Today’s Devotional: “Getting to The Heart”

If I were to define religion as the world sees it, it would be the practice of keeping and maintaining the laws and traditions that surround and interweave with it.

Jesus, however, essentially nullifies the rules and regulations in favor of a relationship, and within that relationship, all the laws of God are contained and worked out.

Jesus, quoting Deuteronomy 6:5, said, “‘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.” (Matthew 22:37-38)

In Jesus’s time, the religious leaders were devoted to lengthy debates about religious traditions and the laws they considered most important.

Jesus, however, never got caught up in such debates; rather, He taught that these were tied to what He called weightier matters, or the principles they contained.

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you pay tithe of mint and anise and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith.” (Matthew 23:23)

The religious leaders were so intent on keeping the letter of the law that they forgot what the laws were about and the principles God intended to teach us through them.

The reason Jesus was so intent on principles rather than specifics was that no one can keep the full extent of the law. By trying to make some laws greater than others, people would have an excuse for not keeping laws they considered less important, thus discounting God’s word altogether.

Just because we may deny the importance of some of God’s laws doesn’t make them unimportant. They still condemn us, no matter how little we value them.

Our focus should then be on this one commandment, to love the Lord our God and others as ourselves, which produces an overflow that naturally keeps all the other commandments.