The two towers that provide the foundational strength of the golden gate bridge are like the two great commandments. They each provide strength to the whole structure but they also rely on each other for strength.
Jesus connects our heavenly upward gaze of loving God with our earthly outward gaze of loving our neighbor.
Our love of God and love of neighbor must be balanced and intertwined.
How do we build our own bridge towers of loving both God and neighbors? Start by drafting an idea of what our bridge will look like.
Today I invite you to look at this stately bridge—with its ascending twin towers built on a strong foundation—through a gospel lens.
In the twilight of Jesus Christ’s ministry, during what we now call Holy Week, a Pharisee who was a lawyer asked the Savior a question he knew was nearly impossible to answer: “Master, which is the great commandment in the law?” The lawyer, “tempting him” and seeking a legalistic answer, with seemingly deceitful intent, received a genuine, sacred, divine response.
“Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.
“This is the first and great commandment.” Hearkening to our bridge analogy, the first tower!
“And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” This is the second tower!
“On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” The remaining elements of the bridge!
To love the Lord centers first on your heart—your very nature. The Lord asks that you love with all your soul—your entire consecrated being—and finally, to love with all your mind—your intelligence and intellect. Love for God is not limited or finite. It is infinite and eternal.
For me, the application of the first great commandment can sometimes feel abstract, even daunting. Gratefully, as I consider further words of Jesus, this commandment becomes much more graspable: “If ye love me, keep my commandments.” This I can do. I can love Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ, which then leads to prayer, scripture study, and temple worship. We love the Father and the Son through the payment of tithes, keeping the Sabbath day holy, living a virtuous and chaste life, and being obedient.
Loving the Lord is often measured in small daily deeds, footsteps on the covenant path: for young people, using social media to build up rather than tear down; leaving the party, movie, or activity where standards might be challenged; showing reverence for things sacred.
Loving God is not accomplished in the abstract but in concrete actions demonstrating our love. As indicated, many of those concrete actions are small and daily.
Jesus bridges our heavenly upward gaze, to love the Lord, with our earthly outward gaze, to love our fellow men and women. One is interdependent on the other. Love of the Lord is not complete if we neglect our neighbors. This outward love includes all of God’s children without regard to gender, social class, race, sexuality, income, age, or ethnicity. We seek out those who are hurt and broken, the marginalized, for “all are alike unto God.” We “succor the weak, lift up the hands which hang down, and strengthen the feeble knees.”
Giving help to others—making a conscientious effort to care about others as much as or more than we care about ourselves—is our joy. Especially … when it is not convenient and when it takes us out of our comfort zone. Living that second great commandment is the key to becoming a true disciple of Jesus Christ.
Russell M. Nelson
Jesus further taught, “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” This is very instructive. There is an important interdependency between loving the Lord and loving one another. For the Golden Gate Bridge to perform its designed function, both towers are equally strong and with equal power to bear the weight of the suspension cables, the roadway, and the traffic crossing the bridge. Without this engineering symmetry, the bridge could be compromised, even leading to collapse. For any suspension bridge to do what it was built to do, its towers must function together in complete harmony. Likewise, our ability to follow Jesus Christ depends upon our strength and power to live the first and second commandments with balance and equal devotion to both.
Love of God and love of our fellow men work in concert, they do not compete with each other for our attention. If they seem to compete it is because we are misunderstanding what one or both of them actually look like.
We are commanded to love everyone, since Jesus’s parable of the good Samaritan teaches that everyone is our neighbor. But our zeal to keep this second commandment must not cause us to forget the first, to love God with all our heart, soul, and mind.
Dallin H. Oaks
How do we build our own bridge of faith and devotion—erecting tall bridge towers of both loving God and loving our neighbors? Well, we just start. Our initial efforts might look like a plan on the back of a napkin or an early-stage blueprint of the bridge we hope to construct. It might consist of a few realistic goals to understand the Lord’s gospel more or to vow to judge others less. No one is too young or too old to begin.
Over time, with prayerful and thoughtful planning, rough ideas are refined. New actions become habits. Early drafts become polished blueprints. We build our personal spiritual bridge with hearts and minds devoted to Heavenly Father and His Only Begotten Son as well as to our brothers and sisters with whom we work, play, and live.
I want to consider what my love of God should look like and how I can strengthen it as well as what my love of neighbor should look like and what steps I can take to strengthen it.
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