Luke 10: 27- 28 And he answered, “YOU SHALL LOVE THE LORD YOUR GOD WITH ALL YOUR HEART, AND WITH ALL YOUR SOUL, AND WITH ALL YOUR STRENGTH, AND WITH ALL YOUR MIND; AND YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF.”  And He said to him, “You have answered correctly; DO THIS AND YOU WILL LIVE.”

When asked how to inherit eternal life Jesus turned the question back to the questioner. The man returned by quoting the Torah as any good Jew would have done. His paraphrase of the original has been repeated down through the ages for one simple reason. It captures the essence of what it means to know and follow God. When you strip away all of the debate and denominationalism in the public square today, when you stop arguing about whether Adam and Eve had navels, and whether Christ was an example for us to live by or a scapegoat for our sins these two commands remain. They are the simplest statement of what I’m supposed to do today… to do every day. Today I am to love God, with all my body, all my soul, all my emotion, and all of my mind. And I’m to love those around me. That’s it. That’s really all there is. Every other action, rule, idea, or belief must follow these two commands because if it doesn’t then that action is something man has made up to justify or augment his own beliefs.
Adding requirements to love is something humanity is really good at. From the time of Christ’s death until the time of Paul’s missionary journeys the church had already created groups that followed one teacher or another. The first argument within the church was over whether or not new converts had to be circumsized as was commanded of the Jews in the Law. Today we do it just as much. A believer can’t drink, can’t go to movies, can’t dance, can’t, can’t, can’t…. A believer must be in the church building every time the door is open, must vote this way, must dress this way, must listen to this music, must, must must… I don’t remember that being in the commandment. Love God. Love others. Not there. When you think about it we’ve actually taught the unbelieving world that a “good” Christian will not have certain things in their lives, regardless of the obvious and repetitive evidence to the contrary. People do not doubt the love of God due to the failings of his followers naturally. They do so because we taught them to.
The Bible certainly doesn’t teach that idea. Paul said the world is full of sinners of whom I am chief. Peter wandered into believers full of the Holy Spirit that had not been baptized. And when Jesus told his followers how the world would be able to tell them apart he said it was by their love… not their perfection. This is not to say that God does not have things for us to do, or that there are things we should never be doing. What it is to say is that when someone looks at my life honestly they should see that love is the deciding force in the actions that I carry out.
This is important for two reasons. First I’m going to fail. I’m going to choose incorrectly. I’m going to do things that hurt people and cause problems. If I’m acting out of love then I have no vested interest in defending my actions… only the motivation for them. It becomes quite easy to say… “I was wrong. I acted stupidly. I had the best of intentions but I now see that I was incorrect.” Acting in love then allows me to be stupid without that stupidity being transferred to the God that I serve or pigeon holing me where I feel the need to justify dumb actions in an attempt to maintain credibility.
Second, love is the great common denominator of humanity. Everyone knows what love is… or at least what they think it is. Everyone accepts that it should have some place in my decision making progress. So when I use love as the starting point for any discussion I have with someone about our lives it requires no instruction, no common vocabulary… It doesn’t even require a common language. By using love as the vehicle of belief it no longer matters if the person I’m talking to is Muslim or Christian, liberal or fundamentalist. Does the God you believe in say I should love Him and love others? Then we agree that God is like that, and that’s a very good place to start.