C. C. Riddle, Jan. 1999
God is love. All those who truly worship God do so by learning to love others with the same pure love with which He loves us. This holy kind of love can be learned only by great exertion on our part; the great commandment tells us that it will take all of our heart, might, mind and strength to master this ability to love purely. Those who are fully engaged in learning to love with the pure love of Christ are called the disciples of Christ.
The great commandment says that when we have learned to love God with all of our heart, might, mind and strength, we then must love our neighbor as our self. This second commandment is subject to many human interpretations and opinions. My opinion is that the great enemy of pure love of God and neighbor is love of self, which I believe is selfishness. I believe the Savior is telling us to love our neighbor instead of loving our self, and that our goal should be to fulfill His new commandment: that we love one another as he has loved us.
God so loved the world that He gave His Only Begotten Son so that whoso believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life. The Only Begotten Son so loved His Father and us that He suffered the pains of all men and sacrificed His potentially unending mortal life. The truly begotten sons and daughters of Christ learn to sacrifice all they have in this world to bless others, even as did our Teacher, our Savior.
There are four ways in which we must learn to show the pure love of Christ to others: these are:
- Show love for God.
- Show love for neighbor.
- Show love for husband or wife.
- Show love for our children.
These four ways of loving allow us to learn to love every good person in heaven and every person on this earth.
Every good person in heaven loves God and is one with Him. To love God is to love our Heavenly Father, His Son, Jesus Christ, the Holy Ghost, and every messenger, minister, and angel who does their will. Our neighbors on earth include every living human being and all of our deceased ancestors. Learning to love these persons purely, that is unselfishly, is the business, the divinely appointed task, of every human life.
It is not within the natural powers of men to have pure, Christ-like love. Such love is a gift from God. This gift is given in small increments. Those who receive one small portion and learn to use it well are given an additional portion. If they also learn to use the additional portion well, they are added upon until, through full faith in Jesus Christ, they come to the measure of the stature of the fulness of the pure love of Christ, becoming even as He is. Thus love is a matter of power. Power given from God mixed with faith in Christ makes possible purity and power in love.
It is then our first task to learn to love God. Why love God? Because our Gods first love us with perfect love. We could not ask for nor desire anything better than that which they show and offer to us. They are righteous, we are not. They are powerful, we are not. They are omniscient, we are not. They control all that can be controlled; we control little, and that only by their gift. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is their offer to join with them and to become one with them: righteous, powerful, omniscient, and in control of everything in the universe which can be controlled so that we can learn to love purely and completely, as they do. There can be no greater offer.
We can love God with a pure, unselfish love only if we desire to do so. We must furnish the desire; that is our agency. If we contribute that desire by showing it to God by repenting of our sins and being baptized of water and of the spirit by those having true authority from Christ, then God adds to our desire knowledge and power in the ways and acts of love, which is righteousness, by bestowing upon us the gift of the Holy Ghost. The Holy Ghost then joins our own spirit in our mortal tabernacle and gives us the opportunity to have, as it were, a “turbo-charged” heart, might, mind, and body. If we are willing to be submissive, patient, obedient and hardworking, the Holy Spirit will lead us in what to say and to do to love purely.
For instance, the Holy Spirit will teach us how to pray. We have been warned that we should not ask God for that which is evil. Being limited in knowledge, we usually do not know what is good to ask for. But the Holy Spirit does know what is good for us to ask and if we ask God to help us to pray, the Holy Spirit will tell us in our minds and hearts what to ask for. If we then humbly ask for that thing in faith, believing that we will receive it, God will bless our obedient prayer with the blessing we seek.
Another example of learning to love God is to keep the Word of Wisdom. We do not own our own physical bodies; they are a loan from God. We show love for Him by honoring these tabernacles in not taking into them tobacco, alcohol, tea, coffee, illegal drugs and a lot of other things which the Holy Ghost forbids to us as individuals. Every commandment given from God is given to help us to grow in the power of pure love.
The essence of learning to love God with the pure, Christ-like love is to seek to do His will and not our own. As we find it in our hearts to ask to do His will, to build His kingdom, to bless His children, to honor and to love Him, He begins to show us how to do these things. As we are obedient and do not weary in the way of righteousness, he leads us step by step to do better and better.
We cannot master the full, pure love of God, however, until we also begin to learn the other ways of loving purely. I first thought as I pondered this matter that learning to love our spouse should be the next step in learning the four ways of love, then our children, then our neighbors. But soon I saw that is an incorrect sequence: The order must be love of God, love of neighbor, love of spouse and of children. The reason for this order is that if we cannot first be a good neighbor, we cannot be a good spouse, because our spouse is always our closest neighbor, though much more. So as we begin to grow in the pure love of God, we must begin also to learn the pure love of neighbor.
The essence of the pure love of neighbor is to be honest, true, chaste benevolent, and to do good to all men. To be honest is that we tell the truth and do not deceive other human beings. To be true means that we keep our promises and contracts, that our word is as good as our bond. To be chaste means that we do not have any physical sexual relations (and our Savior extended this to forbid any mental sexual relations) with any person who is not our legal spouse. To be benevolent means that we have good will towards all men, not desiring anything but their temporal and spiritual welfare. To do good means that we consciously and deliberately go out of our way to bless the lives of others, friends and enemies alike, so that they will be better off both temporally and spiritually. The measure of our love for our neighbor is the sacrifice of our own welfare which we make to do these things for them. If there is no sacrifice, there is no love. What we sacrifice is our own desires, time, substance, and well-being. We cannot sacrifice for ourselves, which is another reason that we cannot love ourselves.
