He wants all of you!

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. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”

Matthew 22:37–40

Jesus had just had a mic drop moment with the Sadducees (Matthew 22:23-33) when a Pharisee lawyer asked Him, “What’s the greatest commandment in the Law?” By the way, I do not believe this was a sincere question from a sincere seeker. This was a question aimed at trying to trick Jesus into blaspheming.

I came upon this passage in 2000, and I’m ashamed to admit it, but I could see myself as the Pharisee in this scene. As God was slowly moving the “belief needle” in my mind, I was still very much cynical and skeptical of this Jesus being written about by, of all people, a traitorous tax collector. The “old” Ed would have sarcastically asked, “OK, Mr. Rabbi man. You’re apparently so anointed. You’re God’s Son . . . yeah, right. We’ve got 613 laws in the Bible; gimme the most important one.”

Jesus’ answer to this question, which was so obviously meant for evil, has come to be regarded as one of the most profound things He ever said. In a previous post, I briefly mentioned the Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4) as the most fundamental expression of the Jewish faith. Jesus’ answer in Matthew 22 quotes God’s words that immediately follow the Shema in Deuteronomy 6:5, but with an integral change:

You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your (Jesus removes) might (and adds) mind.

I used to think that Christianity was mindless nonsense. It was completely illogical. The very idea that I should worship a man. Nope, that’s just silly. I had a mind, and I wasn’t buying it. I was not about to simply check my brain at the door. Wow! How prideful does all that sound?

This is not at all what Jesus is saying when He responded to the Pharisee’s question. His words travel down the centuries to you and me and call for us to love God with everything that makes me me . . . with everything that makes you you. This is loving Him with our emotions, our will, and our intellect. We are to be all in! Nothing held back. In our modern vernacular, the battle cry ought to be “Lord, I love you with every fiber of my being.” Is this the way you think about God? Are you all in? Because He wants to be first in everything: heart, soul, mind, time, resources, labor, finances . . . everything. 

And then Jesus shocked them by adding a second biggie, which He says is like the first: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  A year or two after the Lord saved me, my sons went to a weeklong Christian camp. The theme of the camp was “Love God, love people.” One of them proclaimed, “It’s impossible to really love God if you don’t love people.” And then the other said, “It’s impossible to really love people if you don’t love God.” They explained to me that anyone who says they love God but is “mean” and doesn’t love their neighbor is a liar.

When you are young, it’s just so simple. Your vertical relationship (the one with God) and your horizontal relationships (the ones with people) are inextricably wrapped together like a beautiful flower. Feed them both, and they will both bloom.

Initially, I found Verse 40 to be problematic, but subsequently, to be remarkably profound. It was problematic because it seemed like my clear list of dos and don’ts was being subjugated. And for heaven’s sake, how would I know how to live? I loved having the checkboxes. The checkboxes provided clear expectations.

I was raised with a strict sense of right and wrong. My dad graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point, served in Korea, and was a very black-and-white kind of guy. You act right, and you walk a straight line, and you get rewarded. If you don’t act right and walk straight, you get popped. His words ring in my ears, “This ain’t rocket science.” In a very real sense, he was right. In a checkbox world, check all the boxes, and you will be OK. The problem is that no one in the history of the world, other than Jesus, has ever or could ever check all the boxes.

On the remarkable side, Jesus’ words in Verse 40 are profoundly simple. He is saying to the folks listening in the first century and every century thereafter, “Love God and neighbor the way I tell you to, and the other commands will take care of themselves.” He tells us that everything in every book of the Old Testament hinges on loving God and loving people. These two commands, in Verses 37 and 39, are the bedrock upon which all the other commandments stand. Every commandment deals either with man’s relationship with God or man’s relationship with other men. Therefore, if I’m actively loving God as I should and actively loving the guy down the street as I should, then I will be a walking, talking embodiment of what lies at the heart of our faith: love. This simple truth utterly blew me away.

When you center your life around loving God and loving others, you fulfill His two greatest commandments and express the very heart of the Gospel. Is your “vertical” true, right, and intact? Is your “horizontal” true, right, and intact? If not, get them in line today.

Lord, I need You to give me the grace to love You like I should—to love You with my heart, my mind, my strength, my eyes, and my ears. Jesus, help me love the people around me like You do. Give me Your heart for them. Let me see them like You do. Let me serve them for Your sake. In Your name, Amen.