Love Is the Most Important Thing!

By Maria Fontaine

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There is a lot in the Bible about human relationships and about having love toward others. That’s the whole purpose for living, to love God and others. The purpose for everything is love. That’s the most important thing. You may have a lot of gifts and talents, but if you don’t have love, it’s nothing.1 And the Bible isn't talking about love for your computer or your work. It’s talking about love for the Lord and others. And if you love God you’ll love others too, because loving others is one way you show love for the Lord.

If we’re going to grow and mature in spirit, then we’ve got to grow in love, not just in diligence in our work. The Bible doesn’t teach us that diligence is the most important thing; it teaches us that love is the most important thing. Although diligence is important, “The greatest of these is love.”2

You may do your work well and accomplish a lot, but if you haven’t learned to work with others and treat them with love, then you’re missing one of the main lessons we’re here on earth to learn. We need to learn that people are different and that we can’t treat them all the same. There are so many things written in the Bible about how the Lord wants us to treat people differently according to their needs. Jesus was very mindful of human weaknesses and didn’t require the same from everyone.3 The apostle Paul also instructed, “Uphold the weak, be patient with all.”4

Some years ago I worked with two talented secretaries, Laura and Anne. We discovered together an important lesson in human relationships. Both Laura and Anne were hard workers—really tops in their field, very good at what they did. When it came to their work, they were diligent and efficient and got the job done. But there was often friction in the office.

Sensitive Anne was hurt because of Laura’s rather snappy attitude. Laura thought it was all Anne’s fault for being too sensitive. Laura was partially right; Anne was sensitive. But when I talked with Laura about the problem, we realized that it presented her with a wonderful opportunity for personal growth. Laura was good at her work, but was she willing to learn to improve her relationships with people?

Why had God put Anne in the position of working with Laura in the first place? Might He be working in Laura’s life to help her learn to get along with others better? He could have easily put someone with her who wasn’t so sensitive, but perhaps He wanted them to learn to get along together. Maybe He wanted Laura to learn to be more considerate and Anne to learn not to be so sensitive.

Laura was very single-minded and totally dedicated to her work, and that’s good, but she needed to learn to be more understanding of others whom she didn’t think were quite as gifted as she was.

It just comes down to love and “doing unto others as we would have them do unto us.”5 Regardless of what else we accomplish and everything else we might do right and how much more we might get done than everybody else, we still need to have love and show love for others.

What is the most important ingredient in our relationships with each other? What did Jesus say proves we are the Lord’s disciples? Love. In John 13:35 He said: “By this shall all men know that ye are My disciples, if ye have love for each other.”

How can you love God whom you can’t see, if you can’t love your brothers and sisters in the Lord, or the people you work and interact with? How can you say you love people whom you haven’t seen if you don’t love those whom you see every day?6

We could all stand to improve in our relations with others, and the Bible has lots of counsel for us on that subject—how to work with others, how to treat them, how to be loving toward them, and much more. It talks about patience, longsuffering, love, unselfishness, and giving. In all of the passages about these things, the Lord is talking about relationships between human beings, not about our work or the relationships we have with things—our papers or computers or machines. He’s talking about people. You may work great with your computer, but you’re not going to grow much spiritually unless you learn to have loving interaction with other people—and that’s not always easy. It takes patience, love, and humility.

The Lord wants us all to learn how to get along with people, even those that we don’t necessarily feel too compatible with or who don’t really think the same way as we do or who maybe we don’t feel are as talented or as smart as us. We can all stand to learn lessons about love and working with others, which is really the most important thing to learn.

The Lord gave the simple answer of how to work with others when He said, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”7 It’s all in that little tiny sentence, but it takes a lot of learning to learn how to carry that one little thing out—and a lot of love. But that’s what we’re here to learn.

Laura’s main job wasn’t just to learn as much as she could on the computer until she got so proficient on it she could run any kind of program and even program it herself. That wasn’t the point. The thing the Lord wanted her to learn that’s even more important is how to have love, how to interact with people.

“Am I my brother’s keeper?”8 Well, the answer is obvious. Of course we are our brother’s keeper, and we need to remember that some people need to be “kept” even more lovingly and tenderly than others. To be successful with people, you have to learn that people are different and need to be treated differently.

The Lord has put certain people in your life, whether you like it or not. When you’re working with someone, or cross paths with them regularly, whether you like them or not, the Lord has placed you in a position of interacting with them, and it’s your responsibility to love them. If you can’t get along with them, He evidently knows you need to learn to or He wouldn’t have put you together. It must be possible or He wouldn’t have put you in that situation.

It’s so easy to snap at somebody and say, “Why didn’t you do it right?” But if you want to grow and progress the way the Lord wants you to, then you need to learn to handle each situation in love.

So look at this as a new challenge in life: “What can I do to grow in my relationship with other people?” Part of the answer to that is in growing in our relationship with the Lord. If we’re growing in the Lord, then we’ll be more loving toward other people, and that’s what it’s all about.

That’s one of our purposes in life—to love others. Jesus said to His disciples, “This is My commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.”9 There it is: it’s His commandment. He ordered us, His disciples, to love one another.

What is love? Love is not hurting; love is going out of your way to make others happy. So it’s clear that as Christians we are really erring if we don’t love one another. Laura was an excellent worker, but even if she had been perfect, even if she spent 18 hours a day on the job without making a mistake, she still would not have been pleasing God if she did not show a loving attitude toward the people she worked with.

In our office there was obviously a problem between Laura and Anne, and resolving it was part of their job. It wasn’t easy, because learning how to work with other people can be one of the hardest things to learn. For many people, that can be a lot harder to learn than learning how to operate a machine that doesn’t talk back.

The Lord doesn’t want us to stop doing our jobs, but He does expect us to go on to more, to learn things that are more difficult, but more rewarding in a lot of ways. Working with people and being able to love people and relate to them is another reward all its own.

Unless we learn how to live lovingly, prophecy and all of the other gifts of the Spirit are not going to mean anything. It’s nothing to the Lord without love.

You can have all the gifts of the Spirit, but without love, it’s meaningless.10 Love is the most important thing.

You can quote the Bible word for word, but if you don’t live it in love, it’s not doing you much good. You can speak with the tongues of men and angels, you can make all kinds of sacrifices, but without love, it profits nothing. You can have all the gifts of the Spirit, but without love it is meaningless. You can be tops in your field, but if you don’t manifest God’s love to others, you’re not the best you can be. If you don’t have love, you don’t have anything. Love is the most important thing.

Originally published March 1983. Updated and republished June 2012.
Read by Bethany Kelly.


1 1 Corinthians 13:1–3.

2 1 Corinthians 13:13.

3 Luke 7:37–43; John 8:3–11; John 10:14–16.

4 1 Thessalonians 5:14 NKJ.

5 Matthew 7:12.

6 1 John 4:20.

7 Matthew 7:12.

8 Genesis 4:9.

9 John 15:12.

10 1 Corinthians 13.

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