Loving Your Neighbor Is Not Easy

Counting college and seminary residences along with the homes my wife and I have had, I have experienced a diversity of neighbors. Young and old, outgoing and hermits, complainers and pollyannas, neighbors come in a wide range of forms. Some were easy to tolerate. Others took an effort to maintain a “speaking terms” relationship.

Those neighbors who share a common property line or apartment wall are easy to define. You see them on a regular basis. You know what vehicle they drive. You know something about their daily life. You see them change as time passes. Depending upon how much you have in common, your relationship with your neighbor will be vary from family like to being on speaking terms with the occasional conversation to an awareness someone is living there but yet you know nothing about the person’s life.

Jesus, however, made this neighbor thing a little more involved and a little more expansive. He basically said if you share the same planet, you have the responsibility to act like a neighbor and act in love.

Mat 22:36-40 "Teacher," he asked, "which is the greatest commandment in the Law?" Jesus answered, "'Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.' This is the greatest and the most important commandment. The second most important commandment is like it: 'Love your neighbor as you love yourself.' The whole Law of Moses and the teachings of the prophets depend on these two commandments."

With all of our rules, laws, and guidelines, the one great power to keep us civilized is love. Laws never made neighbors get along. Laws never made us respect each other. Love, however, born out of a relationship with God through Jesus Christ, opens our eyes to the value of others unlike any other influence.

To love God first with all that we are is to allow our love for others to be shaped by that love. Love for God with our total being becomes self-sacrificial, other-focused, and containing a long range perspective. God’s love for us, which came first, dictates how this is all lived out. In the Old Testament we find a beautiful example in the life of Hosea and his relationship with his unfaithful wife Gomer. In the New Testament Jesus reveals a father’s love in the story called the Prodigal Son or Loving Father (Luke 15). The Apostle Paul describes this kind of love in his First Letter to the Corinthians, chapter 13.

In none of these biblical examples is God’s love revealed as a recipient-controlled love. The giver offers this special love. The recipient chooses to accept it or reject it as a freely made decision. God says here is my love. I freely offer it, but I will not change its nature to get you to accept it.

This led the Apostle Paul to say we can only do so much to get along with our neighbor. Hosea couldn’t force Gomer to be faithful. In the parable of the Prodigal Son, the loving father could not force his wayward son to come home. Paul in his letter to the church in Rome plainly says you can only do so much in seeking to show love to your neighbor. Then it is up to them to respond appropriately.

Rom 12:18 Do everything possible on your part to live in peace with everybody.

A follower of Jesus Christ is to express love to God and from that relationship express an influential love for neighbors. In the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10), Jesus says the concept of neighbor can never be restricted to geography. Being a neighbor is a response to need. Being a neighbor is seeing the world through eyes of love, God’s kind of love.

So loving your neighbor is not easy. It means being sensitive to needs in the life of the other. It means relating in a self-giving, compassionate way. It means to do what you can to show God’s kind of love flowing into and through life to others without compromise or judgmentalism.

No, loving your neighbor is not easy, just Christlike.

Grace Is Being Loved When You Lose

No one likes to lose. No one likes to feel they have disappointed someone else, especially someone who is special to them. When you lose and you know you did not give your best, that makes matters even worse.

I am a University of Kentucky Wildcat basketball fan. I won’t deny it and I won’t apologize for it. I have been a fan of the team for over fifty years. I have cheered for them when they won and I have cheered for them when they lost. I celebrated when they won and I was disappointed when they lost, but I never stopped being a fan.

That college team is special to me. Among people living in rural Kentucky, they are a very special team. We will stand by them in the good times and in the rough times. We love our Wildcats all the time even when they lose.

We call that grace. We learned it from God. Even when those Wildcats play worse than we know they can, even when they get beat by a weaker team, we still care for our Wildcats. That is how God looks at us. He looks at us with his heart filled with grace. He knows we have messed things up. He knows we could have done better. He knows we could have beaten the temptation, but now we are stuck with the loss.

Rom 3:23  everyone has sinned and is far away from God's saving presence.

That’s right. We all have lost. We all were given a choice that would have made us winners, but we made the wrong choice and we lost. We missed out on the best win of all. We failed God and missed his saving presence. Now we must suffer the consequences.

Except that God intervened and gave us grace. That means he loves us even when we lose. Even when we fail and disappoint him, he still loves us and gives us grace. That grace takes away the loss and gives us a win instead. It isn’t because we earned it. No, we lost it on our own. He gives us the win because he loves us that much. He put the loss on his Son Jesus Christ.

Rom 6:23  For sin pays its wage---death; but God's free gift is eternal life in union with Christ Jesus our Lord.

Grace is being loved when you lose. We all have lost. None of us will ever have a perfect season or a perfect record or a scorecard without a big L for loser on it. We all have disappointed our Creator and committed the sins that deserve death. Grace intervened and said no. Jesus died instead.

We can get our winning season back in the eyes of God in very simple fashion. All we have to do is accept God’s plan for giving us a winning season. A winning season in God’s plan is to have a personal relationship with him through faith in his Son Jesus Christ.

The Apostle Paul wrote the Book of Romans to explain to his readers how they can have a winning life. It all revolves around Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Jesus won the game for us when he died for us taking our failures, our losses upon himself. God looks at the scorecard now and he doesn’t see the losses in our column. Jesus took those all away. God sees our lives through the perfect score of his Son.

Faith in Jesus is our part of the game.

Rom 10:9  If you confess that Jesus is Lord and believe that God raised him from death, you will be saved.

