I am a Jesus pusher!!! “Leave your gifts there before the altar, and go your way. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift” (Matthew 5:24). A lawyer, skilled in debate, asked Jesus, “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?” (Matthew 22:36). Quoting the Old Testament, Jesus said, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets” (Matthew 22:37-40). The difficulty is in the Greek word “homoios,” translated as like. It means “one and the same.” It denotes a correspondence in feature, property, or nature and a correspondence in measure, capacity, or position. In biblical Greek it means, “of the same kind.” Jesus did not give one commandment first, followed by the second, but He lists them one after the other because He could not state them simultaneously. Loving God is so connected to loving others that they are considered the same! Our passage proposes the same idea of an intimate connection between my love for God and my love for my fellow man. John proposed the question, “How do we know that we have passed from death to life?” The answer is, “Because we love the brethren. He who does not love his brother abides in death” (1 John 3:14). We are murderers if we hate our brother (1 John 3:15). Then John draws a parallel between our lives and Jesus’ life. “By this we know love, because He laid down His life for us. And we also ought to lay down our lives for the brethren” (1 John 3:16). The mind of Jesus must possess me. I am a Jesus pusher!!!