Jesus and the Greatest Commandment: Beyond Rules, Into Love

Jesus declared that the greatest commandment is to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. Simple, right? Yet when we try to live this out, we quickly realize how much of ourselves resists loving God fully. Why is that? I believe in Jesus, I want to love God, I agree with His teaching — but why isn’t that enough to move my whole being toward Him?

Let us turn to scripture to see if we can find the answer to this conundrum. We see God giving commandments to Israel through Moses in the Old Testament. This was understood as God’s way to show us how to return to Him. Finally, now we can bring heaven on earth by living exactly as God always intended. A kingdom of God. Except, something goes very wrong. Turns out the laws God gave are indeed good and a guide to Him, but people corrupt them. In fact, people end up going against His laws and stop caring about them repeatedly.

What can we do? Well, nothing apparently. The New Testament reveals a startling truth that the Law of God was given to increase awareness of sin (Rom 5:20). The more rules you try to follow the greater your guilt becomes as you eventually break them and go against them. The Bible makes clear that simply trying to follow God’s commandments will never work. Now enter Jesus, and He not only gives us a revolutionary teaching on understanding God’s law, but He elevates the requirements to an even higher standard. 

For example, people don’t call it murder until action has been taken to take another’s life, yet Jesus states that in God’s eyes, murder has been committed when hatred fills your heart. Similarly, adultery is not just a physical act but has already taken place when you allow lust to take hold in your heart. If what the New Testament letters reveal about the Law is true, how is this supposed to make things better for us? Let us try to break this down to try to find the answer.

A One Sided Love

The gospel letters write of the life, teachings, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The letters of the apostles reveal and explain what all that means for us and how we are to live in the reality of his ascension and eventual return. 

Paul devotes much of his letters — especially Romans and Galatians — to exploring how grace changes our relationship with God's commands. While grace frees us from striving for acceptance through the Law, we still face the daily challenge of moral choices. The difficulty comes when trying to bridge theology with practice. 

This truth doesn’t free us from facing moral decisions and dilemmas that test us to do what God commands when faced at such crossroads. Yet, many Christians struggle with this (myself included) when the time comes. I find myself conflicted about doing the right thing and many times giving way to my desires over God’s commandments.

It becomes difficult when you read passages such as “if you love me, you will keep my commandments” (John 14:15). It raises a question: if I fail, does that mean I don’t love him? Similarly, James writes, “For whoever shall keep the whole law, and yet stumble in one point, he is guilty of all” (James 2:10). How do we reconcile our imperfections with these high standards? “If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him” (1st John 2:15). If I find myself longing for “worldly” things occasionally, does that mean God’s love is not in me? 

It becomes easy to find verses to condemn yourself further and further if you already feel guilty for not being enough or feeling like you’re always struggling to keep God’s commandments or loving Him with all that you are. If we find ourselves in this mindset, what do we do? Do we give up? Is it that we are not saved, or good enough, or strong enough? 

Every Christian who earnestly seeks to know God and live biblically encounters this tension. For some, this struggle is rooted in their upbringing, where love may have been conditional. Others wrestle with guilt from past sins or trauma, believing they are unworthy of love. Regardless of the cause, the result is often the same — a sense of never being enough. Overall, the same principle that I want to unpack applies to everyone regardless of the degree. 

The Law, Sin, and the Flesh

I want to start by bringing attention to the letter of Romans and the relationship that Paul ties between the Law, Sin, and our flesh/fallen nature.

Paul explains that the Law, though holy, exposes our sinful nature. When confronted with a command, our fallen nature instinctively rebels. The Law highlights our inability to meet its demands and deepens our awareness of sin, driving us to despair if we rely on our own strength. In fact, Paul explains how the Law can do nothing for me except demand and condemn me. Pointing to that, we will always ultimately fail when we try to be good, because no matter how hard we try, we find that we don’t have the power. The law can tell us what to do but it cannot provide us with the power to do it. We are on our own when trying to be good enough.

Here is another consideration: the Law demands only obedience in our behavior, it cares not of the state of our heart while doing it. It is like a mean and tyrannical boss. He tells you what to do and he expects it done but he doesn’t care how you feel about it and doesn’t provide you with the resources or tools to get the job done. The Law wants us to obey, but it does not care about, nor does it have the power to change, the attitude of the heart. In fact, Paul lays out how the Law works and was given to make our sin worse and cause us to become more guilty before God. The Law can never produce love in our hearts.

So, my question becomes this: when Jesus laid out the most important commandment, doesn’t that commandment still cause us to fall into the same cycle? Not only that, but He is asking us to fulfill a commandment that has no power to help us accomplish it. If what Paul said is true, I will always fail in my pursuit of trying to love God with all my heart, soul, and mind. I will always find myself falling short of living up to that standard, and it will always work to condemn me. How is this not just another rule like thou shall not lie or steal? Perhaps this is more troubling because those laws are simply asking me not to do something behaviorally while Jesus is asking me to do something with every fiber of my being. 

