Love your neighbor as yourself.
—James 2:8
According to a Wall Street Journal article, the average American commits three crimes a day, unknowingly violating some of the more than 300,000 federal laws. The U.S. Tax Code alone weighs in at over 60,000 pages. You have to do a lot of reading to stay on the right side of the law.
The Ten Commandments served up a simpler list. Then the lawyers got involved and it ballooned from 10 to 613.
Thankfully, we don’t have to wade through a Leviticus equivalent. The New Testament freed us from that. Check it out: Rom. 7:6; 10:4; Heb. 10:1-18.
Paul reduced it to the point of saying that the entire law is summed up in a single command: “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Gal. 5:14). James called that “the royal law” (Jas. 2:8).
The command to love everybody isn’t
easily lived, but it’s easily understood.