One Commandment to Rule Them All

Begin with the end in mind and the Bible

Photo by Norbert Braun on Unsplash

There’s a question that’s been on my mind lately. A lot of questions have been on my mind. But there’s one that touches on most if not all of them. What is the goal? When we read the Bible and teach people about a Christian way of life, what is the goal? That’s always an important question when we take on any quest. One of Steven R. Covey’s habits of highly successful people was “Begin with the end in mind.” So if the quest is to follow Jesus, what end should be in our mind?

Some people say the goal is to free ourselves from sin. The Hebrew word for sin sometimes means “to miss the mark.” You can’t help but miss the mark if you don’t know what the target is. You think you hit the bullseye, and you did. But it was the wrong target.

What if I said Jesus told us what the goal is, and we missed it? I will qualify this by saying I am usually suspicious when someone says they found something in the Bible that no one has ever found. The Bible is the most carefully studied and scrutinized book in history. It’s hard to believe, at this point, that anyone could find something that no one noticed before. But when I read this statement from Jesus, it seems so glaringly obvious what the goal is. And yet, it’s been hiding in plain sight for almost two millennia. And it’s so simple we…