Keep Two Commandments
and The Law can be Fulfilled

                                                                                     by Stephen Gagnon  

"Then one of them, which was a lawyer, asked Him a question, tempting Him, and saying, Master, which is the greatest commandment in the law?
     "Jesus said unto Him, 'thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment.
       ''And the second is like unto it, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” ^{Matt 22:35-40}

Again, the written word shows an attempt of Satan to trap Jesus. The Pharisaical lawyer was used by Satan to see if Jesus, who came to set men free from the law, could indeed pin-point the greatest commandment in the law. Jesus, undaunted by this irreverent question, took the opportunity to reveal what is the greatest commandment, and one more that is like it. If we keep them we will find that we are obeying all that is in the Law and told us by the prophets. These words were given by Christ for the Church, and we, being a part of that body, should examine ourselves to be sure we are upholding this greatest of the commandments.
     
How, then, can we be sure we are loving the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, and mind? The heart is the inner most part of our being. It is known completely by God because He is the searcher of men's hearts. Sometimes there is something hidden deep within our heart that is hidden even from our conscience. This is made evident when the Lord works true deliverance in our lives and sets us free from things within us which we may have never dreamed had been rooted within our heart. Our heart should be a resting place, a dwelling place for God. When we have asked for and received the baptism of the Holy Spirit, we open our inner-most selves to God, His Son, and His Holy Spirit and allow them to dwell within our heart. By allowing ourselves to be this open to God we are, for sure, on the right track to loving the Lord our God with all our heart.

And what about our soul? What part of us does our soul belong to and how can we love the Lord with all our soul. In a number of places in the Scriptures the soul and spirit are mentioned separately from one another. I believe, in this passage from Matthew, the word "soul" has much more to do with our carnal side than our spiritual side which has been made alive to God through the cleansing blood of Christ. The soul, which Jesus instructs us to love the Lord so much with, is very much a part of our emotions. Our soul is the gathering place of so many of our feelings. The Lord our God wants us to love Him with deep affection, with a great desire to please and serve Him. He wants our souls to get excited about knowing Him. He wants joy to spring up inside us when our thoughts are about loving Him. He wants us to love Him without inhibitions. He wants us to rejoice in Him and be free to praise Him in an emotional way with passion. He wants us to love Him with all our soul.

I believe when Jesus said that he wanted us to love the Lord with all of our mind he was speaking about our thoughts, our intellect. He wants our minds to be full of the spiritual things of God. Paul wrote this to the Romans, "that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. For they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh; but they that are after the Spirit the things of the Spirit. For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace.” ^Rom.8:4-6

The Lord does not want us to have our minds full of the things of this world, He would rather have us cast our cares before Him and seek his Spirit. We need to read the Word in order to have our minds cleansed, as the Bible puts it: “by the washing of the water of the Word”. We ought to have our minds filled with the Holy Ghost's teachings that we might know the things which are freely given to us of God that we might have the mind of Christ which is spoken of by Paul in the second chapter of 1 Corinthians. If we seek and possess these things then we will begin to love the Lord our God with all of our mind.

Jesus came not to do away with the law and God's commandments but to fulfill them, and only He was able to accomplish this. We know that the time is past when men had to strive to live up to the law, yet obeying God's commandments are still very important. The great commandment that Christ gave for the Church, the commandment to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul and mind, and the other commandment to love our neighbor, give us a clear and simple way to know how to serve our God. In Hebrews 10:16 the Lord says, "this is the covenant I will make with them after those days, I will put my laws into their hearts, and in their minds will I write them.” Therefore, let us pray that the first step we take in making certain we uphold the laws that have been put into our hearts and written upon each of our minds, is seeking to keep God's greatest commandment and the other which is like it; to love one another.