📖 Radical Christianity: The Ten Commandments of Jesus — Unit 3: Love God

1. The Question That Exposes the Heart

The man who asked was an expert in the law, and the text says plainly he asked in order to test Jesus, not to learn from Him. The rabbis loved to argue over which of the six hundred and thirteen commands stood highest, hoping to catch a teacher in a careless ranking. Jesus did not take the bait, and He did not hesitate. He reached back to the Shema, the confession every faithful Jew recited daily from Deuteronomy 6, and named love for God as the first and greatest commandment of all.

Notice what that answer does. It moves the whole question off the surface of outward rule-keeping and drives it down to the heart. The greatest thing God requires is not a performance He can audit but an affection: love, given with the whole self. That is the foundation this entire course is built on, and it is the foundation of the Christian life. Get this command right and the others have somewhere to grow from; get it wrong and every other command becomes a burden.

2. A Love That Is Total, and a Love of Degree

This passage tells us that the very foundation of Christianity is the love of God. That is an easy thing to talk about — anyone can say "I love the Lord," and many do, inside the church and out. But Jesus attaches conditions to the kind of love He means, and the first is that it must be total. Christianity is a religion of the whole person. You are to love God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind — every faculty bent toward Him. The three are not separate compartments to be ticked off but three angles on one undivided self, and together they leave no part of a person exempt.

This total love is the very basis of obedience. When you love God with everything, you strive with everything within you to do what He wants; obedience stops being a demand imposed from outside and becomes the natural leaning of a life. Just as a tree that grows by the seashore is bent over the years in the direction of the prevailing wind, the whole of the Christian is meant to be bent, steadily and permanently, by the will of God. And there is a second condition: this is a love of degree. God has given us many good things to enjoy in this world, and they are gifts. But we must always guard the order of our loves, so that no gift — however good — ever becomes as important to us as the Giver. If we love God with all our heart and soul and mind, then nothing is allowed to come between us and Him.

3. Called to Love, Not Merely to Serve

We as Christians sometimes miss the forest for the trees. We pick up the idea that all God really wants from us is to work ourselves to death for Him, and so we become guilt-ridden, working our fingers to the bone and ending up miserable. We even inscribe it on our bulletins and hang it over our doors: "Called to serve." But that motto, taken first, is wrong. We are not first called to serve at all; we are called to love. Service is good in its place, but it is meant to grow out of love, never to replace it — and when we reverse the order, religion turns into joyless duty.

Scripture gives us one quiet model of this. Of Enoch almost nothing is recorded except the one thing that matters most: he walked with God, and God took him. What a commentary on a life — that the sum of it is friendship with God. Enoch was one of the few who actually fulfilled the purpose for which we were all made, for God created us for fellowship with Himself. The searching question for us is simple: to this point, would the commentary of my life read, "He walked with God"?

4. The Greatest Commandment and the Greatest Sin

Have you ever thought about what the greatest sin actually is? We all keep a private list — murder near the top, then adultery, theft, lying, blasphemy, the sins whose weight we feel instinctively. But none of these is the biggest. As Peter Lord points out, the greatest sin is most likely tied to the greatest commandment, for to commit the greatest sin is simply to break the greatest commandment. If loving God with everything is first, then failing to love Him is the first and greatest sin — and it is precisely the one we never think to put on our list.

This reframes everything God asks of us. What God has been most interested in from the very beginning is not our work — He has all power and needs no help from us — nor our money, since He already owns everything that exists. What He cares about is our fellowship, our love. If we work for God without loving God, the whole enterprise becomes a grinding struggle instead of a joy. The test of it is prayer: it is hard to stay even five minutes before the Father unless there is a real love relationship underneath. We read of saints who rose at three in the morning to pray for hours, and we have to wonder whether they were driven by guilt or whether they simply loved God far more than we do. The honest desire of a Christian heart is to love God with the whole of life.

