Living Our Love

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Scripture: Matthew 22:36-40 (ESV)

36 “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” 37 And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. 38 This is the great and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. 40 On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”

Devotion:

            I have a wish. It is that every few years or so people would forget everything they think they know about Christianity and go back to kindergarten class in Sunday school and begin again with the basics. We might avoid a lot of heartache and grief that way. When our “advanced: and “mature” way of thinking about the Christian faith would be stripped away and we would be left to learn the basics and put them into practice.

            Jesus in this passage takes his questioner back to the bare essence of what the Christian life is all about. Jesus reduces the whole labyrinth of the Jewish law code down to two essential commandments. In doing so he disarms his critics who complain that Jesus and his disciples do not seem to follow the details of the Jewish law.

            We have the same problem today. People like me who have been to seminary and have studied “deeply” the things of God can sometimes in our conceit think we know what God is all about. We have learned the secrets of exegesis of scripture without remembering the God whose words we are parsing and his absolute love for the people to whom these words were written.

            Let us, therefore, attend to these basic commandments and look to follow them. The first commandment he reminds us of is this. We are to love our Lord and God with all your heart in other words with every fiber of your being. We are to love God with all our soul meaning with a love that encompasses our volition. Finally, with all our minds we are to seek after God. In today’s church this last way of loving God gets neglected, I fear. We go to church not expecting to be challenged mentally and most of the time that condition is met.

            Then the second commandment follows logically from the first. True love of neighbor is rarely ever practiced in our culture. Our phones, tablets, and computers often act as a “screening” device between us and those we should be loving. Many of us even have trouble loving ourselves properly. Instead of us treating ourselves with respect we engage in all sorts of degrading passions. These passions interfere with our love for self and love for neighbor, and ultimately our love for God.

            A return to these basics of loving God, others, and ourselves and committing ourselves to them with all of our being would clear up a lot of the dysfunction in the church and even the world. Let us pray that God would humble us and make us obedient to his most basic commands.

Prayer:
            Lord, today we trade in all our alleged depth of knowledge about you that we may simply love you and our neighbor. Help us to put away all the toys we have accumulated that divert our attention from loving you, our neighbors, and even ourselves. Let us sit and learn the basics of the faith from you. And having learned them, put them into practice. May the world know through us that you are a God of love for all people. Amen.

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