Think what the world would be like if every person were honest, true, chaste, benevolent and did godly good for their neighbors! It would become a heaven on earth, which is exactly what God intends for us to accomplish. It is not likely that every person will want to do this. But some will, when they know how. The millennial state of the earth comes when all who will not love God are swept away by fire and those who remain are the honorable persons of the earth who are at least honest, true, chaste, and benevolent.
Just as loving God with the pure love requires power from God through the ordinance of baptism, so the full and pure love of neighbor can be attained and performed only through the power gained in the ordinance of the temple endowment. The endowment gives those who love God the abilities of heart, mind and strength to enable full doing of good for our fellowmen. This is why all missionaries who go forth in the authority of Christ first receive their endowments. Then they have the supernatural power to love and serve their neighbors as Christ did when He was here in the flesh. The most important good that we can do for our neighbors is to bring them to Christ through the laws and ordinances of the Gospel, though not to leave undone the ministering to their temporal needs.
When we have embarked upon the path of pure love of God and have well-learned to obey Him, and have learned to love our neighbor in power and selflessness as Christ does, then and only then are we ready to undertake the love of a spouse. This also requires power and authority from God, and the only persons who take a spouse in the godly way are those who are sealed in the Holy Temple of our God. That sealing gives them the authority to be husband and wife and the authority to multiply and replenish the earth. The sealing gives the powers necessary to serve God and fellowmen as two spirits and intelligences in one body, in one flesh.
Thus the great challenge of Christ-like marriage is for the husband and wife to become one. All persons who are or will become exalted must master this step of becoming one with their spouse in Christ. This means that each submits his or her will to Christ, giving up all selfishness, and the two of them learn to work mightily in the cause of Christ on this earth, exercising the power of the Holy Priesthood to further the establishment of the kingdom of God on the earth. Building upon the foundation of being good neighbors, they learn to walk side by side, hand in hand in every venture of their lives, blessing each other and their neighbors with the deeds of the pure love of Christ.
Learning to be one in heart, might and mind, as well as one in the body, which is our strength, is the unique challenge of God’s order of marriage. One cannot dominate the other and accomplish this. Each must see the other as holy, sacred, divine, having become anointed by God, a person to be fully respected, counseled with in all things, taken into account in all things. The love of husband and wife for each other can be brought to a fullness only in Christ, only when empowered by the sealing of the temple, and only when both partners make it the main business of their lives to learn to love purely. It is not difficult to see why few marriages, even temple marriages, fulfill their potential and bring the partners to a full unity of heart, might, mind and strength, for such an attainment requires all the obedience, sacrifice, purity and consecration which it is possible to attain through the grace of God. God gives the power, but the couple themselves must work to gain and use that power to its intended end. When they have become one, they are then ready to join the General Assembly and Church of the Firstborn where all are one with Christ, even as He is one with the Father. They are then in the pattern of exaltation where they serve Christ and do the full work of righteousness into all eternity.
But while the husband and wife are learning to be one while in mortality, there is one other very special lesson of the pure love of Christ to be learned: to love as parents the spirit children of Heavenly Father. Being sealed in the temple, they have a right to beget children into this mortal world, the full power to bless those children, and the obligations to bring them up in the nurture of the Lord so that each of them will have the full opportunity themselves of learning the four ways of Christ-like love. If the parents have learned to love God, truly do love their neighbors, and fully love each other in the pure love of Christ, they can be perfect parents on this earth. Most couples are still learning how to love God, neighbor and to be one in Christ when they have their children, so they are less than optimal parents. Sadly, many who marry in the temple learn so little of the love of God, neighbor and each other that they cannot even stay married and thus bring sorrow and deprivation to their children instead of the fulness of the heritage of Christ.
But the children are not damned forever by the lack of faith of their parents. Each of them has his or her own opportunity to come to the living God, to be born again to be able to love God purely; to be endowed to love neighbor purely; to be sealed in the temple, to be able to love spouse in pure unity; and to love children in the pure patriarchal power given in the temple sealing. Through the atonement of Christ, any harm or lack caused by the agency of another human is made up for, and every mortal child of our Father in Heaven has a full opportunity to learn to love perfectly in the four ways of Godly love and to enter into the grand company of exalted beings in eternity. To claim that opportunity each must follow the same plain path: Faith in the Lord Jesus Christ unto repentance, baptism of water and of the spirit, receiving of the holy endowment unto becoming a Christ-like neighbor, receiving of the temple sealing unto becoming a Christ-like spouse, and using the patriarchal powers bestowed in the temple to become a Christ-like parent in keeping all of the laws and ordinances of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
There is no power in man to accomplish all these things. But the love of God has come to us in the restoration of the fullness of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the restoration of the fulness of the priesthood blessing necessary to become pure love, as God is. God was once as we are: weak and unsaved. But because He was willing to be humble and faithful, He became our God and our Father. He in turn gives us the same opportunity which He had, which completes the circle of eternal love. (See 1 John 4.)
May we all have the intelligence and the humility to stop living the ways of this world and turn our whole heart, might, mind and strength to learning to love God and others with the pure love of Christ is my prayer, in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.