URC Daily Devotion Thursday 26 February 2026

St Matthew 22: 34 – 40

When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him.  ‘Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?’  He said to him, ‘“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.”  This is the greatest and first commandment.  And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.”  On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’

Reflection

Wouldn’t life be simpler if this was the only rule that we needed to follow?  To love God with all we have and to love our neighbour as ourselves.  Yet we have libraries full of individual laws and rules that need to be remembered and followed and enforced and punished.

Even our creeds have got longer and more detailed since their inception.  The first creed “My Lord and My God” (John 20:28) has been expanded to a full page of text with almost every detail spelt out.

I wonder if this is a reflection on our ability to “follow the rules” and “sing from the same hymn sheet” or an attempt to install and maintain control over what is done and believed.

The God we love cannot be contained into a box or a rule book or a creed, and I wonder if that is what scares us into writing prescriptive statements to cope with that awesomeness?!

If only life required the rule of love to be the only rule, and all our actions were borne out of that, then wouldn’t life be simpler?

Maybe I’m a dreamer, but we run the risk of making our God too small and our faith too restricted if we try to dot every i and cross every t in our attempt to understand what is beyond comprehension.

With love as our motive, everything else is done through that love and, in an ideal world, everything works to the benefit of all.  Until that ideal world exists, I guess we’ll just have to keep following the rules!

Prayer

God of love, we try so hard to understand you by reducing you to a list of rules and regulations.  Help us to see beyond our limitations to see your wonder.  Help us to use your love as the foundation for everything we do and say and so allow our understanding to go beyond the written word.  With love as our guide show us how to live by loving you and each other with all that we have. Amen