When I was a kid I was taught a simple acronym for finding and living with “joy.” The idea was that if you get certain relationships in the right hierarchical order you would experience joy. The acronym was J.esus O.thers Y.ou. Jesus first, Others second, and You last.
The longer I’ve been a pastor the more harm I’ve seen come from people who use that as a formula for joy. I’ve seen people harm themselves and their most significant relationships all the while wondering when the “joy” would kick in.
I’ve known parents who struggle balancing “devotions” and parenting young children. They feel the need to “put Jesus first” by spending an hour a day with him and yet never spend that kind of focused time with their children. I’ve seen couples run away from their marriage issues by volunteering even more at church. It’s way easier to serve and get affirmation at church than home and besides, they were “putting Jesus first” while every week they grew further and further apart. I’ve seen the volunteers who struggled the most with keeping their commitments were those who didn’t place a lot of value on themselves. They didn’t understand the great value that God placed on them, so they struggled giving that kind of love and honor toward others, and consequentially often avoided others and God, spiraling into even more self-loathing.
I don’t believe that whoever came up with this acronym was trying to destroy the world. I think they were truly trying to be helpful. But what concerns me about this prolific acronym is how we can use it to justify behavior we know is wrong.
Certainly there is truth in the thought that Jesus should be first in our life, but what does that really mean? How do we practically live that out? Is it just warm-fuzzies that we send up to heaven? There is no doubt people are way too self-consumed and should be more other-focused. But can one really separate loving God from loving people? Is it really even possible to love God without loving others? I don’t think it is.
Jesus was asked once by someone who wanted to know what the greatest commandment was in all of Scripture. Jesus said it was to love God AND your neighbor as YOURSELF (Matthew 22:36-40). (Here are all 3 ideas of J.O.Y at once and not in a numerical order!) It’s easy to think Jesus created a hierarchy of importance, it even sounds good…#1-Love God #2- Love People. But if you read it again you see it reads more like #1a AND #1b. Jesus said loving others was “equally” important as loving God (not second). The Apostle Paul says in Galatians 6:2 that we are to “carry one another’s burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ.” Jesus himself said that everyone would know we were His followers by the way we “loved one another” (John 13:34-35). Jesus didn’t say people would know we were His followers because of our worship services, the cross on our neck, or the verses we post on Facebook. It was by loving O.thers that people would know that we loved J.esus. The evidence of God’s Spirit living within us (Galatians 5:22-23) can only be expressed in relationship toward O.thers.
How do you love God? You love God by how you love others. Jesus said that what we’ve done to others we’ve done to him (Matthew 25:37-40). So that means no matter how high you raised your hands on Sunday or how loud you sang “I love you Lord,” if you are rude to others you aren’t putting Jesus first. This is true with your relationship with your spouse, this is true with your kids, your co-workers…you love God by how you love them.
This disconnect between loving God and loving people is part of why my non-Christian friends tell me they find Christianity unappealing. How can people who say they love God be so filled with hate toward others? I can’t disagree with them. If God truly lives within us, shouldn’t it affect every part of our lives and not just the part that attends a worship service?
So to get practical, what if you started viewing date nights with your spouse as putting Jesus first? What if you viewed playing with your kids as an expression of your love for Jesus? What if you viewed helping out with the boring chores of laundry, dishes, dusting, and cleaning as Jesus coming first? (1 Cor. 10:31)
The bottom line is it’s impossible to compartmentalize loving God and loving people. When you stop trying to separate the two, life gets a little more simple and a lot more serious as every action is an expression of loving God.
