The first and greatest commandment is this: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

But the foundation of our very existence is that God has loved us and called us His own. Before we are anything else, we are loved, we are accepted, we are enough.

Far too much of church life and faith either rejects the primacy of this foundation or assumes it is already in place and, thereby, puts the burden on the individual Christian to begin fulfilling the greatest commands. Instead of first teaching, preaching, and embodying the love that God is, we move straight to regulations on sin and holiness as though these were first order concepts. Sin and forgiveness will never mean anything unless we first know the depth of love and relationship that can then be broken. Lives will not be transformed until we give up control and learn to trust in the faithfulness of God’s abiding love. Without the foundation of love and relationship first, Christianity will be, at best, a noisy but irrelevant gong; at worst, an active participant in the harm done to children of God in the name of vapid and ultimately meaningless conceptions of righteousness.