Love Is So Easy -- Trying Makes it Hard

How exactly does "trying to love" fit in with the law, and thus our attempt to keep this law leads to a fall from grace?

"But when the Pharisees had heard that he had put the Sadducees to silence, they were gathered together.

"Then one of them, which was a lawyer, asked him a question, tempting him, and saying,

"Master, which is the great commandment in the law?

"Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.

"This is the first and great commandment.

"And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.

"On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." (Matthew 22: 34-40)

All the Law, all the Prophets, hang on "Love thy neighbor" (literally, the one nearest you, not just the one who lives next to you), and "Love the Lord thy God" with everything you have.

Can anyone of us love God with "all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind"? No! Absolutely not! Jesus Christ magnified the Law and the Prophets to their proper standard, an impossible one for mankind.

Yet by the atoning death of Jesus Christ, wiping away once and for all the stain of sin, forever reconciling us to His Father, we are then empowered to love, by the power of the Holy Spirit:

"But the fruit of the Spirit is love" (Galatians 5:22)

and

"Te love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us." (Romans 5:5)

So, love is a fruit of the Spirit, which He bears in us, which we receive and release by faith.