The Whole Gospel Article is adapted from a chapter in Richard Stearns book, The Hole in Our Gospel.
The Pharisees were always looking at how they could trap Jesus: “Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question:”
“Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?’ He replied, ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbour as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments” (Matt. 22:34–40).
The first—to love God with all of our hearts, souls, and minds— means that we must love God with our whole being—totally and completely. It sits above the many detailed requirements of the Old Testament Law because it recognizes that all forms of obedience to God must first and foremost flow out of our love for Him. Quite intentionally, Jesus then linked the second greatest commandment to the first by saying, “And the second is like it . . .”
In other words, loving our neighbour as ourselves is like loving God with all of our being. So then, Jesus equated loving our neighbours with loving God. If we truly love God, He was saying, we will express it by loving our neighbours, and when we truly love our neighbours, it expresses our love for God. The two loves are fully interconnected and intertwined. We see this same connection in Matthew 25, where the evidence of true faith were acts of love for others that Christ viewed as acts of love for Him. It is also the core of Isaiah 58, where God equated true fasting (authentic worship) with feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and bringing justice to the poor. Notably, both of these “greatest commandments” involve expressing love—to God and to our neighbours.
So what, then, is the third greatest commandment? Here, I take a bit of liberty, but as the last command given to us by Christ prior to His ascension, the Great Commission must surely carry a weight similar to the first two commandments. If the mission Jesus announced in the Nazareth synagogue in Luke 4 described a social revolution with a vision for a changed world, Jesus’ Great Commission, then, challenged His followers to take this revolution to all the nations through making disciples. (Matt 28:16-20)
This “mission of God” is now our mission, and the “whole gospel,” the good news, is born out of God’s love for us and ours for Him. That love, when demonstrated to the world through acts of kindness, compassion, and justice, is revolutionary; and when we become the agents of it, we make credible the message of a Savior who transforms men and women for eternity.
