What do you think you are set out to do? No matter what purpose God calls you in, everyone's calling will line up to God's greatest commandment: to love God and to love your neighbour.
In Matthew 22:37-40, Jesus commands us, saying, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets."
Many Christians commit to the call to love God and others, but sadly sometimes fail to realise one important aspect to life that lines up with the great commandment: to love your family first on earth.
It's virtually impossible to obey the great commandment if we neglect the importance and value of family. To love God and to love our neighbor, we must learn the importance and commit to the decision of valuing our family beyond any human relationship.
1 Timothy 5:8 is ominously specific when it comes to this area: "But if anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever."
The provision this scripture talks about goes just beyond bringing home the bacon.
It also entails that we meet every other need of our family members such as quality time, emotional investment and even spiritual leadership and covering. To undervalue our family is to deny our faith in God because it only shows our unwillingness to walk in God's specified ways.
God is most honoured and glorified when our values are in the right place. After God, family must always come first. That's how God designed society to work. To operate in any other way makes us fail to honour and show love to our God. We cannot say we love Christ if our families are not next to God, over our careers, our ministry and, yes, even our own selfish desires.
In Paul's letter to Titus, he was very particular about qualifications of church leaders, calling for them to be "the husband of one wife" and for "his children to be believers" (Titus 1:5-9).
We cannot care for our neighbour until we take care first of our home.
God's way is not to sacrifice family for the sake of ministerial, professional, and economical success. When we learn to value, love, and care for the family more and more, we walk more and more in God's command to love our neighbour as ourselves.
