BE LIKE JESUS
How Jesus Loved: The Two Greatest Commandments in Action
Everything hangs on two commands. This page is about watching Jesus live them — and what that means for how you live yours.
Love is not a feeling. It is a direction.
When the lawyer asked Jesus which commandment was greatest, he was asking a theological ranking question. Jesus answered with something bigger: a description of what the entire law is actually about. Love God. Love your neighbor. Everything else is exposition.
The Greek word for the love in both commands is agape — not the love that arises naturally when someone is lovable, but the love that is chosen when it is not. Not the love that comes from affinity but the love that crosses distance. Not the love that persists when it is easy but the love that endures when it is not. Agape is covenantal love — the love that does not depend on the worthiness of its object.
Jesus did not just teach this love. He demonstrated it with every interaction He had. Watching Him in the Gospels — scene by scene, person by person — is the most complete education in what love actually looks like when it is embodied in a human life. This page unpacks that demonstration: love for God in His prayer life, His obedience, His trust; love for neighbor in His attention, His service, His forgiveness, His truth-telling.
The two commandments are not separable. 1 John 4:20 is direct: "If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar." Love for God that produces no love for people is not yet the thing. And love for people that has no root in love for God tends to thin out when it becomes costly. The two sustain each other. Jesus showed us both.
How Jesus loved God — the vertical relationship
The most consistent feature of Jesus's relationship with God is prayer. Not the public prayers that synagogue-goers could watch but private, sustained, sometimes all-night conversations with His Father. Luke 6:12 — "he went out into a mountain to pray, and continued all night in prayer to God." Mark 1:35 — "And in the morning, rising up a great while before day, he went out, and departed into a solitary place, and there prayed." His public ministry came from His private prayer life. The overflow of what He had with God alone was what He gave to the crowds.
Jesus prayed before major decisions (choosing the twelve — Luke 6:12-13), in crisis (Gethsemane — Matthew 26:36-46), in grief (before raising Lazarus — John 11:41-42), in gratitude (feeding the five thousand — Matthew 14:19), and intercession for others (His high priestly prayer for His disciples and for us — John 17). Prayer was not a duty He performed — it was the living center of His relationship with the Father. The Lord's Prayer (Matthew 6:9-13) gives us the architecture of that relationship: intimacy, reverence, submission, dependence, and honesty about need.
"I always do those things that please him." (John 8:29) This was not a statement of performance anxiety — it was a statement of relationship. Jesus's obedience came from knowing the Father, not from fear of punishment. John 15:10 — "If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love; even as I have kept my Father's commandments, and abide in his love." Obedience is how love for God is expressed in action. Not as law-keeping for its own sake but as the natural expression of a relationship with someone whose will you trust.
In Gethsemane, Jesus asked for another way — genuinely, three times. And then He submitted: "not my will, but thine, be done." On the cross, His last words: "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit." (Luke 23:46) Trust in the Father was not the absence of fear or difficulty — it was the choice to rest in the Father's character in the middle of both. This is love for God at its most mature: trust that does not depend on circumstances.
To the Samaritan woman at the well, Jesus described what genuine worship of the Father looks like: "God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth." (John 4:24) Not location, not ritual, not performance for an audience — but the whole person, oriented toward God, with honesty. He modeled this in His prayer life, in His trust, in His refusal to perform piety for others while doing the opposite in private (Matthew 6:1-6).
How Jesus loved His neighbor — the horizontal relationship
Every person Jesus met was a neighbor. The Samaritan woman drawing water alone at noon. The leper calling out from a distance. The tax collector in a tree. The woman whose bleeding made her ceremonially unclean. The dead girl whose father was a synagogue ruler. The Roman centurion whose servant was sick. His neighbors were not curated — they were whoever appeared in front of Him. And He gave each one specific, personal attention.
He saw individuals in crowds
One of the most striking patterns in the Gospels is Jesus's ability to see the individual in the midst of crowds. Mark 5:30 — a crowd is pressing around Him on all sides, and He turns and asks who touched His garment, because He felt power go out from Him. One woman in a crowd of hundreds touched the hem of His robe in desperate faith, and He stopped everything to find her, hear her story, and commission her: "thy faith hath made thee whole." He did not let crowds replace individuals. He saw through the crowd to the person who needed Him.
Bartimaeus was calling out from the roadside as Jesus passed through Jericho. The crowd told him to be quiet. He called louder. Jesus stopped and said: "Call ye him." They brought him. And Jesus asked: "What wilt thou that I should do unto thee?" He already knew. He could see the man's blindness. He asked anyway — because Bartimaeus deserved to be heard making his own request, not just to receive a miracle he had not been invited to ask for. The question was love.
The crowd was invested in Jesus passing through without acknowledging the tax collector in the tree. Jesus looked up, saw him, and said: "make haste, and come down; for to day I must abide at thy house." "Must" — not "shall if it is convenient" but "must." The necessity was love. The crowd murmured. That was the social cost of loving Zacchaeus, and Jesus paid it without negotiation. Zacchaeus repaid half his goods to those he had wronged. The dinner changed him. Love that sees and goes to people tends to do that.
