The Teachings of Jesus: What Did He Say?
30 min read
Jesus reduced the entire law to two commandments. Understanding what those two commandments actually demand is the work of a lifetime.
"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." — Matthew 22:37-39
1. A scribe asked Jesus to rank the commandments.
In Matthew 22:34-40, a lawyer tests Jesus with the question: "Which is the great commandment in the Law?" Jesus' answer quotes Deuteronomy 6:5 (love God with everything you are) and Leviticus 19:18 (love your neighbor as yourself). Then he says something no one expected: "On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets." He did not select two commandments from the list. He identified the root that produces the entire tree.
2. Loving God with everything you are is not an emotion — it is a total orientation.
The Hebrew of Deuteronomy 6:5 and Jesus' expansion of it in Matthew 22:37 — heart, soul, mind, and strength — covers every dimension of human existence. This is not a command to feel warmly about God. It is a command to orient every faculty, every decision, every relationship, every resource toward God. It is the description of a life that has been reorganized from the inside out around who God is.
3. Loving your neighbor as yourself is the outward expression of loving God.
1 John 4:20 makes this explicit: "If anyone says, 'I love God,' and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen." Love of God that does not produce love of neighbor is not love of God. It is a religious performance. The two commandments are not two separate duties — they are one integrated reality: a person who is properly oriented toward God will be properly oriented toward people.
4. "Neighbor" was the explosive question.
In Luke 10:25-37, after giving the Jesus Creed, Jesus is asked: "And who is my neighbor?" Rather than defining the term, he tells the parable of the Good Samaritan — and makes the Samaritan the hero of the story. In a culture where Jews and Samaritans were mutual enemies, Jesus' point is precise: neighbor is not defined by proximity, ethnicity, or shared religion. Neighbor is defined by need encountered. The Jesus Creed has no geographic or ethnic boundaries.
5. The Jesus Creed describes a transformed interior, not a behavioral checklist.
Scot McKnight, who has written extensively on the Jesus Creed, argues that Jesus was not giving a new set of rules to perform. He was describing what a genuinely transformed person looks like. You cannot manufacture love of God and love of neighbor from the outside in. It flows from encounter with God, from the indwelling Spirit, from a heart that has been changed. The Jesus Creed is simultaneously the simplest summary of the Law and the most demanding description of what regenerate life produces.
Treating the Jesus Creed as a simple, achievable summary of morality. It is simple to state and impossible to fulfill in your own strength. That is the point. Jesus gives us the target so we know what we are aiming for — and so we know we need him to produce it in us.
Write one paragraph describing a specific situation this week where loving God and loving neighbor required you to do something costly. What did you do? What did you avoid?
Submit your paragraph and your journal answer about who is hardest to love.
A: Because they are the root of the entire Law — all other commandments are applications of love for God and love for neighbor.
A: The Good Samaritan parable answers: anyone whose need you encounter. There is no geographic or ethnic limit.
A: Not in our own strength. It describes what genuine transformation by the Spirit produces — it is the target, not the mechanism.
Lord, I cannot love you or my neighbor this fully on my own. Transform my interior so that this love flows naturally rather than being forced from the outside. Amen.