In Mark 12 Jesus is asked which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” He answered:
“The most important one is this: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.” (Mark 12:29-32)
We’ve looked in some detail in the program that aired January 5, 2013 about what it means to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength. That’s a tall order. But the second one is equally challenging: to love our neighbors as we love ourselves.
So first, we need to know who our neighbors are, if we’re serious about obeying Jesus. You remember the story in the Bible when an expert in the law was trying to test Jesus, and he asked, “And who is my neighbor?” He expected Jesus to say, “Your fellow Israelites—the people like you.” Instead, Jesus replied by telling him the story of the Good Samaritan, a story most everyone is familiar with.
What Jesus said was that your neighbor is whoever comes across your path who is in need. The priest passed the wounded man by, maybe using religion as an excuse. The law said he would be unclean for seven days if he touched anything dead, and perhaps he thought the guy was dead. The Levite passed by as well, perhaps out of fear or just simply because he didn’t want to get involved! But the Samaritan man took care of this beaten, half-dead man as though he were his own family. This was his neighbor.
Who are the people God has brought into your life? What about that co-worker—you know, the one who really gets on your nerves! He or she is your neighbor.
What about that sister-in-law—or mother-in-law, or some other family member. Those relatives that became part of your family when you were married—well, they are your neighbors.
We are to love people who are not like us. Recently a woman came to our church to tell how God has delivered her from the sex industry, where she was a dancer in a strip club for years. And now she has a ministry to reach those women. God has brought her across our path and we are partnering with her to reach out and love those women who are not like us at all, but they are our neighbors.
What about people of other religions? How do you feel when you see a Muslim woman, all covered up by a burqa? Underneath that covering is a woman, and if she is somehow in your life, she is your neighbor. What about the women all over the world who are trafficked in slavery? Do you even know about their plight? They are our neighbors, and we need to love them as we love ourselves.
Wow, that’s a big assignment that Jesus gave us—to love our neighbors as ourselves. Let’s begin by taking a look at how we love ourselves. There’s a famous poem that begins: “How do I love Thee? Let me count the ways.” Well, here’s my version: How do I love me? Let me count the ways:
· I love me so much that I do whatever I can to make my life comfortable and easy.
· I love me so much that I feed myself when I’m hungry.
· I love me so much that I do whatever I can to ease any pain I have.
· I love me so much that I don’t let other people take advantage of me.
· I love me so much that I buy nice clothes for myself to wear.
· I love me so much that I defend myself when anyone tries to harm me.
This list could go on. By the way I live and the way I treat myself, it’s obvious that I love myself. Interestingly, Jesus did not say that I should not love myself, but that I should love my neighbors just like I love myself.
Loving yourself is not wrong. Appreciating who you are in Christ and how God has created you is good. In fact, I think you have to come to a place of loving yourself—liking the way God created you, being content with who you are—in order to be able to love others. If you have for some reason not yet come to that place of loving yourself appropriately, you will be more self-concerned, self-conscious, and much less likely to think or care about others. So, yes, it’s not wrong to love yourself knowing, God loves you and you were created in his image.
But then we have this commandment from Jesus to love others like we love ourselves. So that means, making the lives of others comfortable and easy when possible, feeding them when hungry, helping them find healing for the pains of their lives, defending them, meeting their physical and emotional needs when we can. Loving others as we love ourselves comes right down to where we live—it means doing the nice things for others that we naturally do for ourselves because we love ourselves.
Do you know someone in need right now? If you were in that same situation, what would you want someone to do to help you? Then, do that for the person in need. That’s loving others as you love yourself. Pretty simple and uncomplicated, isn’t it? It’s the second greatest commandment from our Lord, and we need to take it seriously.
But how do we love people we don’t like? Is it even possible to love people you don’t like? Yes, when we understand what kind of love this is, then we can indeed love people we may not particularly like. I know of no scriptural directive that commands us to like everyone, but there are many that tell us to love everyone. We often think that love begins with like, and then moves on to love. But that’s because we misunderstand the word love. The kind of love that we need in order to love people we don’t like—to love others as we love ourselves—is agape love, God’s kind of love.
