And Whatever Other Command

The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery,” “You shall not murder,” “You shall not steal,” “You shall not covet,” and whatever other command there may be, are summed up in this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” - Romans 13:9

Paul is going out on a limb here (he had a habit of doing that, and sometimes it got him in trouble (remember when he had to escape Damascus by being hidden in a basket?). Take a moment and think about that phrase “and whatever other command there may be.” According to holy Scripture, whatever commands you can dig up in the Bible (the Pharisees liked to summarize that there were 613 total), they are ALL summed up in the single command: Love your neighbor. So love really is what makes the world go round.

This is a huge statement for those who follow Jesus. If everything is summarized (“held together, brought to a head, finished off” could be different translations) by love, then it’s high time that we got to working hard on love and stopped sweating the details. What if the counter-cultural, sacrificial, servant-hearted, putting-others-first, blessing-our-enemies kind of love that Jesus embodied was what we were all about? Seriously - take a moment and think about this: if you were free to really, truly love people and not follow some external list of ‘shoulds’ and ‘should nots,’ how would that change how you entered into conversations and situations and relationships and conflicts and your budget and managing your time?