What Tuesday Reveals

"You shall love the Lord your God ... and your neighbor as yourself." (Luke 10:27)

The Great Commandment tells you what actually matters, and it is two things, and they are not separable. Love God. Love people. And here is where we must be careful, because we are very good at the first one in a way that costs us nothing. Loving God is more than having the heart moved in a worship service. It is more than the catch in the throat during the last chorus, more than the sense of nearness in prayer, and those are treasures. But they can be entirely genuine and entirely uncoupled from a life.

We prove that we love God by how we love other people. That is not a modern softening of the gospel. John says it flatly: if anyone says he loves God and hates his brother, he is a liar. Not mistaken. Not immature. A liar. The vertical and the horizontal are welded together, and you cannot have one without the other, however moved you feel on a Sunday.

So the test of your love for God is not what happens in the room during the service. It is what happened in your driveway on Tuesday, in the tone you took with the person who wronged you, in whether you crossed a room or crossed a street. Do not measure your love for God by the warmth of your worship. Measure it by the person you find hardest to love, and how you actually treat them when no one is singing.