Which Is the Great Commandment?
Then one of them, a lawyer, asked Him a question, testing Him, and saying, “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?” Jesus said to him, “‘You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the first and great commandment.”
Listen to the "Verse by Verse" episode covering this scripture.
The lawyer seemingly intended this as a trick question with many possible answers that would be considered wrong by those experts who had ranked the laws differently.
But Jesus Christ cut to the core of all the laws to identify what is truly most important. Loving God with all our being means we will seek to please Him and do everything else He asks us to do.
This first, great commandment summarizes the first four of the 10 Commandments (Exodus 20:1-11) where God explains how to love Him the way He wants to be loved. Human ideas of how to worship God may be well-intentioned, but to be assured we are pleasing God, we must worship and obey Him the way He wants us to. The first four Commandments, and the entire Bible, show us that way.
Study more about how God wants us to love Him in our article “The Great Commandment.”
