The Two Great Commandments are, in a simplified form “Love the Lord, and love your neighbor as yourself.” These represent the full range of people that we should be loving. We read in the work New Jerusalem: “It is not just people as individuals who are one's neighbor but people in the plural. That is, it is any smaller or larger community, our country, the church, the Lord's kingdom, and above all the Lord Himself” (#91). The “neighbor” ranges from the individual person (including oneself), all the way up to the Lord Himself.
Loving the neighbor begins with ourselves. When on an airplane, passengers are instructed to put on their own oxygen mask before helping the person next to them … and yes, this goes for parents with children also. It is hard to help someone when we ourselves are running out of oxygen. This idea is made clear in the Writings where it says, “We all need to make sure that we have the necessities of life, […] since unless we acquire the necessities of life for ourselves, we are not in any condition to extend caring to others” (New Jerusalem 97).
One of the cool things about the Two Great Commandments is that they are really just one Commandment—Jesus said, “The second is like [the first]”—so, if you are living by one of them properly, you are also by definition doing the other one. This is such a valuable idea because some people may struggle with what it means to love the Lord. Well, the answer is you can love the Lord by loving your neighbor. The question remains then: what does it mean to love your neighbor?
In True Christianity, we read “We are to love people according to the type of goodness they have inside. Goodness, then, is actually our neighbor” (#410). Our neighbor isn’t a person, per se, our neighbor is the quality of the person. You see, if our neighbor were the person, then we would love and support them regardless of how they live their life, and regardless of how they treat others. But if goodness in the person is the neighbor, then we can love, support, and nurture that good quality they possess. This is also what makes it possible to love ourselves … or rather to love the goodness in ourselves that is from the Lord.
And this is where we get back to the Two Great Commandments again being one—the goodness that is in a person is actually and literally the Lord with them. Loving the goodness in a person, all the way from ourselves up to the Lord’s kingdom, is, in fact, loving the Lord.