Jesus said:  Your love for one another will prove to the world that you are my disciples. (John 13:35) 

If we are true followers of Christ, then we have a mandate to truly love others.  Truly loving is about acceptance and recognition of another person being created in the image of God.  Such realization makes all others have special significance no matter their situation or plight in life.   

The Christian has a true starting place to love others, a place to start.  And that is; ‘I know who you are’.  You are made in the image of God. Even with a non-Christian, the Christian has some way to begin:  to go from the façade of the outward to the reality of the inward, because no matter what a man says he is, we know who he really is.  He is made in the image of God; that’s who he is.  And we know that down there somewhere – no matter how wooden he is on the outside, or how much he has died on the outside, or even if he believes he is only a machine – we know that beyond that façade there is the person who is a verbalizer and who loves and wants to be loved.  And no matter how often he says he is amoral, in reality he has moral motions.  We know this because he has been made in the image of God.  Hence even a non-Christian, the Chrisitan has a way to start, from the outside to the inside, the Christian is to love and love and love his fellow man ‘so that’ he is demonstrating and sharing the reality of the love of God ‘so that’ his fellow man might see the light and source of that love and come to personally know and possess the love of God of which he was made to know and possess.   

Thoughts developed and/or taken from the works of Dr. Francis A. Schaeffer, Trilogy – He Is There and He Is Not Silent