5. Loving God More Than Family

If that love is total, it will sometimes be tested against our other loves — and Jesus named the hardest one first. "Anyone who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me," He said, "and anyone who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me" (Matthew 10:37). We rightly honor devotion to family; love within a family is one of God's good gifts. But precisely because it is so good, it carries a real danger: that we come to love even something as worthy as our family more than we love God. Sometimes God will ask us to settle which love is first.

Abraham faced that test in its sharpest form when God asked him to offer Isaac, the son he had waited a lifetime for. He loved the boy more than his own life — yet he loved God more, and in heart and intent he gave his son to the Lord. God never meant for the knife to fall; He stayed Abraham's hand. The point was never the death of Isaac but the discovery of where Abraham's first love lay. The same test comes to us in quieter forms: family attachments and family concerns can quietly hold back a life of obedience.

6. Loving God More Than Money

The second rival love Jesus named is money. "You cannot serve God and money," He said, and one of His hardest words was spoken to a rich young ruler who sensed something was missing and asked how to inherit eternal life. Jesus saw that the man loved his wealth more than he loved God — that money had quietly become his god, claiming his time, thought, and energy — and so He put His finger exactly there: sell what you have, give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. It was the one thing the young man could not do, and he went away sorrowful.

The question that story presses on us is one of ownership: who really owns what we hold? If it is mine, I will use it one way; if it is God's, I will use it another. Scripture answers plainly — the earth, the cattle, even the birds belong to God, and He owns all that we have. He is generous in letting us use His possessions and does not demand them all back, but He does say that the tithe is the Lord's. To withhold it is not thrift; it is to rob God. We give our tithes and offerings for a reason: so that Christ may be known, so that people are saved and taught here, and so that others can be sent out to tell the world of the Savior. It is a glorious privilege to have a part in that work, and how we hold our money quietly reveals whether we love the gift or the Giver.

7. Looking to Him More Than to Life

To love God above family and money finally comes down to keeping our eyes on Him above everything, including our own life and desires. Hebrews 12:2 puts the whole Christian life in three words: "looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith." The instruction is simple and somehow the hardest thing to keep doing. Many of us came to trust Christ early and meant to keep our eyes on Him for life, yet somewhere we looked away. It is like the children's game of staring until someone blinks; in our spiritual lives we blink, lose sight of the Lord, and look somewhere else — usually toward the glitter, power, and desires the world holds out.

David is the great example of a man who blinked. As a shepherd boy his faith was so strong that, armed with a sling and his trust in God, he brought down a giant the whole army feared. God made him king, and nothing on earth could stand against such a man. But then David looked away — caught up in ruling, in power, in everyone telling him how great he was — and one evening his gaze drifted to his neighbor's wife, and he fell. Had his eyes stayed on the Lord, he could have escaped the temptation altogether. So can we. The struggle of the Christian life is largely a struggle of where we are looking, and the everyday things we walk right past can be exactly where God is waiting to be seen.

8. Never Too Early and Never Too Late to Look

If the whole of it is learning to look to Jesus, then two encouragements follow. First, it is never too early to begin. Many of the great men and women of God fixed their eyes on Christ when they were young, and a single steady look at Him can set the whole course of a life. The lay preacher in a snowbound English chapel who could only repeat one verse — "Look unto Me, and be saved" — and pressed it on a miserable fifteen-year-old, was used that day to turn the boy who became Charles Spurgeon into a Christian. A young heart that learns to look to Jesus has been given the best of all beginnings.

Second, it is never too late. There have been people with great sin behind them and grey hair on their heads who at last looked to Jesus alone and were received, for the opportunity stands open regardless of how a person has lived. B. H. Carroll, godless and embittered and crippled by war, was dragged unwillingly to church by his mother; the sermon left him empty, but at its end a light from heaven seemed to break, Christ stood before him calling, and he looked up once and forever and became a great man of God. Whether we come early or late, the command is the same and the door is the same: love God with all your heart, and keep looking to Him until, as the old hymn says, the things of earth grow strangely dim in the light of His glory and grace. Loving God is the first and greatest commandment — and it begins, and is kept, by looking to Him.

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