Loving your neighbor isn’t always easy, but love is always right. First God. Then others. Love is the key. Love is the start and the finish. But there is a problem if we don’t know our neighbor.
Here’s why we do it: we can’t love people we don’t know. You can’t either. Saying we love our neighbors is simple. But guess what? Doing it is too. Just throw them a parade. We don’t think Jesus’ command to “love your neighbor” is a metaphor for something else. We think it means we’re supposed to actually love our neighbors. Engage them. Delight in them. Throw a party for them. When joy is a habit, love is a reflex.--- Bob Goff
We cannot love people we don’t know. In fact when we begin to love people we will begin to like different things, we will have conversations, we will go out of our way to do things a bit different.
In our neighborhood and close to us we have some retired people, a graphic designer and a young Hispanic couple. We talk some to our neighbors, but I have to ask do I or have I really shown that we love them? Love is an action verb. Right?
I have learned the most about being a neighbor from my neighbors.
Those aren’t the neighbors necessarily that live around me. Sometimes it is like the people Jesus talked about in this story. But the problem is we are so busy, we have our preconceived ideas about people and honestly sometimes we really don’t care. Would you agree?
John 13:34-35 NASB
A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.”
I love the way Bob Goff puts it. You should read his book Everybody Alwaysand see how he fleshes this out by loving people. Literally our neighbors are any of the people we encounter during life. That is those close to our house or those far from us.
It is when we love others that we look the most like Jesus. It is when we love our neighbors when people realize we belong to God. The more we love, the more of God is seen.
Do we really love others? Do we believe God and act upon His word when it comes to the people? It is a big deal to love our neighbor. That is because God makes it a big deal.
Galatians 5:14 NASB
For the whole Law is fulfilled in one word, in the statement, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
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