“Hear O Israel:  The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts.”  Deuteronomy 6:4-6

Moses had watched one generation of Israel wander 40 years in the desert never seeing the Promised Land. Now, he is standing on the East side of the Jordan River with the children of that faithless people, viewing the land of Canaan which was promised by God. This great leader knew that God was about to bring them into this flourishing land; so, he begins to refresh their memory of who God is, the great miracles God performed delivering them from the hand of the Egyptians, and the laws written by God and given to Moses. He wanted to encourage them to rededicate their lives to loving and obeying the one true God.

In the Hebrew culture, the heart was the totality of a person – it signified everything. With that belief, Moses gets straight to the point – not wasting any words but emphatically stating that you must love God with everything in your being and that the commandments must be written on your heart.

In the New Testament, we find where Jesus was questioned by the expert lawyer asking which commandment was the greatest. Jesus answered by quoting the passage from Deuteronomy 6 saying that this commandment was the first and greatest. But Jesus did not stop there. He went on to say, “… the second is like it – Love your neighbor as yourself.”

What is written on your heart? This is the question I have been asking myself. Moses was compelled to recount the stories and the laws one more time in hopes that it would be written on their heart. But what about us? We do not live under the law of the Old Testament because we are under grace that was provided by Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection. So, what is written on our hearts?

I cannot help but imagine that just maybe Jesus was thinking, “you are trying to attack me and trip me up, but I am about to encapsulate all those six hundred laws into two.”  And so, He did. This summary of the commandments was of the utmost importance or Jesus would not have referred to the passage. Why? Because Jesus knew that it was impossible for them to remember all the laws, much less live by them. Jesus came to liberate the Jews from the bondage of the law. And so, He summarized it into two commandments – love God and love people.

We are no different today. These two commands not only freed the Jews from the law, but it frees us as well. As a child of God, we do not live our lives in fear, worrying about crossing all the t’s and dotting all the I’s; on the contrary, we live our lives for Jesus because we love Him, and His Word is written on our heart. The Christian life is not based on performing religious acts. No. We live our lives by walking in a relationship with Jesus. Because of what Jesus did on the cross, we are free to live our lives to the fullest loving God, loving people, and obeying God’s Word.