What is the greatest commandment of all?
When someone asked Jesus what the greatest commandment was, the Lord famously answered:
“The most important is Listen, Israel! The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. The second is, Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other command greater than these” (Matthew 12:29-31).
Love is the greatest commandment.
When it comes down to it, Christianity is simple. We’re called to “do” two things: believe in Jesus as our Savior, and then love God by loving the people around us.
Believe and love. That’s what it all boils down to.
And those two “movements” are connected. God saves us freely. And that display of God’s one-way love is what provokes our two-way love. I don’t understand people who say that grace is a license to sin. Knowing God’s love, knowing that He sent Jesus to die for me, and to rise again from the dead, knowing that salvation is a gift from God, is the single greatest motivator to holiness and faithful service that I know.
As Christians, we’re called to love.
Do you know what the opposite of love is? You might think that it’s hate. That’s not quite true. Although he wasn’t the first to say it, Elie Wiesel, author, Holocaust survivor, and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize claimed, “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.”
Love is of the essence of Christian discipleship. Indifference is the antidote to love. One of the greatest dangers to Christian discipleship is not that we begin to hate other people (although that happens!), but that we become indifferent to other people. Indifference is a discipleship killer. When you don’t care, you won’t act. When Jesus dictated his letter to the Ephesians, He complained:
“But I have this against you: You have abandoned the love you had at first” (Revelation 2:4).
They began in love. But they didn’t continue. They stopped loving. Jesus warned them that they would stop being a church if they didn’t change.
Consider how far you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first. If you do not repent, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place (Revelation 2:5).
If the grace movement stops loving each other—if we leave our first love and grow cold to one another—God will remove our lampstand, too.
You can’t build God’s church with an indifferent heart.
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Send your questions or comments to shawn@freegrace.in.
Read his latest book, The Myth of Tithing and the Joy of Grace Giving by getting it from us or from Amazon.
Amen! Wouldn't it be cool if we (as those who seek to sow grace) could be one in Christ as Christ and the Father are One SO THAT the world would believe that the Father indeed sent the Son?
Oh, that we would not bite and devour one another and let this minor differences thing consume us.
Lord, shed light on our indifference. Make it clear to us and prompt us to pursue health with one another and conformity to the image of Jesus.