Loving God With Everything You've Got, and Your Neighbor as Yourself

When asked what the greatest commandment is, the gospels record the answer Jesus gives as being “And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” But he continues by saying the second is like it. “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” So also, Jesus says, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” And in what else we read throughout the Scriptures, a great many of God's commands have to do with how specifically we go about loving one another - loving particular neighbors as we love ourselves, depending on their relationship to us and our corresponding responsibilities to them. For instance, husbands are told to love their wives and hold fast to them. Wives are told to submit to their husbands in everything. Children are told to obey their parents. Fathers are told not to frustrate their children, but to bring them up in the instruction of the Lord. Always, whether in the Old Testament or the New Testament, under the old covenant or the better one we enjoy the blessings of now, the way we relate to one another is tied back to the overarching claim God has on our devotion to Him. Based on His infinitude and our finitude, however, we find that we have none of the omnis. We are limited in our knowledge, presence, energy, time, attention, ability, and resources. And so we have to prioritize.  When prioritizing, we will often find competing claims for our devotion and service, our time and attention, and even our resources and ability. And when we find ourselves so challenged, the solution from the Scriptures is not to please everyone. Rather, we work as unto the Lord. We perform for an audience of One, even as we let our lights so shine before all men. The loop and circuit is complete to make this Christian life go, and to power it. Thus, children are not told to obey everyone's parents. They are commanded to obey their own. Husbands are not commanded to love all the wives in the world. They are commanded to love their own wives. Wives are not commanded to submit to all the husbands they know, but their own husband. And so on and so forth. All else being equal, we see that any Christian man who shrugs about providing for his relatives, especially the members of his own household, is worse than an unbeliever. But that is to say too that his first priority is the members of his own household, and only secondarily is he to expend himself in caring for his extended family. Yes, we are told to do good to everyone, as we have opportunity. But we are also told to do good especially to those who belong to our household of faith - that is, Christian brothers and sisters. So if we have opportunity in the way of surplus time, attention, energy, and wealth, our extended Church family gets first dibs after our extended blood relations, and our extended family is served only after the members of our immediate family and household are taken care of. And, yes, children are to obey their parents. But adults who are married have to reorient their priorities under God. Wives no longer obey their father and mother if they submit to their husbands in everything. So also, husbands no longer obey their father and mother in everything if they are leaving said parents and holding fast to their wives. Interestingly enough, in this way, we actually serve best both God and the Church, and both those inside our family and in the broader community. Wives and children loved and served well are a blessing, and all the above testifies to the goodness of God even as it lets our reasonableness be known to all. Thereby too we exalt a nation by righteousness, and we also seek the welfare of the city by showing how to have strong, healthy families.