Luke 10:25-29
On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
“What is written in the Law?” he replied. “How do you read it?”
He answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”
“You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.”
But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
Once upon a time, people knew their neighbors. They talked to them, had cook-outs with them, and went to church with them. In our time of unprecedented mobility and increasing isolationism, it's hard to make lasting connections with those who live right outside our front door. We have hundreds of "friends" through online social networking, but we often don't even know the full name of the person who lives right next door. (From an online review of the book: The Art of Neighboring, by Paythak and Runyon. Much of what I am sharing here today comes from ideas in that book.)
When the lawyer asked that question, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan and the importance of helping the total strangers. In Jesus’ day it was safe to assume that his audience would be able to love those nearest to them, their literal neighbors, the people most like them, who shared the same heritage and geography and in many cases, family. So when Jesus told the parable of the Good Samaritan he was stretching their concept of neighbor to include even people from a group they didn’t like.
We are all very familiar with that inspiring parable that teaches us that everyone is our neighbor. But what if Jesus also meant our actual neighbors, the people who live closest to us? We could have this problem, that “when we aim for everything, we hit nothing. If we insist we’re neighbors with everybody, it is very easy to end up being neighbors with nobody.” Ouch. We must pray that when we ask ourselves “Who is my neighbor?” we are not hoping to find a loophole as the wily lawyer did. Let us remember that the most obvious answer to the question is, those who live nearby are my neighbors.
As we understand the parable today we tend to go straight to the stranger on the side of the road and no longer include the person in the house next door. These days, even though we are still a people who need community, we go looking for it in our cars, and largely avoid working in the community that lives all around us. We often don’t even know the names of our actual physical neighbors who live next door.
Who is your neighbor? Who are your neighbors? Who lives next door, or just down the road from your house? Who lives in the eight other houses that are closest to yours? Why eight? Just look at your bulletin cover. If your house is thought of as in the middle, then who lives on each side of you and at each corner? How well do you know your actual neighbors whose houses are closest to yours? They are your immediate mission field.
Perhaps Christians have for too long been making “neighbor” into a safe metaphor that allows us to believe we are carrying out the Lord’s command when we visit soup kitchens and do acts of kindness to complete strangers. That way the mission field is a part of life we visit occasionally, if we even do that. But if we are called to love our actual next door neighbors, then each one of us lives right smack dab in the middle of our own personal mission field designed and appointed to us by God himself.
Now here is the mission. Love your neighbor as you love yourself. And guess what. If you do that you will also be loving God by obeying his commandment to love. Guess what else. The only way you can really love your neighbor is if you first love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. Guess what else. You can’t obey either of those commandments unless you first know how much God loves you, that he loved you first, while you were still a sinner, that Jesus came and died on a cross to fix the problem you have with sin, and that he rose again from the dead to prove his power and love.
For those who believe that gospel He also gave us the Holy Spirit, so that we are filled with His love and enabled to obey him! Then, when we hear the call to love our neighbors, and think of the people next door or down the road, we are led to pray for them. We will want to bless them. Even if in our own thinking we may feel they are not worthy of our blessing, or that they have been bad neighbors, mean and hurtful, we will be led by the Spirit to forgive them, and then find a way to bless them just by being a good neighbor.
Perhaps the most freeing concept is that there is inherent value in just being a good neighbor, even if your neighbor never becomes a Christian. There is inherent value in being a good neighbor, even if you never get to have a conversation about Jesus. You should want to bring him up. You should try to share the gospel. But for those who put you off and don’t want to talk about the God, or the Bible or religion, you can still be a good neighbor.
But guess what. Most people do want to talk about God, the Bible, religion and their opinion of Jesus. Just ask them what they think of these things without being concerned about making them hear you. If you listen, you will hear what they think and you may be given a spirit guided way to share your opinion too. Especially if they notice they’ve been doing all the talking, they might just get around to asking you what you think. People like to compare notes. And even if you never get to say what you think in contrast or correction of their views, at least you know better how to pray for them.
