What Jesus Demands of The World - Love Your Neighbor!

In his acclaimed book What Jesus Demands of the World, pastor John Piper writes:

The focus of the “second” commandment—“You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matt. 22:39)—is not on whether the receiver of love is an enemy or a friend, but on whether the one who loves desires the neighbor’s good as he desires his own. Its importance is seen by the two stupendous things that lie on either side of it. On one side is the greatest commandment in the Word of God—“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” On the other side is the assertion that everything written in the Law and the Prophets hangs on these two commandments. We are in the company of incomparable superlatives—the two greatest commandments in the entire Word of God, and all of that Word hanging on them. We should take off our shoes in reverence here. There are few texts of Scripture greater than this.

An Overwhelming and Staggering Command
The second commandment seems to me to be an overwhelming commandment. It seems to demand that I tear the skin off my body and wrap it around another person so that I feel that I am that other person; and all the longings that I have for my own safety and health and success and happiness I now feel for that other person as though he were me. It is an absolutely staggering commandment. If this is what it means, then something unbelievably powerful and earthshaking and reconstructing and overturning and upending will have to happen in our souls. Something supernatural. Something well beyond what self-preserving, self-enhancing, self-exalting, self-esteeming, self-advancing, fallen human beings like me can do on their own.

On These Two Commandments Hang the Whole Law and the Prophets
What does this mean? Answering this question opens a window into heaven. We will see this if we start by contrasting what Jesus says here in Matthew 22:40 with what he says in Matthew 7:12. This verse is better known as the Golden Rule. One way to see it is as a good commentary on “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.” In that context, Jesus has just said that God will give us good things if we ask and seek and knock, because he is a loving Father. Then in Matthew 7:12 he says, “So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.”