In a time when Christianity is often used to justify division, power, and partisanship, I found myself asking: What does it truly mean to follow Jesus? For me, the answer came not through a new theology or denomination, but through a return to something ancient, radical, and profoundly simple—Jesus’s summary of the law: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:37–39).

In an age where Christianity is often co-opted by power, partisanship, and exclusion, becoming a Great Commandment Christian felt like a way home. Not a retreat from orthodoxy, but a return to the heart of the Gospel: love for God and love for neighbor.

After all, it was Jesus’s own way of summarizing the faith. It seemed simple enough to understand and clear enough to follow. At its heart, this identity brings together God’s holy love—holiness, righteousness, justice, sanctification—and love itself, not in tension but in unity.

To become a Great Commandment Christian is to allow this two-fold command to become the interpretive lens for everything else: Scripture, theology, church life, ethics, and personal discipleship. This identity is not a dilution of orthodoxy, but a distillation of it. It brings together God’s holiness and God’s love, transcendent and immanent, into a single call to live in communion with Him and in compassion toward others.

Yet being a Great Commandment Christian doesn’t simplify the faith. It raises the bar. It requires a more demanding and holistic form of discipleship. Rather than offering easy answers or rigid systems imposed from the outside, it calls for spiritual formation and spiritual disciplines that shape us from within.

The 613 commandments in the Old Covenant symbolized God’s desire for holiness to permeate every aspect of life, yet Jesus distilled the essence of holiness into one requirement: love God and love neighbor. The Great Commandment unites holiness and love in a way that reframes our discipleship, not as rule-keeping, but as transformation.

This way of being Christian offers not simplicity, but clarity; not withdrawal, but engagement; not ideological tribalism, but spiritual renewal. This essay is both testimony and theological reflection. It is the story of leaving behind an increasingly politicized evangelicalism and walking toward a faith rooted in the Great Commandment. My aim is to clarify what this identity entails, how it differs from what many have walked away from, and why it offers a faithful path forward in our divided age.........

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