“Jesus answered, ‘The most important is “Listen, Israel! The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.” The second is, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” There is no other command greater than these.’” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Something a little different this week. I have the privilege of chaperoning some of our kids to camp this week for what I suspect will be the final time. That’s a little bittersweet, I’ll confess. It’s a lot to do this each year, but it really does make for a fun week. Like the last few years, this week we’ll take a break from our normal fare to explore a bit what the kids are learning this week. These will likely be pretty short reflections as time is fleeting at camp, but as least you’ll get the gist of it. Without further ado, here we go.

The theme this year is “Higher,” with the focus being on how the kids can go further and higher in their relationship with God than they’ve yet experienced. The best way to grow in our relationship with God through Jesus is to learn to love Him more. The more we love Him, the deeper we’ll understand who He is and why living life His way makes more sense than any other way.

Well, when we live life His way, we’ll be making the world around us better for the people living in it. This, in turn, will make the people around us who are not already following Jesus more inclined to follow Him. Indeed, when you meet someone who is really kind and generous and gracious with you, and who seems to always have your best interests at heart before even their own, if you are at all a good-willed person, you are likely going to be inclined in their direction, having at least some interest in what has made them this way to see if it can do the same for you.

When that happens, the Gospel is coming full circle. You’ve embraced it, and you’ve helped someone else embrace it who will in turn help yet someone else embrace it. That’s how God designed His kingdom to grow: one loved person at a time.

With all of this in mind, the theme verse for the week is something Jesus said in response to a question that was a hotly debated topic among the rabbis of His day. What is the greatest commandment in the Law? Which commandment, if we get that one right, will put us in a good place for getting all the others right?

I love the way Mark in particular narrates the context from out of which Jesus gets asked this particular question. Jesus was in the temple teaching during His final week before going to the cross. On this particular day, wave after wave of Jewish religious leaders were coming and asking Him their hardest questions.

Their goal was not to learn from this famously insightful and charismatic rabbi. Their aims were entirely more disingenuous than that. They sought to trap Him by one of these questions into saying something incriminating they could then use to credibly accuse Him of something that would successfully turn public opinion against Him, allowing them the space to publicly justify His arrest and eventual execution. The trouble was, Jesus wasn’t playing ball with their efforts.

Over and over again, Jesus just kept answering their questions perfectly. Opponent after opponent went away embarrassed that they couldn’t beat Him in a Battle of legal or theological wits. He was just too smart for them.

Finally, one scribe who wasn’t part of the group effort was sufficiently intrigued by the scene that he stepped in and asked his own question. This likely infuriated the other religious leaders who had undoubtedly meticulously coordinated their efforts to bring Him down. This guy, rather than trying to trip Jesus up, just lobbed Him a softball which He proceeded to knock out of the park, something even the scribe himself couldn’t help but to admit.

Jesus’ response to this famous question was to quote the Shema from Deuteronomy 6:4. This was a good starting place, as most scholars agreed it was the most importing foundation pillar for the whole law.

“Listen, Israel! The Lord our God, the Lord is one.” The God Israel worshipped was not one of many gods. He was just one God. He didn’t need multiple other gods to help Him govern and oversee various aspects of creation. He was sovereign over everything. He was just one God.

Moses didn’t stop there in his farewell address in Deuteronomy, though, and neither does Jesus. They both go on to tell us what we should do in light of God’s nature. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.”

If God is who the Scriptures proclaim Him to be, then loving Him is the only response that makes any sense. That is, choosing Him and exclusively Him over and against any other option is the only rational thing to be done. And, it’s not enough to just throw Him a bone of devotion. We need to love Him with our whole selves.

We attach ourselves emotionally to Him. We delight in Him with the very substance of our being. We adjust our thinking so that our minds and mental output are consistent with His character. And we throw ourselves wholly into this love. We choose Him and commit ourselves to Him with every fiber of our being.

But then, instead of stopping where most other rabbis did, Jesus adds one more log to the fire. If we are going to successfully love God with our whole selves, the natural result of this in and through our lives is a growing love for others. In fact, as Jesus Himself put it: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

This, Jesus said, is actually a command second only in weight to the previous one. In Matthew’s telling of this exchange, Jesus notes that this second command’s relationship to the first is that it is “like it.” That could be taken a few different ways, but all of them indicate there isn’t much daylight between the commands to love God and love people in terms of their importance. They are hardly opposite sides of the same coin. They’re more like the same sides of a single coin.

In other words, if you love God, you are going to love people. Period. If you don’t love people, then any profession to love God is a lie. On the other hand, if you don’t love God, you won’t love people very well. You may do it as much as you are capable of, but with God’s love flowing through you, your capacity will necessarily be much, much higher. The comparison between God’s love through you and your love on your own won’t play very well in your favor.

So then, the real lesson of this first day is that loving people well is what it looks like to go higher in our relationship with God. Just about nothing else matters more than this. This is because God loves people. It’s an essential part of who He is. You can’t love God, therefore, without this love’s being reflected through you toward others. That’s simply how it works.

I’m excited for our second (and first full) day of camp. I’ll share with you more about it tomorrow.