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by the Rev. Jim Ball, Ph.D.
Founder & Chair,
Evangelicals For Harris
The Great Commandments have never stopped and can never stop being great — because they’re from God, given to us by our Lord, Jesus, God’s son.
To love God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and our neighbor as ourselves — these are the two Great Commandments that fulfill the Lord’s Prayer for God’s Kingdom to come wherever His will is done.
What are we created for? What is our purpose? What is our calling? To fulfill the Lord’s Prayer by fulfilling the Great Commandments.
But have the Great Commandments to love God and others stopped being great for Christians in the United States? For too many, I fear the answer is yes.
What we need is a spiritual and moral reawakening to make the Great Commandments great again in our hearts.
A key reason for our sorry spiritual state is that extremist versions of politics are poisoning our country, and have even infected the Church, sowing division, conflict, and suffering. Toxic politics is now being combined with false teachings cloaked in religious language that assert government power should be used to enforce beliefs and practices on others. Some label this “Christian Nationalism.” But there is nothing Christian about it. It knows not the Great Commandments. It knows not love. It knows not freedom, which is foundational to our loving relationship with God and others.
Because toxic politics is poisoning our country and even the Church, does this mean we should retreat, protect ourselves, and abandon politics and engagement as citizens?
Certainly not! That is exactly what false teachers and those pushing toxic politics want. To leave others at the mercy of those who have no mercy is not what love would have us do.
The Bible teaches us that God sought to work through the kings of Israel and Judah, commanding them to establish justice and protect the vulnerable. They were the seat of political authority.
In our form of government, a representative democracy, the seat of authority lies with the citizens, or “We the People” as the Constitution begins. As the Declaration of Independence states, governing authorities derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
For those of us who are striving to make the Great Commandments to love God and others great again in our hearts, we dare not abandon the public square to those driven by hate and fear. We cannot toss aside our gift of citizenship when the going gets tough and protect ourselves, hiding in our homes, our churches, our fearful hearts. This is the opposite of loving others as ourselves. True love, Christ’s love in our hearts, does not hide. It does not stand by passively in the face of injustice; it is not passive in the face of need. We cannot in fear hoard true love in our hearts. True love must be expressed, or it dies. We must let true love live.
Part of making the Great Commandments great again in our hearts, part of this moral reawakening, is to exercise the power of love in the public square, to show others that real love is rooted in freedom, not fear, not force. As Jesus showed us, real love does not try to dominate. Real love liberates, even in the face of persecution. To love others is to let them become who God created them to be, which can only happen through freedom. Real love lets freedom ring.
There has never been a time more in need of a spiritual and moral reawakening to the Great Commandments to love God and others and fulfill the Lord’s Prayer. We must be witnesses of Christ’s sacrificial love in our homes, our churches, our communities, and in the public square as we combine our citizenship with discipleship.
Today this means standing up to the toxic politics of fear, force, and hate through the power of love. To do this we must make the Great Commandments great again in our hearts. May it be so.