Simple Love

I'm a big fan of simple.

If you look at my office, you won't see a lot of clutter. Look at my computer and it's also pretty clutter-free. Some people just joke that it's a little obsessive-compulsive; I tend to think it's just being organized, being able to find stuff, and making things simpler, not harder. 

But simple isn't easy. 

Apple is probably one of my favorite companies in the world. Not only do I love their products, but 99% they work flawlessly for me. The design of those products is very simple compared to other products of the same type - you won't see any fancy holographic stickers on their computers, and you won't see many buttons on their phones. But you look at the competition while walking through a Best Buy and you’ll see that Apple products stand out - and it’s not just because of their price, it’s because of their simplicity. 

When Steve Jobs helmed Apple, he was famous for saying “Simplify, simplify, simplify" over and over again. After returning to the company in 1998, the industry witnessed one of the biggest turnarounds in corporate history. 

Near bankruptcy, one of the first things Jobs did was get rid of all the stuff. Apple had multiple models of computers, printers, monitors, and other things. He came in and threw out over a decade of bad business decisions and simplified the products. He fired lots of people. He made critics, stockholders, and some employees very angry. And very nervous. 

But Jobs proved them wrong when Apple introduced the iMac in 1999 and it was a hit. Three years later, he would introduce a little device named the iPod, and although it took a few months to catch on, it changed the music industry forever and made the company billions. This success allowed Apple to engineer products like the iPhone and iPad just six years later. 

Apple is now the most valuable company in the world - beating out companies like McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, and Exxon-Mobil. 

Being simple may seem easy, but in practice it’s very hard to accomplish. 

The overwhelming message of the Bible, when you boil it down to its simplest form, is love. In fact, if I could sum up the Bible in four words, I would say, “Love God, Love Others.” It sounds like such a simple idea, but in practice it’s really not. Because when we say “God is Love” and we don’t practice it, we’re not upholding one of the simplest and basic ideas of scripture. 

If you want to read about love, and more specifically brotherly love - the love that we should have for one another, there are two great places to go in the Bible. The first of which is 1 John 4.7-21. 

The book of 1st John was a letter probably written to those who were already believers, where the Gospel of John was written to those who had not yet believed. 

In this section of scripture, the word love (or some tense of the word) is used 26 times in just 14 verses. Do you think that John is trying to make his point to us? 

I want to focus right now on the last three verses of that section of scripture in 1 John 4.19-21.

19 We love because he first loved us. 20 If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, cannot love God whom he hath not seen. 21 And this commandment have we from him, that he who loveth God love his brother also.

The only reason that we are able to love in the first place is because God has hard-wired it into us from the beginning of creation. We only love because God first loved us.