He healed all ten. Only one returned to thank Him. Rather than withholding the nine healings as incentive for gratitude, He healed everyone who asked, knowing most would not return. Love for neighbor in the Gospels is never transactional — it does not require the recipient to perform appreciation before or after receiving the gift.
He crossed every boundary love required crossing
The categories Jesus refused to use as barriers to love include: ethnicity (Samaritans), social status (tax collectors, lepers), gender (women were rarely addressed in public theological conversation), occupation (fishermen and tax collectors became His closest disciples), moral history (Mary Magdalene, the woman at the well, the adulterous woman), and health (lepers, the demon-possessed). If love required crossing a barrier, He crossed it. Every time.
Jesus crossed four barriers in this conversation: ethnic (Jew speaking to Samaritan), gender (male rabbi speaking to a woman in public), moral (her five marriages and current arrangement), and geographic (He was in Samaria, which Jews typically bypassed). He asked for water, entered into genuine dialogue, revealed things about her He had no natural way of knowing, and then disclosed His identity as Messiah to her — a disclosure He was consistently reluctant to make in public. She became one of the first evangelists, bringing her entire town to hear Him. He gave His richest one-on-one theological conversation to the most unlikely recipient.
The Woman Who Learned Her Neighbors' Names
A woman in her early thirties moved to a new city for a job and found herself, six months in, genuinely lonely in a way that surprised her. She had colleagues she liked and a church she attended, but she had not made real connections. The people in her apartment building were strangers she passed in hallways.
She decided to do something deliberate. She started learning her neighbors' names — not just the ones on her floor, but the ones she saw at the mailboxes, the ones who had dogs she passed in the parking lot. She asked about their lives. She remembered what they told her. When the woman downstairs mentioned that her sister was having surgery, she asked about it two weeks later. When the man across the hall mentioned he was training for a race, she asked how it went.
Nothing dramatic happened. No one had a crisis she rescued them from. What happened was slower and more ordinary: a woman who had been widowed two years earlier started stopping to talk to her in the lobby. A young couple started texting her when they had extra food. An older man knocked on her door one evening to bring her tomatoes from his garden, just because he had too many.
Six months after she started, she realized her loneliness was mostly gone — and so was theirs, or at least some of it. She hadn't done anything remarkable. She had just paid attention. The Good Samaritan crossed the road because there was a specific person in the ditch in front of him. Love for neighbor, practiced at scale, turns out to be exactly that: showing up for the specific person in front of you, again and again, until you are known to each other.
"Who is my neighbor?" — answered for today
The lawyer who asked Jesus "who is my neighbor?" wanted a narrow definition. The parable of the Good Samaritan gave him an unbounded one: whoever is in front of you who needs what you have to give. Here is what that looks like in the specific geography of modern life.
The colleague who is struggling, being marginalized, or whose ideas are consistently dismissed. The new person who doesn't know how things work and is afraid to ask. The one whose job is in danger and who can't tell anyone. Loving this neighbor looks like noticing, asking, advocating, and being the person who doesn't just keep walking when someone is in the ditch.
The hardest neighbors. The parent who wounded you. The sibling you have grown distant from. The marriage that has developed its own cold war. Loving this neighbor doesn't mean accepting everything as fine — it means staying in the relationship with enough honesty and enough patience to let repair happen. Jesus loved Peter after the denial. He restored him specifically and personally. That is the model.
Matthew 5:44 — "Love your enemies." The people you disagree with sharply enough to feel contempt for in your chest when you read what they write. The neighbor you have never met and will never meet but whose suffering is real. Love for these neighbors does not require agreement — it requires treating them as human beings made in the image of God, which is what the second commandment actually means.
The Good Samaritan had never met the man in the ditch. He had no obligation. He stopped because he saw a human being who needed help. The daily, ordinary application of loving your neighbor is noticing the stranger who needs directions, the cashier who is having a terrible day, the person waiting alone at a table, the one whose arms are full who needs a door held. These are not grand gestures. They are the ten thousand small applications of "love your neighbor" in a single week.
The Book of Mormon on love
"And charity suffereth long, and is kind, and envieth not, and is not puffed up, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil, and rejoiceth not in iniquity but rejoiceth in the truth, beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things." (Moroni 7:45)
Then Moroni 7:46-48: "Wherefore, my beloved brethren, if ye have not charity, ye are nothing. Charity never faileth...Wherefore, cleave unto charity, which is the greatest of all, for all things must fail — But charity is the pure love of Christ, and it endureth forever; and whoso is found possessed of it at the last day, it shall be well with him."
This is Paul's 1 Corinthians 13, word for word in spirit. Identical across two continents, two centuries, two separate revelatory streams. Both say: without this, nothing else counts. Both say: this is not a virtue you generate — it is the pure love of Christ, received and then given. The convergence of these two witnesses is itself a testimony that this is what discipleship is about.
