Luke 10:27 - The Greatest Commandment.

Luke 10:27 -  The Greatest Commandment.

Luke 10:27 (KJV) Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy 
heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all 
thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself. 

To love God in the sense here stated and implied is to dedicate 
to His service one's entire being, the affections, the life, the 
physical powers, and the intellect. [SDA Commentary] 

The form of the lawyer's answer was entirely correct; what he 
lacked was spiritual insight into the application of this principle to 
his life. He knew the letter of the law, but not its spirit. This 
knowledge comes only when the principles of the law are applied to the 
life........Legal righteousness never satisfies the soul, for 
there is something 
 vital lacking until the love of God takes control of the life. Only as 
a man fully surrenders himself to the influence of that love can 
he truly keep the spirit of the law. [SDA Commentary] 

God's requirement for eternal life is to love Him supremely and 
to love your neighbor as much as yourself. No one can love in these 
ways without the help which God gives through faith in Christ. 
[Disciple SB] 

True holiness is wholeness in the service of God. This is the 
condition of true Christian living. Christ asks for an unreserved 
consecration, for undivided service. He demands the heart, the mind, the soul, 
the strength. Self is not to be cherished. He who lives to himself 
is not a Christian.   
Love must be the principle of action. Love is the underlying 
principle of God's government in heaven and earth, and it must be the 
foundation of the Christian's character. This alone can make and keep him 
steadfast. This alone can enable him to withstand trial and temptation.   
And love will be revealed in sacrifice. The plan of redemption 
was laid in sacrifice--a sacrifice so broad and deep and high that 
it is immeasurable. Christ gave all for us, and those who receive 
Christ will be ready to sacrifice all for the sake of their Redeemer. 
The thought of His honor and glory will come before anything else.  
 
If we love Jesus, we shall love to live for Him, to present our 
thank offerings to Him, to labor for Him. The very labor will be 
light. For His sake we shall covet pain and toil and sacrifice. We 
shall sympathize with His longing for the salvation of men. We shall 
feel the same tender craving for souls that He has felt.   
This is the religion of Christ. Anything short of it is a 
deception. No mere theory of truth or profession of discipleship will save 
any soul. We do not belong to Christ unless we are His wholly. 
COL48-50    

In the end we will be judged not by the creed we hold but by the 
life we live. [Barclay Commentary] 

Our greatest responsibility is to obey the greatest of the 
commandments, which the man quoted accurately from Lev. 19:18 and Deut. 6:5. 
But we cannot rightly love God or our neighbor until we have God's 
love in our hearts (Rom. 5:5; 1 John 4:19). [Wiersbe Expository 
Outlines] 

We must love God with all our hearts, must look upon him as the 
best of beings, in himself most amiable, and infinitely perfect and 
excellent; as one whom we lie under the greatest obligations to, both in 
gratitude and interest. We must prize him, and value ourselves by our 
elation to him; must please ourselves in him, and devote ourselves 
entirely to him. Our love to him must be sincere, hearty, and fervent; it 
must be a superlative love, a love that is as strong as death, but an 
intelligent love, and such as we can give a good account of the grounds and 
reasons of. It must be an entire love; he must have our whole souls, and 
must be served with all that is within us. We must love nothing 
besides him, but what we love for him and in subordination to him. 
(Matthew Henry's Commentary) 

We must love our neighbours as ourselves, which we shall easily 
do, if we, as we ought to do, love God better than ourselves. We 
must wish well to all and ill to none; must do all the good we can in 
the world and no hurt, and must fix it as a rule to ourselves to do 
to others as we would they should do to us; and this is to love our 
neighbour as ourselves. (Matthew Henry's Commentary) 

A person should be a neighbor to anyone he meets in need. [Bible 
Knowledge Commentary] 

The help must be practical and not consist merely in feeling 
sorry. . . Compassion, to be real, must issue in deeds. [Barclay 
Commentary] 

The point is simply that our neighbor is anybody who needs us, 
anybody whom we can help. [Wiersbe Expository Outlines] 

What we learn from Christ's story is that being a neighbor has 
nothing to do with how near we live to others, or how similar our 
religion or race. Being a neighbor depends simply on our humanity - and 
on need.  Anyone you or I come in contact with who has a need is 
our neighbor. And to love our neighbor means to care enough to reach 
out, and help in any way we can. [The 365-Day Devotional Commentary] 

"Because we cannot see Christ we cannot express our love to Him; 
but our neighbors we can always see, and we can do to them what, if 
we saw Him, we would like to do to Christ." Mother Teresa [The 
365-Day Devotional Commentary] 

 "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" The query contains a 
contradiction. What does anyone do to inherit? Why, nothing! An inheritance is 
something someone else has earned. An inheritance comes as a gift. . . 
Inheritance is based on relationship, not on performance.  
Phillips translates Jesus' reply: "Quite right. Do that and you 
will live" (Luke 10:27). 
But this of course is the problem. Do all that! Put all self 
behind; love God purely and perfectly. Love others as you love yourself. 
Do all that and you will live. 
These words sounded doom to the questioner. He had been 
convicted from his own lips. For he, as every person who has ever lived, 
had fallen short of doing "all that." We have all had selfish 
thoughts. We have all neglected to put God first. We have all hurt our 
neighbors. [Victor Teacher's Commentary] 

Those "experts in the Law" we meet so frequently in Luke are 
rabbis, or sages, who devoted themselves to a study of the Old Testament 
and the massive body of interpretations which by this time had grown 
up around it. 
The master interpreter of Judaism who now approached Jesus made 
the typical mistake of members of his class. He asked, "What must I 
do to inherit eternal life?" 
When Jesus asked him his opinion, he rightly answered that 
Scripture calls us to love God supremely, and to love our neighbors as 
ourselves. These two requirements do sum up the religious and moral message 
of the Old Testament. But being "right" created a terrible problem. 
For Jesus then said, "Go and do it!" 
"Go and do it" are words that confront everyone with the 
impossibility of earning salvation. Many of the world's religions have a high 
moral vision. But none provides believers with the ability they need 
to "go and do" the good that faith defines. 
In telling this expert in the Law of God to "go and do" what he 
knew to be right, Jesus forced him to face the fact of his own 
inadequacy, and invited him to look at the Scripture with new eyes. What 
every person must seek is not more rules to follow in a vain attempt 
to earn salvation, but a forgiving and loving God, who has made a 
way for confessed sinners to come to Him. [The 365-Day Devotional 
Commentary]