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?”37 And he [Jesus] said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. 38 This is the great and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. 40 On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”
That’s it. That is what we are called to do: love God, love others. The people who know that their sins are forgiven, the people who understand the sacrifice made on their behalf should be the people who are excited to bring others into that kind of peace. But we get distracted.
We fall into the temptation of being the go-betweens of grace, “Don’t worry creator of the universe I can decide who really deserves your love.” Unfortunately for us, the scripture never told you to love the “right” neighbors. It just says you need to love your neighbor. Full stop, no loopholes, no exceptions.
When we allow distractions like who they voted for, what they look like, or how much money they have determine how much we can love them, we have already failed. Loving people, while stated simply, is hard. We need to put away all the stuff that, eternally, doesn’t matter.
Love God, love people. It really is that easy.