The first commandment is to love the Lord your God with all you heart and all your soul and the second likened to it; love your neighbor as yourself. All other commandments are contained within those two. Isn’t that a great statement? How does that statement get so twisted as to become impossible? The first commandment tells us how to keep the second and all other commandments are contained within those. There are doctrines spoken and written by men on how to keep the first commandment that limit our capabilities to keep the second. Love cannot be regulated, mandated or forced. Love is given and cannot be taken, bought or sold. In our attempts to be righteous by following doctrine and making doctrine more important than people, we disobey the second commandment. Jesus did not die for doctrine; He came and died for people.
The first commandment, to love the Lord your God, tells us how to keep the second commandment. We cannot misinterpret what love is. This is love, not that we love God but the He first loved us. How do we love our neighbors? In the way God has loved us. We love first. Our lives get so messed up with the garbage that we do to each other; how can we love? Hate is so prevalent that we cannot love. Hate is the loss or absents of love. Hate is so prevalent because mankind has rejected God and the love that God gave first. Hate is so prevalent because we do not love. Hate is so prevalent because we hate. The first step to keeping the two greatest commandments is to let God love us – accept the love. We use the excuse, “If there is a loving God, why is there hate?” Love cannot be regulated, mandated or forced. God gave us His Son as an example of love and we killed Him as an example of hate. His Son said, “Forgive them because they do not know.” God raised His Son from death and sent the Holy Spirit to mankind – the opportunity to receive the Holy Spirit is available to all of mankind. The Holy Spirit brings the seed of love.
It is so easy for mankind to take the directions that the Holy Spirit delivers to them and try to make it a path to righteousness. Jesus is our righteousness and our attempts to be righteous are like rags to God. We have been given a perfect suit to put on and given an introduction to God, in the name of Jesus. We walk before God as if we were Jesus Himself. Why would we choose to put on rags and try to present ourselves to God? In the flesh, we have doctrines on how to dress in church claiming to be keeping the first commandment or at least claiming an attempt to respect if not love. The doctrines are based on what a man thinks God wants and is contrary to the second commandment. We are instructed not to offend the young in Christ, so we write doctrine to keep the elders from being offended. When someone walks into a group of people, claiming to be believers, for the first time looking for answers we offend them with doctrines of clothing. When someone needs prayer, do we make him or her wait until the prayer part of the service, because that is the doctrine of “How we do things here?” Keeping the first commandment is accepting God’s love. Keeping the second is living in God’s love and letting it flow to others. Keeping the second is getting ourselves out of the way and letting God work through us. Keeping the second is letting the Holy Spirit work within us. We cannot continue to keep the first commandment if we do not keep the second.
The second commandment is also where our works of faith are performed. We know God in the Spirit, because God is Spirit. We worship God by serving each other. At times the serving is in spiritual things (i.e. prayer) and sometimes it is in fleshly things (i.e. visiting the sick, feeding the hungry, etc.). The things we do in the flesh also have spiritual counterparts. Visiting the sick can mean going to where a physically sick person is housed, but it can also mean sending the Spirit that flows from the Christian to minister to one that is spiritually sick. Feeding the hungry can be handing someone something to eat or ministering to his or her hunger for God. That exercise could go on and on. The point to be made is that keeping the two great commandments are really letting Jesus work in us to reach the point where the Holy Spirit is producing love and that love will flow from God to our neighbors. God has, through Jesus, given us the tools to keep the commandments. The commandments within themselves have the fulfillment of the commandments, just as Jesus fulfilled the Old Testament commandments, the Holy Spirit fulfills the two great commandments with us. We accept God’s love by accepting Jesus as the Christ and God sends to us the Holy Spirit that plants into us the fulfillment of the two commandments that contain all the commandment already fulfilled by Jesus. What a God.
To have order in a service, groups of people may need doctrines and timetables but the doctrines are not more important that the people – the people are the church. Teaching in seasons may help with scheduling and teaching the days and laws that Jesus fulfilled is not wrong, but the seasons are not more important than the people. What if you are the fig tree that Jesus asked for food out of season? We are the body of Christ to each other. We are members of the body of Christ. If a member has need of food out of season, is that not Jesus asking? God loves us and Jesus is the head of the body, but we are the body. If someone needs a hug, we are the arms. If someone needs food, we are the hands. If someone is lost, Jesus is the spiritual head and the head contains the spiritual eyes – point the lost to Jesus. We cannot regulate love – the love of God or the love of each other. We cannot regulate the flow of the Holy Spirit. We cannot regulate the anointing of God. We can only recognize the anointing and speak it into the physical world. Jesus died for all of mankind and we have not been called to be prejudice against anyone that our Lord died to preserve. Love your neighbor and you will be loving God.