Greatest Commandment: Not a Dead End

So, what do we do? Surely Jesus knew that commandments, although holy and correct, work to only condemn us. I understand that, in context, Jesus was making a point about which commandment matters most and what all the commandments were pointing to, but how do we go about fulfilling that? I think Jesus knew that commandment would have the same effect as all the others. It would still cause us to perpetually fall short. We will always find sin working in us to disqualify us from God’s love instead of bringing us closer. 

The answer comes from not looking just at Jesus’s teachings, but his mission. Jesus gave the commandments, but He also provided the way through his ministry on the cross to approach God before we have earned it, because Jesus earned for us. Approach God for what reason? The answer lies in God’s love for us. One of the most profound insights comes from the apostle John, who lived a long life and surely in his walk with Christ wrestled with his own shortcomings of this Commandment. The conclusions he came to through revelation are deep and profound. 

Our Love for God Flows from His Love for us

John discovered this truth; "We love Him because He first loved us" (1st John 4:19). This simple yet profound truth holds the key. As I meditated on this, I realized that our love for God is in direct proportion to how much we allow Him to love us. John’s cyclical writing style reiterates this point also, “In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:9). I concluded that even loving God can be changed into some legalistic rule and cause us to feel like we are never doing good enough or worthy of His love. What if that is completely backwards? That to love God we don’t work to earn His love, but we approach Him to allow Him to love us. 

Why I think this is also such a powerful shift in understanding is that the only “commandment” I can think of that can’t be changed into another legalistic rule is allowing yourself to be loved. This shift is profound: instead of striving to prove your love, you focus on receiving His love. Vulnerability, not performance, becomes the foundation. The more you open your heart to God, the more His love transforms you, and loving Him becomes a natural response. You find out that everything you are, even those parts you deem unworthy, God loves. The question becomes not “are you loving God enough”, but “are you allowing yourself to be loved by God”?

From Performance to Response

In this mindset you don’t worry about what parts of your life are not loving God, but which parts of you are kept from being loved by God. You see unloving parts of your life not as areas to “fix” or “do better” but areas that you should present to God to be transformed by His love. Your performance doesn’t bar you from being loved, only your faith does. What happens to your heart is that in response to opening those parts you deem unlovable, confessing your shortcomings and sins, allowing God to love you through Jesus and accept all that you are, you cannot help but love Him back! Your love to Him becomes an inevitable response to His love. Think about how Jesus first saves you, then sends you. He first cleans you, then calls you to do His work, He accepts you, and then works on changing you. He comes first, and then you come second.

This principle extends to all relationships. Just as we allow God to love us, we must open ourselves to receive love from others. In marriage, friendships, and community, vulnerability allows love to flow freely. Rather than striving to earn love, we learn to receive it, creating a cycle of mutual care and growth. 

Love and Fear

Contrast brings clarity and John juxtaposes God’s love with the antithesis of fear in the same passage as the key verse we are discussing. The fear of not being enough, not being lovable, people finding out who you really are and rejecting you. Fear prevents vulnerability and keeps a heart closed off from receiving love. This is why John states “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love” (1 John 4:18). A perfect love is reciprocated, not one sided. Fear is cast out once you realize God’s love for you and then love is perfected when you let down all your walls and love Him back in response. Many people struggle with experiencing God’s love because fear prevents them from presenting their whole being. Fear leads them to only offer those parts of themselves that they believe are lovable or acceptable. God requires our whole being to be loved if we believe that we are to love God with our whole being. We will hide and put away parts of ourselves that we are ashamed of and that we don’t believe can or deserve to be loved. Thinking if we honestly opened to God we would be punished or rejected.

Punishment may be what we deserve, but since Jesus took it upon Himself, love and acceptance is what we will find. Won’t truly understand unless you experience it and the only bridge that can gap between our fear and God’s love is faith. To believe that God is who He says he is, and Jesus did what He said He did. 

Open That Which is Hidden

This is my message to this generation: allow yourself to be loved — by God, by others, by yourself. The more you allow love into your life, the more you give it out. The more open you are as a person; the more love can flow freely into you and out to others. 

In response to God’s love, keeping His commandments and doing His will becomes a natural response from the heart. "For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments. And His commandments are not burdensome" (1st John 5:3). Through Jesus' ministry and sacrifice, we are invited to rest in the love of God. This love frees us from striving, fills our hearts, and empowers us to live in obedience. As we embrace this truth, we fulfill His commandments not out of duty but as a joyful response to His unending love.” For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments. And His commandments are not burdensome” (1 John 5:3). The hope of understanding and living out this truth is that each of us come to the same conclusion as John. In the depths of our soul, we can say that, truly, “God is love.”