Truly our ultimate desire in engaging our neighbors is to share the gospel with them and our ultimate motive is to see them turn to the Lord. But this must never be our ulterior motive. By that I mean that we don’t want to use engaging our neighbors as a thinly-veiled guise to try to “win them,” only to give up on them when they do not respond positively. Here I want to quote from a book about the Art of Neighboring. The authors say, “The ‘agenda’ we need to drop is the well-meaning tendency to be friends with people for the sole purpose of converting them to our faith. Many so desperately want to move people forward spiritually that they push them according to their timetable, not according to how God is working in them. It’s tempting to offer friendship with strings attached.”
They clarify: “Sharing the story of Jesus and his impact on our lives is the right motive, but it cannot be an ulterior motive in developing relationships. We don’t love our neighbors in order to convert them; we love our neighbors because we are converted.” Christians have long been taught that we should do good things solely to have a spiritual conversation that can move people toward conversion; but Jesus never called us to use a bait-and-switch approach where we are friends only so we can share the gospel. “We are called to love our neighbors unconditionally, without expecting anything in return.”
This doesn’t mean ignore the importance of sharing the gospel. It means relax and prayerfully let God lead. You love your neighbors. God will open the doors of communication as he sees fit.
Now I want to encourage you and make this a really practical message with a big idea to take home with you. So I have a hand out that I want to share with you now. (Distribute this: Here’s a little devotional and practical project for you.) Picture a tic-tac-toe board with a house in each square. Your house is in the middle square.
1. First, write the names of
the people who live in the house represented by each of the boxes. If you can
give both first and last names, that’s great. If you’ve only got first names,
that’s okay too. You might have to use your imagination a little to decide
who your eight nearest neighbors are if they aren’t just all around you as in
the diagram. For example, if you live on
a long road with no side streets or blocks to go around, you will probably list
the four next houses to your left and the four next houses to your right.On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
“What is written in the Law?” he replied. “How do you read it?”
He answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”
“You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.”
But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
Once upon a time, people knew their neighbors. They talked to them, had cook-outs with them, and went to church with them. In our time of unprecedented mobility and increasing isolationism, it's hard to make lasting connections with those who live right outside our front door. We have hundreds of "friends" through online social networking, but we often don't even know the full name of the person who lives right next door. (From an online review of the book: The Art of Neighboring, by Paythak and Runyon. Much of what I am sharing here today comes from ideas in that book.)
When the lawyer asked that question, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan and the importance of helping the total strangers. In Jesus’ day it was safe to assume that his audience would be able to love those nearest to them, their literal neighbors, the people most like them, who shared the same heritage and geography and in many cases, family. So when Jesus told the parable of the Good Samaritan he was stretching their concept of neighbor to include even people from a group they didn’t like.
We are all very familiar with that inspiring parable that teaches us that everyone is our neighbor. But what if Jesus also meant our actual neighbors, the people who live closest to us? We could have this problem, that “when we aim for everything, we hit nothing. If we insist we’re neighbors with everybody, it is very easy to end up being neighbors with nobody.” Ouch. We must pray that when we ask ourselves “Who is my neighbor?” we are not hoping to find a loophole as the wily lawyer did. Let us remember that the most obvious answer to the question is, those who live nearby are my neighbors.
As we understand the parable today we tend to go straight to the stranger on the side of the road and no longer include the person in the house next door. These days, even though we are still a people who need community, we go looking for it in our cars, and largely avoid working in the community that lives all around us. We often don’t even know the names of our actual physical neighbors who live next door.
Who is your neighbor? Who are your neighbors? Who lives next door, or just down the road from your house? Who lives in the eight other houses that are closest to yours? Why eight? Just look at your bulletin cover. If your house is thought of as in the middle, then who lives on each side of you and at each corner? How well do you know your actual neighbors whose houses are closest to yours? They are your immediate mission field.
Perhaps Christians have for too long been making “neighbor” into a safe metaphor that allows us to believe we are carrying out the Lord’s command when we visit soup kitchens and do acts of kindness to complete strangers. That way the mission field is a part of life we visit occasionally, if we even do that. But if we are called to love our actual next door neighbors, then each one of us lives right smack dab in the middle of our own personal mission field designed and appointed to us by God himself.
