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.
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