Matthew 22.37-40
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”
Agape love—love as God designed it—is the preeminent virtue in the Christian faith. Empowered by the Holy Spirit, love is a powerful force that motivates the followers of Christ to serve others and do what is uncomfortable but necessary.
The virtue of love transcends emotion and sentiment. Feelings flow from authentic love, but feelings don’t direct authentic love. Love should be the servant of your will, not the slave of your emotions.
Counterfeit love, on the other hand, is indulgent, undiscerning, and selfish. It is driven by the old nature and preys on people’s emotions and sentiments. It pursues “feel good” and avoids “do good.” Our world is in desperate need of much more agape love, and much less counterfeit.
As Jesus says in the Matthew passage quoted at the top, there are two great commandments. The first is to love God with every dimension of your being. The second is to love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and Prophets depend on these two commands, Jesus says.
Romans 13.10 teaches the same truth: “Love is the fulfillment of the law.”
Loving other people is the natural and necessary extension of true, wholehearted love for God, because people are made in the image of God. This is the moral and ethical foundation for every command that governs how we ought to treat our fellow humans.
In the New Testament, James points to the image of God in men and women as an argument for allowing even our speech to be seasoned with grace and kindness. It is utterly irrational, he says, to bless God while cursing people who are made in God’s own likeness (James 3.9-12).
Proverbs 17.5 says, “He who mocks the poor reproaches his maker.” Neglecting the needs of a person who is “hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison” is equivalent to neglecting the Lord himself. “Inasmuch as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to Me.” (Matthew 25.44.45)
Here is an important point: God’s image was placed in humanity at creation, not at redemption. Although the image of God was seriously distorted by Adam’s fall, it was not destroyed. The divine likeness is still part of fallen humanity; in fact, it is essential to the very definition of humanity. Therefore every human being should be treated with dignity and compassionate love, out of respect for the image of God in them.
“God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him” (1 John 4:16).
