When the Bible speaks about loving each other, this means much more than – and something quite different from – the love between husband and wife. It means: loving each other with the love God poured out in our hearts even before He commanded us to love each other. So this loving is not a hard task, but a possibility that God gives us. And this is necessary too! For without love we die, without love we cannot find real fulfillment in our lives.
Only one kind of love is not good, even deadly for us, and that is self-love. Self-love is self-centered and that is the most fundamental sin of man.
Many Christians find it very hard to follow Jesus, while the Bible shows us time and again that nothing is so delightful as really following Him. But as long as we are not truly delivered from our self-centeredness, it is impossible for us to follow Jesus Christ and to serve Him. For temptations and enticements will always remain as long as our ‘ego’ is still king in our heart. But whoever is freed by Jesus and is delivered from this self-love - who allows the stream of Jesus’ love to flow through his whole life - will desire nothing else than to be redeemed from himself and from his self-centered desires.
There is not much time left for us to devote our entire life to the fulfillment of the will of God. Therefore let us clothe ourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ! Let Him be around us, like a cloak, so that no room will remain in our lives to foster self-centered desires. And then His victory will become reality in our lives, in such a way that people around us will start asking us to tell them about our faith in the Lord.