It’s my first week on the job. I’m pretty excited!

5. When I am fulfilling that “first and greatest commandment” I am fulfilling my destiny and thereby am a success in God’s eyes. 

6. Love REALLY IS everything 

7. Without it (love) I REALLY AM nothing 

8. No matter how I feel, I walk by faith and not by feelings or sight, so it my feelings and my opinion of myself –no matter how poor they may be- really DON’T matter. Only what He says matters to me. 

I don’t feel strong. This is a year of weakness for me. But I resolve to do as He has asked me -to love and serve Him as if I was not tired and weary and weak, with strength and vigor and %100, as if it was the very first week in His service all over again. 

Jesus said it this way:  

I know that many of you have important jobs for Me, important duties for the Kingdom‚ and I thank you for being such faithful servants. But being a faithful servant, as important as that is, is not a higher priority than obeying the first two commandments. Those are your highest priorities of all: to love Me and love others. No matter what your to-do list says, you should always imagine that written above your top priority are two extra items: Love Me and love others. Getting your first priority done without doing those extra two means you really only did third best, which isn’t good enough. That’s failing in My books.  

There’s nothing that can compensate for a lack of love. There are no works that you can do which will make it okay that you didn’t care for those around you. There’s no task that is so great that I’ll say it was okay that you treated others rudely or roughly or like hindrances to your plans in order that you could accomplish it. And since you cannot make up for a lack of love, the only solution, if you want your life to amount to anything in the next world, is to show that love. Love is life. Love is the only way to live. The greatest of these is love.       

Some of you might think that what you’re doing is manifesting love for Me via your hard work‚ or love for the lost via the works that you are doing to bring them to salvation. That is true in many cases. Yet even those works cannot supersede the personal love that I want to show to those immediately around you through your personal acts and words of kindness to them. It’s like John said about not being able to love Me whom you haven’t seen, if you can’t love your brothers whom you do see ( 1John 4:20 ). 

So don’t let the Enemy trick you into thinking that whatever you’re doing is more important than love. Being too hasty or rude, or being short-tempered with people, making people feel unimportant, being impatient, being too busy to smile at someone or show My love in other ways, all these things will render your task meaningless in the end. I will not look at it and say, “Well, you weren’t kind, you weren’t loving, you didn’t have charity, but boy oh boy, you sure got some stuff done, so it’s okay.” That’s a deception of the Enemy when you think that way; it’s not how I work or judge things.   I’ll close this message to you with some other words, perhaps less known than those of Paul, but also inspired by Me. They are found in Charles Dickens’ novel, “A Christmas Carol.” I helped to get this message into that story, because it is so vitally important, just as much now as when it was written, and even more so because the world is getting so much faster, and people’s hearts are growing so much colder.  

In the story, Scrooge is visited by the ghost of Jacob Marley‚ his old business partner, who expresses to Scrooge how much regret he has in the afterlife that he didn’t show more charity, that he wasn’t a better man, or in so many words, wasn’t more loving. Scrooge tries to comfort him by pointing out his good points and saying, “Well, you were always a good man of business.” Or as you might put it today, “You always got a lot of stuff done.” But Jacob Marley replies, “Mankind should have been my business.”
 

How about you? Is mankind your business? Is your top priority to love others? –Even above the press of your daily work? It’d better be, or you too will be filled with regret that your works have turned to ashes, and without love, you have nothing to show for all that other stuff you did.
 

Start today to make a change! Learn to love others! Make that your top priority, your business. Go full-time into the business of love. Love is what the Kingdom of God is made out of. Therefore if you’re loving, you’re seeking first the Kingdom of God! And then the promise will hold true that everything else–all the success you need–will be added unto you.     –Jesus (Speaking in Prophecy)