Read: Matt. 22:34–40
Yesterday we talked about one of the stranger habits Christians have developed over the centuries: How we can become incredibly passionate about things that, eventually, turn out not to have been quite as big of a deal as we thought they were. Organs, pianos, pews, worship styles, church structures, Bible translations, clocks, and end-times charts detailed enough to require both a theology degree and a ruler. Some of those things matter. Some of them don’t. Some of them matter quite a bit. But they don’t all carry the same weight.
When Jesus was asked to identify the greatest commandment, He did not give a long list. He said to love God with everything we are and to love our neighbor as ourselves. Then He said everything else hangs on those two commands. That means one of the most revealing questions we can ask ourselves about our faith is this: What do we actually treat as load-bearing?
What makes us angry? What makes us defensive? What are we obsessed with or constantly talking about? What issue makes us feel like we have to correct everyone else? Those reactions tell us a lot about what we have placed at the center of our Faith. Sometimes we might discover that we have given enormous weight to something Jesus never gave that much weight to, while the things Jesus did put at the center have quietly become secondary and assumed.
Yesterday we said that love is not the furniture of Christianity. Love is load-bearing. So today, take a few minutes and make a short list of the Christian, cultural, or political issues that create the strongest emotional reaction in us. Then ask a harder question: Does the amount of weight I give this match the amount of weight Jesus gave it?
We do not have to stop caring about secondary things. We just need to stop building the house (and the church) on them.