Counter-Cultural Love-The Simplicity of the Greatest Commandment (Part 1): Matthew 22:37-40

 

Matthew 22:37-40- Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

Have you ever seen the movie, "Evan Almighty" (2007)? It's the humorous story of a young family man recently elected to Congress. The story follows his family's relocation to Washington D.C. so he can begin his term of service in the nation's capital city. The story begins by Evan Baxter, played by Steve Carell, kneeling beside his bed in prayer asking God to change the world through him. The story follows his hilarious attempts to ignore God's call upon his life to change his world. 

Imagine that God appeared to you with the unique chance to change your world in a significant way. Unlike this movie character, God explains how He is going to use you to solve the world's problems. In a sense, that is what God did when He sent Jesus into the world. Humanity has had a sin problem since the beginning of time. Sin separates humanity from God and destroys our ability to enjoy healthy relationships with one another. So God sent Jesus to fix that problem. 

The Simplicity and Complexity of the Greatest Commandment

The Gospel tells the story about how Jesus came to fix our relationships with God and with people. We join Jesus in His story in Matthew 22 when He introduced love as the simple solution to this profound problem. The account introduces a common occurrence for Jesus when an expert in the law tried to test Jesus by quizzing Him about the greatest commandment. I imagine this legal specialist thought Jesus would cite the Levitical laws hoping to catch Him either in a lie or error. But once again Jesus turned His detractors' world upside down when He introduced love for God and people as the two greatest commandments. No laws. No legalities. Just love. 

Jesus introduced simplicity to the world with the greatest commandment. It seems too simple that the 613 laws of God could be summed up with two commandments. When we learn to live simply by loving God and loving people, we will experience the same sense of simplicity that Jesus suggested when He answered this confused expert in the law. 

The greatest commandment simplifies the entangled mess of our lives through love. To call this great commandment simplistic does not mean easy, though. It is simple, yet profound with all of the complexities of a loving relationship; like love's intricate and delicate nature that destroys the enmity between humanity and God. Jesus' language captures love's simplicity and complexity by defining the standards of measure for loving God and people. Let's dig into His words to understand the standard by which we are called to love God and each other.

Read Matthew 22:37-40 again. I have created a chart to explain the standards Jesus used when He described the greatest commandments. 

Matthew 22:37-39

The Four Standards of Love

Love God	Love People
Heart (Greek: kardia) Your center of being	As yourself (Greek: seauton) Bringing action/attention back to yourself
Soul (Greek: psuche) Your life, the source of life
Mind (Greek: dianoia) Your thoughts, full reasoning
Strength (Greek: iskhoos) (Mark 12:30) Your power to overcome resistance

God's Standard of Love

Before we think about these standards of love, consider that Jesus told us to love God with "all" (Greek: holos) of the heart, soul, and mind. Have you ever heard the expression "all" means "all?" Well, that is what this word means. It means that we are called to love Jesus with our entire and complete being. We are to reserve for God all that Jesus includes in this commandment. There seems to be nothing left for anyone or anything else, except that is the mystery of this great commandment. I will get to that in part 2 of this devotional. 

Now turn your attention to the heart. Jesus calls us to love God with all of the heart. The heart represented the center of life or existence. All of us center our lives around something. Many of us make our careers the center of everything we do. Our work defines our identity. We choose work over family. We fight to climb the ladder at everyone's expense, including our own integrity sometimes. Pastors are notorious for making ministry their center. Ministry defines what they do and who they are at the expense of their families and health. Others make a husband or wife the center of life. They can't conceive how they would make it if their spouse was out of the picture. Their spouse "completes" them. Helicopter parents make their children the center. Ballgames, practices, and continual activity define their days. They choose their children over their spouse. They live in a child-centered home as opposed to a God-centered marriage. 

But God calls us to ensure that everything revolves around God as center. We are called to love God with all that defines us as a person; from the depths of who we are as a human being. Not our career. Not our children. Not our spouse. God "completes" everything else in life. 

Next we are called to love God with all of the soul. Jesus used a word that derives its meaning from the very beginning of time when God created humanity. Genesis 2:7 says, "And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul" (KJV). This word means that God breathed life into our being. He is our source of life. The soul represented the very breath we breathe, knowing that God breathes into us life. 

While loving God with all of your heart means you place God in the center of all that you do and all who you are, loving God with all your soul means you love Him as the Source of your life. You don't depend upon anything or anyone else for your significance. God is your source. He is your center. And He is your source. 

Third we are called to love God with all of the mind. This word offers an interesting twist. It does imply that we love God with all of our thoughts. But the word takes the meaning of our love beyond mere thought. Jesus used a word that means to reason or examine something from one side to another. Many people think that Christians must abandon sound reason to believe in God. However, God calls us to love Him with the capability of a reasoning mind that carefully examines the intricacies and uniqueness of God. We derive our faith from our passionate love which compels us to center Him in the middle of everything as our Source of very existence and to pursue Him with careful introspection, deliberation, and thought. 

Finally the Gospel of Mark accounts for another word. According to Mark 12:30, Jesus included "strength" as a standard of our love for God. We'll come back to Mark 12 in another post, but in the meantime, Jesus used a word that meant power to overcome resistance. Love for God ought to be the reason we fight. The Bible makes it clear that we are in a spiritual warfare. Our love for God is the motivating reason to wage war with the enemy. If we give in, we fall short of this standard. If we give up, we have abandoned the standard of love. Love for God with all of our strength makes the battle worth fighting until the last man is standing. 

Life Application

When you put these standards of love all together, this is what our lives should look like. We center our lives around God with nothing else competing for first place. We acknowledge that God is our source of life, meaning we take His Way and Will to heart living in such a way to please Him in all our ways. We take every thought captive unto obedience to Christ (2 Corinthians 10:5) because we seek to love God with thoughts that originate from the Mind of Christ (1 Corinthians 2:16) with careful reasoning and reflection from His Word. And we fight with all of our strength to love Him first before all things because we love Him first before all things. All of this means that love expresses its perfect simplicity when God is everything to us. 

Our standard of measure for loving God can be summed up with the following questions:

Is your life centered around God and nothing else?

Is your existence or reason for living based upon Him and nothing else?

Does the thought of God define the nature, quality, passion, and pursuit of your mind?

Do you fervently fight to resist the enemy’s attacks to make your struggle about something else other than your love for God? 

Jesus called us to "love the Lord your God with all the heart, with all the soul, with all the mind, and with all the strength." We will study what it means to love our neighbor as ourselves in the next post. 

Scriptures for further study

Matthew 22:34-40

Mark 12:28-34