Now, agape love is not a feeling. Though we may experience nice feelings, agape love does not depend on how we feel or how others feel about us. We can express agape love whether the feelings are present or absent, whether they are positive or negative.
Agape love is an action. The Bible tells us that we know that God loves us because he sent his Son into the world to redeem us. We know that Jesus loves us because he gave his life for us. God’s kind of love is an action, not a feeling. That tells me that I can love people toward whom I do not necessarily have good feelings. I can love people toward whom I have no feelings at all.
I have to tell you there are times I don’t like myself very well. Do you know what I mean? Times when I said something or did something that was just not right. Times when I know Jesus wasn’t pleased with me. But even when I don’t like myself very well, I still love myself enough to take care of my needs. I still feed myself and help myself and make myself comfortable. So, if I’m going to love others as I love myself, then I’m going to love even those I don’t like; those who irritate me; those who disappoint me; those who make my life difficult.
Think: Who are the people you will be dealing with today or tomorrow that you really don’t like? Will you ask God to help you understand how to love them, even though you don’t like them?
As I was thinking about what Jesus meant when he said we are to love our neighbors, I thought about women whose lives are so difficult—here and on the other side of the world. These are my neighbors—and yours, too. Women caught in human trafficking; women who are abused simply because they are women; women who are prostitutes; women who exist on very little food, dirty water, and live in terrible conditions. I know about these women because occasionally I have seen them, but many I know about simply because I’ve begun to educate myself about the plight of women in this world.
If I want to follow my Lord’s teaching and love my neighbor as I love myself, then I need to love even those I’ve never met—and most of whom I never will meet—and yet I know how great their need is. I can do something to help them. It may not seem like much, but I can do something.
Have you ever thought about the obligation we have to love those people in far-off places because they, too, are our neighbors? It’s so easy to put them out of our minds and just live our day-to-day lives as though they don’t exist. But I believe we are under obligation, as people of God, to love those people who are in desperate conditions and who cannot help themselves.
How can we love those neighbors? Well, first we need to become aware of who they are. Have you read Half the Sky, a book which documents the plight of women in these horrible conditions? I recommend that you do. And then you can love those neighbors by praying for them—yes, praying for faceless people who you know are in need.
Then you can support trustworthy organizations that are literally there with those people, helping them. There are many good Christian organizations, such as Samaritan’s Purse, World Vision, and one our church helps called As Our Own, where they rescue girls from the brothels in India and raise them as their own.
And maybe—just maybe—God would privilege you to go to one of those places in the world and love those neighbors personally. He has a right to do that, you know, if you are his disciple, and it would be a privilege. I encourage you to think outside your box about how you can love these easily-forgotten neighbors and give God permission to use you in any way he chooses.
In the last few weeks God has been impressing on my mind that I just need to concentrate on these two things: loving God and loving others. I want that to become the mantra of my life. I want to think about it daily, pray about it regularly, and practice it consistently. I just want to take seriously what Jesus told us are the two most important things in the world: Love God and love others.
We have created a simple card to remind us of these two priorities. You can put the card in a place where you’ll see it everyday, because if you’re like me, you’ll need reminders. The enemy will do his best to make us forget what we should remember, but sometimes a simple little reminder can keep us focused on the main thing: Loving God and loving others.
If you really want to join me in this pursuit of the two most important things in the world, I’d love to send this card to you along with a transcript of this message. Or, you can go to our website where you’ll find it there and you can print your own card. Either way, I hope you’ll recognize the importance of taking Jesus seriously and doing what he told us to do: Love God more and more with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, and loving others as you love yourself.
Join us for the 25th Annual Weekend Getaway – April 19-21, 2013. The Theme is: The Life You Were Meant To Live. Kay Arthur is our Special Guest Speaker. She has an exciting and practical approach to the Scriptures. Come and learn from her and Mary, enjoy worship music, relevant workshops, great food and fellowship too. Don’t miss out. Register Today at www.christianworkingwoman.org or call our office at 630-462-0552