THE MODEL
The Greatest Commandment Model™
A research-based framework for Christian well-being, built on the relational structure of Luke 10:27-28. It gives Christians, practitioners, and churches a shared language for understanding where someone is thriving and where they are not, and a practical path for growing closer to God, themselves, and others.
"You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. You shall love your neighbor as yourself."
LUKE 10:27-28, ESVWHERE IT COMES FROM
The Greatest Commandment is not a new idea. It is the summary Jesus offered of the entire law, rooted in the Shema of Deuteronomy and carried through centuries of Christian thought. Augustine organized his theology of love around it. Contemporary Christian Psychology literature returns to it again and again as the most concise articulation of what a rightly ordered human life looks like.
What has been missing is a framework that takes that structure seriously at a psychological level, that maps what we know from well-being research onto what the commandment actually describes, and that gives people something they can use. The Greatest Commandment Model™ is built to do that.
HOW IT IS STRUCTURED
The model is organized around seven domains drawn directly from Luke 10:27-28.
Three are relational and hierarchically ordered. Four describe the dimensions of how we love God with the whole person.
THE THREE RELATIONAL DIMENSIONS
Love the Lord is the primary and organizing dimension of the model. It is not reducible to religious practice or doctrinal knowledge but describes the full quality of a person's covenantal relationship with God, the source from which everything else flows. It encompasses the whole person across four dimensions: Heart, Soul, Mind, and Strength.
Love Yourself and Love Others emerge from that primary relationship as overflow, parallel to one another and grounded in the same foundation: every person, including yourself, bears the image of God and has been declared worthy of love by the One who made them. These two dimensions are not subordinate in value, but they are dependent in order.
THE FOUR DIMENSIONS OF LOVING GOD
Heart
The internal orientation of the whole person toward God, encompassing thoughts, desires, motives, and purposes.
Mind
The cognitive and interpretive faculty, encompassing understanding, reasoning, and evaluative judgment submitted to God.
Soul
The affective and felt inner life, encompassing the full range of emotional experience offered to God in wholehearted trust.
Strength
The active, embodied capacity of the person, encompassing every ability, effort, and resource directed toward God's purposes.
WHAT IT IS AND WHAT IT IS NOT
The Greatest Commandment Model™ is a psychological framework informed by theology. It is not systematic theology, and it is not a replacement for scripture, pastoral care, or the life of the church. It is a tool for understanding where a person is in their journey and what might help them grow.
It is descriptive before it is prescriptive. It names what Christian well-being looks like across the full range of the person before offering any path forward. That matters, because you cannot support growth in someone without first understanding where they actually are.