Matthew 22:37-39 (NIV) 37 Jesus replied: "'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'
Ephesians 5:25 (NIV) 25 Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. . 33 Each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.
Philippians 3:7-14 (NIV) 7 But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. 8 What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ 9 and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ--the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith. 10 I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, 11 and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead. 12 Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. 13 Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, 14 I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.
"We live by demands when we should live by priorities."
J. A. Motyer, Quoted in Men of Integrity, Vol. 4, no. 3., Today's Best Illustrations – Volume 5, (Carol Stream, IL: Christianity Today, 1997), WORDsearch CROSS e-book, Under: "BUSYBODIES".
