“He said to him, ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and most important command. The second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself.’” (Matthew 22:37-39 CSB)
Devotional
We tend to treat our faith like a to-do list. Read the Bible, check. Pray, check. Don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t gossip, check, check, check. It feels manageable that way. Measurable. We can look at the list at the end of the day and know how we did.
Jesus blows that up here. A religious expert asks him which command matters most, probably expecting a debate about which of the 613 laws in the Hebrew Scriptures deserves top billing. Jesus doesn’t pick one rule. He names a posture. Love God with everything you are, heart, soul, mind, all of it. Then he adds a second, inseparable from the first: love your neighbour as yourself. Everything else, he says, hangs on these two.
That word “hangs” matters. Every other command, every other instruction about how to live, swings from these two like a door from its hinges. Take the hinges away and the door doesn’t work anymore, no matter how carefully you built the rest of it. We can be precise about our theology, disciplined in our habits, careful with our words, and still miss the point entirely if love isn’t the thing holding it all together.
Here’s what makes this hard to hear on a Tuesday afternoon when we’re irritated with a coworker or too tired to really listen to our kid: this isn’t asking us to feel warm and fuzzy about God and everyone around us. It’s asking for our whole selves, heart, soul, and mind, not just the parts that are easy to give. Loving with our mind means actually thinking about what’s true. Loving with our heart means letting ourselves care, even when it costs something. God isn’t asking for a performance. He’s asking for us.
And maybe that’s the relief hiding in this verse. God didn’t hand us a longer list to master. He handed us a relationship to grow into, one that reshapes how we treat the people standing right in front of us. That’s not a burden. That’s an invitation to stop keeping score and start actually loving.
Reflection
I catch myself managing my faith like a checklist more often than I’d like to admit. I want to ask myself honestly this week: am I loving God with my mind, or just going through the motions? And when I think of the person who’s hardest for me to love right now, what would it look like to actually treat that as connected to loving God, not separate from it?
Prayer
Father, we confess that we’ve turned parts of our faith into a checklist instead of a relationship. Teach us what it actually means to love you with everything we are, heart, soul, and mind. And Father, show us the person in front of us today who needs to be loved the way you love us. We can’t manufacture that on our own, so we’re asking you to grow it in us.