Is there room for brotherly love?

1 John 5:1
“Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God, and everyone who loves the father loves his child as well.”

“Brotherly love is the effect of the new birth, which makes obedience to all God’s commandments pleasant. (Matthew Henry’s Concise Commentary)

With so much hate in the world, is there room for brotherly love? What does it take to move the needle so far that the question is turned around to become: With so much love in the world, is there room for hate?

If you have faith that Christ is the Messiah, if you believe he was born of God, if you believe that God loves us like we could never imagine, then you know that what He calls us to do is the best, the only route for us to take.

The route is one of obedience to the commandments because that is the best way to live, given to us by the loving creator of us and all wisdom. The greatest of these are to love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. There are no commandments greater than these. (Mark 12:30-31, Matt 22:37-40, Luke 10:25-28, Romans 13:9, Galatians 5:14, etc.).

What’s important to God is that we love like He loves us. What does that look like? It looks like we make government social programs unnecessary because all of us are giving and involved in eradicating social and economic injustice on a family level, on a local level, all the way to the global level. We act like the early Christians did, we take care of each other and we take care of others. We give and sacrifice like Christ did for us. We love, and we live out of love, not out of fear or self. We do it because we are called to and because, in the light of eternity, it’s the right thing to do.

With so much hate in the world, is there room for brotherly love? In the light of Christ, is there room for anything but brotherly love? Love deeply, risk everything to serve God, walk in the path He has given us. Shake the dust of the world off your feet, go contrarian like Christ.