“Our Three Loves” (Part 2)

Wednesday

Love for Our Neighbors

Love for others with all our heart is another very clear goal also modeled by our Lord and Savior. Remember His clear summary of His desires for us:

“ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’  This is the first and greatest commandment.  And the second is like it:  ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’  All the Law and Prophets hang on these two commandments”. (Matthew 22:37-40)

So we use His model and teachings for some checkpoints:

• Love people of all sizes and shapes and backgrounds. Our prejudices must somehow go out the window, for there are no “little people” in God’s heart or in His practice.

That means love for even the people who are very draining at church, and it causes us to provide programs or ministries that can support them.

• Love for people that shows in saying what needs to be said to them. Paul the apostle summarized his ministry at Ephesus to the elders in Acts 20, saying he never hesitated to proclaim whatever they needed from the Scriptures! (20:24)

Sometimes that just takes nerve. Loving nerve.

• Teach love for others. The commands are everywhere in our Lord’s Word, but they are not obvious to all.

I grew up in a strong Bible-teaching church where there could easily be “racial” jokes outside after the sermon, or strong gossip about people who smoke or drink.

Love taught in a biblical way allows no room for that.

• Pay attention to your community! The issue of schedule comes in, not to make us feel guilty but just to have goals – love for outsiders also, with time to connect with the community, for instance. As if all people are important to us.

• Love forgives. So the goal of love toward others must include dealing with offenses or dropping them. (I sometimes wonder if Jesus told us to go to the person who offended us partly to help us not to get offended so easily! [Matthew 18:15] Some people who offend so easily would be running to people all the time if they obeyed the command to deal with it!)

• Pray for people in need or people where there is friction (Matthew 5:44). Surely everyone has experienced the grace that comes into our hearts when we pray for others, and the change of attitude when it is someone who has been in opposition to us.

Not only pray, but continue with gentle teaching when someone does oppose or cause friction – II Timothy 2:25, 26 is very clear about this.

So we never give up on the scriptures but also on a kind spirit when teaching them.

• Sponsor ministries for people in need. The story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10) is such a good reminder that the “neighbor” we are to love as we love ourselves is the person in need. There’s an old call to pastors, “Find a need and meet it,” that could drive us crazy because there are so many needs. But at the same time when we see a need in the church or in a person’s life, we must be the pastor or shepherd and seek to help.

ü Spend time with people. Love includes time together. We can’t be everything to everybody or in all places, but there is this goal of getting to know people in the church, greeting and bringing joy to the hallways before the services and after, attending some of the activities where we can rub shoulders. It is interesting that when Paul summarized his ministry at Ephesus he said, “You know how I lived among you” (Acts 20:17).

• Say it, one on one appropriately, and to the whole church. I always tried to say this from up front every six weeks or so.

These are just some of the ways we show and grow in our love toward other people, with the goal of somehow coming closer to our Lord’s huge command to love the Lord our God with all our hearts and love our neighbors as ourselves.