Matthew 22:37
What does Matthew 22:37 mean?
Jesus said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’
The short answer
In Matthew 22:37, Jesus is asked a lawyer's question—which commandment in the law is the greatest?—and he answers with a single sentence: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind." He is quoting Deuteronomy 6:5, a verse every devout Jew of his day would have recited daily. But by naming it the first and greatest commandment, Jesus does something remarkable: he compresses everything God asks of us into one word. Love.
The three terms—heart, soul, mind—are not a checklist of separate compartments. Together they mean the whole self. Your heart names your desires and loyalties, your soul the deepest life within you, your mind your thoughts and understanding. Jesus is saying that love for God is not one duty among many, or a warm feeling reserved for religious moments. It is the orientation of an entire life. Nothing is held back; no part of you sits this one out.
As J. Ellsworth Kalas puts it, Jesus stamped an "eternal imprimatur" on the word love here—an official, permanent seal of approval. Whatever else people may want religion to be about, anyone following Jesus cannot get around this word. And the verse immediately raises a harder question, the one F. Belton Joyner Jr. takes up: what would it actually look like to love God with all your heart, soul, and mind? In the Wesleyan tradition, that question has a name—Christian perfection, the lifelong hope that love for God and neighbor can grow toward completeness. Matthew 22:37, then, is both a summary and a summons: the simplest statement of what God wants, and the most demanding.
What scholars say
Kalas explains why the word love is inescapable for anyone following Jesus—he gave it an eternal seal by naming it the first and greatest commandment—while Joyner presses the question the verse raises: what loving God with all your heart, soul, and mind looks like, read through the Wesleyan hope of perfected love for God and neighbor.
“But we’re stuck with this word. Jesus put an eternal imprimatur on it. When an inquirer asked him what was the first commandment—that is, what commandment summarized and included all the rest—he answered, “ ‘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 neighbor as yourself’ ” (Matt. 22:37–39). It’s difficult, indeed impossible, to get away from that word love.”
“Wesley based his sermon “Christian Perfection” on Philippians 3:12, a reminder from Paul to keep moving toward perfection (“I press on to make it my own”). Hebrews 6:1 is an instruction toward perfection. The Collect for Purity, prayed in many denominational traditions, pleads: “Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you….” The first commandment given by our Lord is to love God with all of your heart, soul, and mind (Matt. 22:37). The challenge of Jesus is to perfect love of God and neighbor. That is the meaning of Christian perfection. (Because such a life would be fully holy, sometimes the term “entire sanctification” is used as an alternative name for Christian perfection.)”
What it means for you
This verse resists being filed away as inspiration. It asks a practical question of every reader: where does your heart, your soul, your mind actually go? Loving God with all of yourself means your affections, your inner life, and your thinking all point in the same direction—which is rarely true of any of us on a given Tuesday.
The good news is that Jesus states this as a direction, not a pass-fail exam. The Wesleyan tradition speaks of pressing on toward a love that keeps maturing. Start where you are: notice what you love most, bring your thoughts as well as your feelings into your faith, and let this one commandment reorder the rest.
Matthew 22 in context
Matthew 22 finds Jesus in Jerusalem during his final week, facing a series of trap questions from religious leaders—about taxes to Caesar, about the resurrection, and finally, from a lawyer among the Pharisees, about the greatest commandment. Verse 37 is Jesus' answer to that last test. He follows it immediately with a second command, to love your neighbor as yourself, and says all the law and prophets hang on these two. What was meant as a trap becomes the clearest summary of God's will in the Gospels.