, you cannot steal from someone and love them at that point, you cannot lie to them and love them at the same time.
Why not?
B-A-C gave you an excellent answer but i want to give you one also just to agree with and back up his point.
At the point you decide and choose to tell that lie, at that very point, who are you choosing to serve?
We may have words of love and feelings of love towards them but our actions do not back up our words and feelings.....faith without works is dead... so at that point, the fruit of our words and feelings is nada, zero, big fat nothing because at that very point, when we decide to lie, we are choosing to please ourselves, choosing to be selfish. The fleshly fruit of serving self is sin.
When we choose to lie, tell an untruth, deceive either ourselves, someone else or both, we are putting ourselves in place of The Creator Almighty God. There is only one Creator, The Most High and Holy God. When we lie, we decide to create in opposition to God, we create a false self, a false image of us, a false story and it is empty because it is untrue. That is how serious lying is. Every lie we tell or deception we make, we forget it after a while but it is out there living somewhere as a falsity. We created it and not someone else believes it as truth, so now it takes on life in and of itself. The repercussions of which are enormous depending on how many times that lie we told gets repeated and to whom.
Are you seeing how serious one small lie is?
How offensive it is to God?
How dangerous it is and how much it damages the person that we tell it to?
We involve them in our sin and cause them to collude unbeknown to them.
When we repent, we should go back and undo as many lies as we can think of that we've told.
A kingdom cannot be divided against itself. Either we serve God (love) or we serve ourselves, where the enemy can get a foothold. In that moment, we can't do both.
Which is why all you need to do is love a person and you'll be keeping all the commandments by default.
