Friday, July 15, 2016

Simply Jesus Pt. 2: Love Your Neighbor as Yourself

The last few days have been interesting to say the least. During a men’s league basketball game Monday night, I seriously injured my surgically repaired right knee. Unless God does a miracle, it’s looking like operation number four.

The next morning, instead of mowing my overgrown lawn myself, I took the opportunity to teach my 12-year-old son how to do it. It was a great bonding experience. Yet, right after he had passed the halfway point, I received a call from my wife saying her car wouldn’t start, and no one in the Walmart parking lot would help jump her car.

I was loaded up on painkillers, so it wouldn’t have been a good idea for me to drive with the kids to help her out. Instead, I called my friend Terry, a deacon at our house church, and asked if he could help Stephanie. He gladly agreed, even though it would mean missing his haircut appointment and driving quite a ways away from where he was.

While Stephanie was waiting, a woman pulled up in front of her car, sobbing. Stephanie approached her and asked what was wrong. The woman said that she just received word of a death in her family. Stephanie asked if she could pray for the woman, and did right there in the parking lot. The grief-stricken woman was tremendously appreciative that Stephanie took the time to minister to her.


Stephanie had been waiting outside Walmart for over 45 minutes when God sent a kind stranger named Jeffery to help her out. He told her, “With all that is going on in the world, there are still people out there that are good and want to serve the Lord.”

Evidently, while the man was working on Stephanie’s car, Terry realized that I had accidently sent him to the wrong Walmart. I blame the painkillers. Anyway, an already long drive grew exponentially. And by the time Terry arrived, Stephanie had just pulled out of the parking lot.  

I must add a small but crucial detail to this beautiful story. My wife and I were both in places of need that day, and God used three African American males to meet our needs. My African American son learned how to mow the lawn to help me out. Terry and Jeffrey, both African American men, inconvenienced themselves to help my wife. All three of them demonstrated what it means to love your neighbor as yourself.

Maybe some people think that detail shouldn’t matter, but I think it does. The media survives and thrives on spewing stories of racial hatred. Tales of racial reconciliation simply don’t sell. However, one of the most popular stories of all time exemplifies what it means to be a neighbor, and happens to be all about racial reconciliation.

One day Jesus was confronted by an expert in the Jewish law, and asked what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus asked the man what he believed the law stated, to which the man replied, “You shall 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 your neighbor as yourself (Luke 10:27).”

Jesus told him to do those things and he would live. Realizing that he was in trouble, the lawyer sought to justify his lack of love by asking, “And who is my neighbor (Luke 10:29)?” Jesus responded by telling the famous parable of the Good Samaritan.

The Good Samaritan is a profound story about a Samaritan man going to incredible lengths to demonstrate the love and mercy of God to a man of a different race that considered him an enemy, and in many ways, less than human.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke about this very issue in his sermon, On Being a Good Neighbor:

“The Samaritan was good because he made concern for others the first law of his life. … One of the great tragedies of man’s long trek along the highway of history has been the limiting of neighborly concern to tribe, race, class or nation. … More than ever before, my friends, men of all races and nations are today challenged to be neighborly. … No longer can we engage in the luxury of passing by on the other side. Such folly was once called moral failure; today it will lead to universal suicide.

In our quest to make neighborly love a reality, we have, in addition to the inspiring example of the good Samaritan, the magnanimous life of our Christ to guide us. His altruism was universal, for He thought of all men, even publican and the sinners… His altruism was dangerous, for He willingly traveled hazardous roads in a cause He knew was right. His altruism was excessive, for He chose to die on Calvary, history’s most magnificent expression of obedience to the unenforceable.”

Dr. King is one of my heroes. He possessed unwavering conviction to living out the teachings of Jesus in the face of unimaginable persecution. And though he passionately sought the welfare and salvation of all people, he refused to sink into the mire of the postmodern universalism of his time. Unlike many today, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would have fit in nicely with the early Christians.

Justin Martyr, a second century Christian apologist wrote this about the second greatest commandment:

The man who loves his neighbor as himself will wish for him the same good things that he wishes for himself, and no man will wish evil things for himself. Accordingly, he who loves his neighbor would pray and labor that his neighbor may be possessed of the same benefits as himself. – Justin Martyr 160CE, Volume 1, p. 399 [CD-ROM]

Do you want to meet Jesus face-to-face and be overjoyed when you see Him? Do you want to be transformed into His image when you receive your glorified body? Do you want to be one with Jesus as He and the Father are one? Do you want to experience the day when everything wrong is reversed, and God wipes every tear from your eye, no more hungering or thirsting, and you know fully even as you are fully known?

To love your neighbors as yourself means to pray and labor for them to experience the same benefits that you seek for yourself. Not just pray, but also labor. Not just for those people you like. Not just for those people who like you. Not just for those people who look like you.

Who needs you to be a neighbor to them today? 

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