The Core – Part Two
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.”
Our response to God (his essence and his revelation) is love, love for God. This love is all consuming, heart, soul, mind and strength. Strength has traditionally been interpreted to mean the body or physical world. This indicates the importance of the physical in our relationship with God as manifested in baptism and communion. If Paul’s analogy of marriage holds true then baptism becomes the consummation of our relationship with God (1 Corinthians 12:13; Ephesians 5:31-32) and communion the perpetual wedding feast.
“Love your neighbor as yourself”
This final portion shows that our relationship with God is to be manifested outwards as well as upwards. Our relationship with others is secondary only to God and the love poured into us should be poured into others. These two relationships are so closely linked that to live without love for our neighbor is to live without love for God (1 John 2:9-10).
This starts with our first neighbors are our families (1 Timothy 5:8) and for those who are married this is your spouse. This means that whatever is good for our relationship with God is good for our relationships with our families and for our other neighbors.
Jesus’ ministry was marked by this love for neighbor, in his inaugural address he states, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor (Luke 4:18-19).” This should serve as a great indicator to those who follow Christ, the best way to love our God is to love our neighbors.-
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