After Christ's visit to the Nephites, something extraordinary happened — and lasted two hundred years: "there was no contention in the land, because of the love of God which did dwell in the hearts of the people. And there were no envyings, nor strifes, nor tumults, nor whoredoms, nor lyings, nor murders, nor any manner of lasciviousness; and surely there could not be a happier people among all the people who had been created by the hand of God." (4 Nephi 1:15-16) The love described here is not romantic or familial — it is the agape that reorganizes priorities and dissolves the social structures built on self-interest. It produced a society without crime, without poverty, without conflict, for two generations. The two commandments, lived out at scale, make a different kind of world.
"Wherefore, my beloved brethren, pray unto the Father with all the energy of heart, that ye may be filled with this love, which he hath bestowed upon all who are true followers of his Son, Jesus Christ." The mechanism is prayer — not effort, not willpower, not moral progress — but asking. "Pray unto the Father with all the energy of heart." Charity is not something you grow by trying harder. It is something you receive by asking honestly and being a true follower of Christ. The path to love your neighbor is love for God expressed in prayer.
Why the two commandments are one love
Jesus said the second is "like unto" the first (Matthew 22:39). Not similar — like unto. The same substance, a different direction. Love for God and love for neighbor are not two separate requirements you balance. They are one love with two expressions.
1 John 4:19-21 makes the mechanism explicit: "We love him, because he first loved us. If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen? And this commandment have we from him, That he who loveth God love his brother also."
God's love for you is the source. Your love for God is the response. Your love for your neighbor is the overflow. The sequence matters: you cannot manufacture love for difficult people by willpower, but you can receive love from God and let it flow through you. This is what Moroni 7:48 describes: "pray unto the Father with all the energy of heart, that ye may be filled with this love." The asking is the posture. The filling is God's work. The overflow goes to your neighbor.
- Prayer — daily, private, honest conversation
- Obedience — doing what He says because you trust Him
- Trust — "not my will, but thine"
- Worship — spirit and truth, not performance
- Scripture — hearing His voice in His Word
- Gratitude — acknowledging the source of every good thing
- Compassion — seeing people as He sees them
- Service — doing for others without audience
- Forgiveness — releasing the debt as often as needed
- Honesty — saying what love requires saying
- Presence — staying when it would be easier to leave
- Generosity — giving without requiring return
Try This Before Sunday
Choose one person you see regularly but don't really know — a coworker, a neighbor, someone at church. Learn one thing about their life this week that you didn't know before. Not from a social profile — from asking them. Remember it. Ask about it next time you see them. That is how "love your neighbor" starts in Tuesday afternoon.
Track your daily practices in Covenant Path — set a reminder, journal what you notice, and watch your consistency build over time.
Questions about love and the two commandments
What are the two greatest commandments?
Matthew 22:37-40 — love God with all your heart, soul, and mind; love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus said all the law and the prophets hang on these two. Every command in Scripture — every principle, every story, every instruction — is an expression of one or both of these. They are the interpretive key to everything else in the Bible and the Book of Mormon.
What is the difference between agape love and other kinds of love?
Greek distinguishes: eros (romantic love), philia (friendship/affection), and agape (unconditional, covenantal, sacrificial love). The commandments use agape — not the love you feel when someone is lovable, but the love you choose regardless of the other person's worthiness. It is the love God has for you ("while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us" — Romans 5:8). It is the love the father ran to give the prodigal son. It does not wait for the object to be deserving before being given.
Who is my neighbor?
Jesus answered this with the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37). The answer is: whoever is in front of you who needs what you have to give. Not a category of people who qualify. A posture — being someone who stops. Your neighbor is the colleague in distress, the difficult family member, the stranger whose car won't start, the person online who is suffering, the person in front of you who needs what you have.
What is charity in scripture?
Moroni 7:47 — "Charity is the pure love of Christ." Not your love for Christ but Christ's love, received and extended. 1 Corinthians 13 and Moroni 7:45-48 describe it as patient, kind, not self-seeking, bearing and hoping and enduring all things. Paul says without it, everything else is nothing. Moroni says possession of it at the last day is the defining measure of discipleship. Moroni 7:48 says the mechanism for obtaining it is prayer: "pray unto the Father with all the energy of heart, that ye may be filled with this love."
How did Jesus love His enemies?
"Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do" — spoken while being crucified by the people He was forgiving (Luke 23:34). He ate with tax collectors, who were enemies of their own people. He healed the ear of the servant of the man who had come to arrest Him (Luke 22:51). He told His disciples to love their enemies and pray for those who despitefully used them (Matthew 5:44). Love for enemies in Jesus's model is not affirmation of their behavior — it is the extension of grace and care to people who have not earned it and may not receive it.
Continue your study
Learn to love the way Jesus loved — in Covenant Path
Moroni 7:48 says to pray with all the energy of your heart to be filled with the pure love of Christ. Covenant Path gives you daily scripture reading plans, a personal prayer journal, habit tracking with streaks, and AI-guided study companions — so love becomes your daily practice, not just your Sunday ideal.