New City Catechism #7

Question: What does the law of God require?
Answer: That we love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love our neighbor as ourselves.

This question and answer comes straight out of Scripture. A lawyer comes up to Jesus and asks him what the greatest commandment in the law was. Jesus replies, “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

Maybe we are used to this command in Scripture if we’ve been in church for a while. However, slow down and realize how strange sounding this command actually is. What if we made laws like this today? Say you were were listening to a news report and the anchor say this in his low, serious-sounding voice, “Congress passed today, by unanimous vote, a new law requiring you to renew your car registration every six months and love the DMV agent granting you the registration with all your heart.”

I don’t know if there would be rioting in the streets over that kind of law, but it would certainly raise eyebrows all around the country. And you’d think, “You can’t command love! You can only command obedience.”

The reason this sounds strange to us is that, in our culture, we’ve relegated love to a feeling. And we know we don’t command feelings. Yet, when the Bible speaks of love, it isn’t rooted in a feeling. Love is about commitment. It is about action, service, and priority. So, when God says to love him as the fulfillment of the law, then it isn’t about conjuring warm feelings. It is about regarding him as our greatest commitment. Action is motivated out of that which simply cannot stay internal. And what happens if you do that? If you live in great commitment to the Lord? The feelings of love will come as the fruit of obedience, which serves to reinforce our commitment! This empowers greater obedience which reinforces our commitment which empowers more obedience. You get the idea! Round and round we go in an upward spiral of God-honoring worship. The commitment of loving God and loving others quickly becomes about our entire life. No, wonder that it is the greatest commandment.