Even when my Kentucky Wildcats lose a basketball game, I will still be on their side cheering them on. Even when I lose, when I fail in life, God is still on my side cheering me on. His grace is love in action in my life.

Obeying the Law

It is expected of every citizen and guest in our country. Obey the laws of the land. We tend to obey some as a matter of convenience, as in highway speed limits. In spite of our sometimes appeal to grace in such cases, we feel society has a much better chance of staying civilized if everyone obeys the laws, liked or not.

Some laws were passed we now know did not contribute to a healthy society. We have also seen laws overturned or rejected because later legislatures or courts felt those laws were not beneficial to the citizenry. Every generation has battled with what constitutes a legal system that promotes the best culture for society as a whole. Each generation has had to define the absolutes that would be the foundation for a healthy society.

Our three branch government was designed to help the citizenry reach the best set of laws for the country with the least amount of bloodshed. The American Civil War showed even then it was not always possible. Yet we still believe a strong executive branch working in conjunction with a strong legislative branch subject to a fair and independent judicial branch will in the long run give us a society offering the most benefit to the most people. Nonetheless, as Martin Luther King, Jr. has said, “America is a dream.” It is a work still in process.

Jesus declared the laws of God would be valid as long as time endures. (Matthew 5:17-19) Jesus and the Pharisees both had high views of the Law, but the friction came when the purpose of the Law was expressed. The best examples were the laws surrounding the observance of the Sabbath.

One of the Ten Commandments, honoring the Sabbath, was seen in Jewish history as a sign of the covenant between God and his people. (Exodus 31:16-17) Countless secondary laws were generated to explain and protect the holiness of the seventh day. The legalistic Pharisees saw these laws as protecting the holiness of the Law and the holiness of God.

Jesus turned all this upside down when he said, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” (Mark 2:27-28) As important as it was to honor the day acknowledging God as Creator of all that exists, Jesus still insisted the law could not stand in the way of doing what was right.

Rather than pointing to the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament (Exodus 20, Deuteronomy 5), Jesus said there were two greater commandments that superseded these ten words. These two revolved around the concept of love as defined by the nature of God. (Matthew 22:35-40) Love God and love your neighbor as yourself.

Obedience to the law in the eyes of Jesus must begin with a recognition God deserves our first and our best. As such we acknowledge his authority over everything else. It is not a matter of saying, “Hey, God, we love you,” and then go do what we want. Recognizing God for who he is translates into a mindset, a value system, and a lifestyle that say all we do is designed to honor the One who created us and loved us first. (I John 4:10-12, 19)

Jesus refused to allow this first and greatest commandment to stand alone without outward expression. Your neighbor must be the recipient of a love defined by how God has taught you to love yourself. God loved you enough to allow his Son to die in your place as the punishment for your sins instead of you catching the penalty. To love your neighbor in such a way is far more than just making sure you keep your dogs out of his roses!

Jesus told a parable of one who lived out the law of loving one’s neighbor. In that brief story the main character risked everything to help one who in a reverse situation would have rejected him. (Luke 10) That is loving your neighbor – help even those who would not help you.

Obey the law. Obey the right laws and you won’t have to worry about the others.

I Don't Speak Legalese!

This week in the mail our office received our updated insurance policy for the association covering vehicles. For the first time, I have to admit, I went through every page, more than 25 of them in the document, printed front and back. I fell asleep at least twice. I had to get a mug full of the most caffeinated stuff in the frig. I took a tour of the hallway. Finally I finished the thing.

Our vehicular policy covers a trailer. We don't have a van or bus. We don't have a fleet of cars. We have a trailer, one twelve-foot trailer. Yet our laws require that all this legalese be in writing to protect us or the insurance company or somebody somewhere. A lot of the language faintly resembled studies in my Hebrew classes or perhaps systematic theology. I fell asleep with those as well.

While buying our home, I asked the attendant real estate lawyer was it really necessary to have to sign a stack of papers approaching five inches think. She said yes. Her explanation should have come as no surprise.

Every paragraph in the stack of documents was there because at some time someone somewhere had tried to beat the system and get the benefit at the expense of someone else. The paragraphs represented attempts to protect the innocent, the gullible, the ignorant, and people like me who just don't like taking the time to read all the fine print. We have to include the legalese to provide order.

I don't speak legalese. I have no interest in learning legalese. I am quite content to allow someone I trust to speak the language for me while I speak a language that comes more easily to the workings of my mental gifts. Yet I cannot escape the presence of legalese in my culture and context.

Jesus had the same problem. He knew the Old Testament Law was there for a reason. He knew it revealed the holiness of the Creator. He knew that it helped define the relationship that was required between Creator and creature. He just didn't stop with saying that is all there was.

The laws are on the books because someone tried to get the best of someone else to their own benefit with no regard for the cost to the other. To keep order we pass laws, lots of laws. The laws serve a purpose. Yet believers in Christ are called to go a step farther. We are called to go beyond the basic statement of mutual respectful treatment and move to the place of the divine nature.

Jesus lumped all those Old Testament laws under two commands, love God with your total being and love your neighbor as yourself. (Matthew 22:34-40) If we are obedient to these two laws, then all the others will be fulfilled. All those paragraphs talking about consideration for others will be fulfilled. All those statements about protection of rights and respecting the needs of others will be fulfilled. All the laws of the land will be satisfied as we love God with all that we are and love our neighbors as we would wish to be loved.

I don't speak legalese. I don't like legalese. Even though he knew every jot and tittle of the Law perfectly, I get the idea that Jesus didn't care much for the language either.