It is our duty to love. But not all love is equal. And wisdom requires us to practice the right orders of love to live faithfully before God.
Jesus makes this clear when he declares the first and greatest command is to love God with all our heart, soul, and mind. And the second is to then love our neighbor as ourselves. The love for our neighbors and ourselves comes after our love of God in orders of precedence.
Of course, we cannot claim to love God while also despising one another. Part of how we love God is through our love for each other. But, even still, this is not to make an idol of our love for each other. Our supreme loyalty is to God alone. To be disciples of Christ requires us to hate everyone else in comparison to our love of Jesus and obedience to him; and this includes our father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters (Luke 14:26). Even our love of family, as important as it is, takes a second seat to our love of God.
While our love of God should be preeminent over all others, our love of neighbor also has different orders that must be considered as well. Paul reminds us we have a special duty to take care of those in our own household. In fact, he says we are worse than unbelievers when we don’t (1 Timothy 5:8).
As such, our special duty to love our family comes before our general duty to love everyone else. To be sure, there are times in which our family rightly makes sacrifices to demonstrate love to others. The point is not to focus exclusively on our creature comforts as a family while ignoring the needs of others. But our allegiance is first to the members of our own household.
We invite much heartache, pain, and suffering when our loves are not rightly ordered.
In the end, mature in love by practicing the right orders of love. This keeps your heart focused ultimately on God without making idols of others.