Now here is the mission. Love your neighbor as you love yourself. And guess what. If you do that you will also be loving God by obeying his commandment to love. Guess what else. The only way you can really love your neighbor is if you first love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. Guess what else. You can’t obey either of those commandments unless you first know how much God loves you, that he loved you first, while you were still a sinner, that Jesus came and died on a cross to fix the problem you have with sin, and that he rose again from the dead to prove his power and love.
For those who believe that gospel He also gave us the Holy Spirit, so that we are filled with His love and enabled to obey him! Then, when we hear the call to love our neighbors, and think of the people next door or down the road, we are led to pray for them. We will want to bless them. Even if in our own thinking we may feel they are not worthy of our blessing, or that they have been bad neighbors, mean and hurtful, we will be led by the Spirit to forgive them, and then find a way to bless them just by being a good neighbor.
Perhaps the most freeing concept is that there is inherent value in just being a good neighbor, even if your neighbor never becomes a Christian. There is inherent value in being a good neighbor, even if you never get to have a conversation about Jesus. You should want to bring him up. You should try to share the gospel. But for those who put you off and don’t want to talk about the God, or the Bible or religion, you can still be a good neighbor.
But guess what. Most people do want to talk about God, the Bible, religion and their opinion of Jesus. Just ask them what they think of these things without being concerned about making them hear you. If you listen, you will hear what they think and you may be given a spirit guided way to share your opinion too. Especially if they notice they’ve been doing all the talking, they might just get around to asking you what you think. People like to compare notes. And even if you never get to say what you think in contrast or correction of their views, at least you know better how to pray for them.
Truly our ultimate desire in engaging our neighbors is to share the gospel with them and our ultimate motive is to see them turn to the Lord. But this must never be our ulterior motive. By that I mean that we don’t want to use engaging our neighbors as a thinly-veiled guise to try to “win them,” only to give up on them when they do not respond positively. Here I want to quote from a book about the Art of Neighboring. The authors say, “The ‘agenda’ we need to drop is the well-meaning tendency to be friends with people for the sole purpose of converting them to our faith. Many so desperately want to move people forward spiritually that they push them according to their timetable, not according to how God is working in them. It’s tempting to offer friendship with strings attached.”
They clarify: “Sharing the story of Jesus and his impact on our lives is the right motive, but it cannot be an ulterior motive in developing relationships. We don’t love our neighbors in order to convert them; we love our neighbors because we are converted.” Christians have long been taught that we should do good things solely to have a spiritual conversation that can move people toward conversion; but Jesus never called us to use a bait-and-switch approach where we are friends only so we can share the gospel. “We are called to love our neighbors unconditionally, without expecting anything in return.”
This doesn’t mean ignore the importance of sharing the gospel. It means relax and prayerfully let God lead. You love your neighbors. God will open the doors of communication as he sees fit.
Now I want to encourage you and make this a really practical message with a big idea to take home with you. So I have a hand out that I want to share with you now. (Distribute this: Here’s a little devotional and practical project for you.) Picture a tic-tac-toe board with a house in each square. Your house is in the middle square.
2. Second, write down some information or facts about each of the people in that house. I don’t mean facts that you could observe by standing on the road and looking at their house (“Drives a red car”) but facts that you’ve gathered from speaking to them (“Works for a bank,” “Grew up across town.”).
3. Third, write down any in-depth information you know about each of the people. This could include details like their career plans or religious beliefs—the kind of information that comes from real conversation.
4. Over the coming weeks and months pray and try to visit each of these neighbors and learn more about them, starting with name, and adding details as you develop relationships. In the rest of this work sheet I have given you space to write additional information as you learn more about each of your neighbors. But I know that most houses have more than one person in them, so you will probably end up praying for and caring about more than eight people. Just make the best use you can of this resource. Let God guide you. Let God’s love for all people move you. Even if your neighbors are the worst of sinners, remember that Jesus died for them too. They need to hear the gospel! Jesus came not for the righteous, but to save sinners!
5. Also, you have these invitations to our Thanksgiving dinner. Perhaps you could invite one of your neighbors. And if you want to give more than one invitation to our dinner, just ask me to make some more for you!
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