“‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment.  A second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ The entire law and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments.” Matthew 22:37-40

Summarizing Jesus words in today’s verses, Augustine said, “Love God and do whatever you please: for the soul trained in love to God will do nothing to offend the One who is Beloved.”

Great words. True words. Something inside me resonates with these often-quoted words…and saddens me a little, too. And I think, if only we could pull it off better. We seem to do a lot better at the “do as you please” part of Augustine’s famous quote, than the “love God” part. And this is compounded because the pandemicly shallow grasp of loving God among His people.

It seems like the phrase is more often used to justify what we want to do than to describe the life of a passionate lover of God.

To “love” someone (in the biblical sense) means to totally give ourselves over to him or her. Sort of like “to obsess”. It’s one of the reasons I like being around engaged couples or newlyweds. They’re often so obviously focused on each other. Their thoughts, emotions and actions are totally aligned with each other as they becoming more and more “one”. It’s the best earthly illustration I can think of for what it means to “love God” as Augustine says.

Walk out that kind of love and everything we do will be loving…and it isn’t even a struggle. We won’t need to be taught how to treat people, things, work or pleasures because these things are totally covered in that love.

Problem is, we as Christians are often fickle and our love can swiftly shift from God to any number of other good, neutral or selfish things, and how we treat people, things, work or pleasures will suffer the consequences. So while we fumble around with this idea of loving God, we end up needing to be taught how to treat people, things, work or pleasures after all.

I think this is why the Apostle Paul, who ascends the heights of brilliance with passages on walking in the love and grace of God, descends into the humdrum of specific instructions like “stop stealing”, “stop arguing” and the like.

It’s like he’s saying, ‘Yes, it would be far better to walk in the beauty of God’s grace and bask in the all-consuming fire of His love; but while you’re still falling short of all the Holy Spirit is transforming you into—until you get there, here’s some tedious but practical ‘plain-language’ instructions on how to get along in the Christian faith.’

Before the coming of this faith, we were held in custody under the law, locked up until the faith that was to come would be revealed. So the law was our guardian… Now that this faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian.  Galatians 3:23-25

And that’s were Christian maturity comes in.  We’ll pick up on that thought next time.