The main and plain points
Let us treat Christ's new commandment as an essential of the faith, loving your fellow Christians as Christ did, and as he still does. We are to be beacons of the love God's bears for each of us, and be that for one another. Doing so is the very thing that will lead us to visible unity before the unsaved world. (See John 13:33 ff.) It should have seemed odd to us that the triune one God would give us only a twofold summary of our responsibilities, to love God wholeheartedly and our neighbors as ourselves. In fact we have a threefold calling. Christ's twofold summary of the Hebrew Law, love God and love your neighbor, sums up the Christian's responsibility toward the matters covered under the old law of righteousness. But it is incomplete: It takes us only so far as Moses and the Prophets. Christ's New Commandment, which brings us up to gospel times, he added to those two: to love your fellow Christian believers as he did. That tells us how to be the church of his