Nursing Home - Loving Your Neighbor Pt. 1 Series

? How did you feel? Fearful, Angry, Hopeless, alone???

? How did you react?

Sometimes when we experience significant loss or change, we want to withdraw and seclude ourselves.

Our room becomes our hiding place and our TV becomes our best friend.

What do you think are some of the most important things a person needs when he or she first moves into to a place like this one?????????????

Left alone???? For how long?

What does isolation do to a person???????????????????

How important are caring friendships?

Yes, friendships are essential!!!

Here is a definition of a caring friend. Tell me if you agree:

A caring friend is someone who wants to know you and actually cares for you, someone who desires to be a blessing to you, and is willing to acknowledge you and your feelings, to protect you, and even respectfully correct or disagree with you when it might help you.

Is that a good definition?

This kind of friendship is rooted in the love of God.

When God speaks of His love for us and our responsibility to love our neighbors, He is speaking about a caring friendship.

(Repeat this definition)

Nitty Gritty:

Let’s look at what God says about love in Verse #1:

Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God.

Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.

Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.

~ 1 John 4:7-8

? Selfless love is the characteristic that identifies us as God’s children.

? A life of love is what we have been born into.

If you don’t care about your neighbor, your room mate, the lady down the hall…even the most difficult person down the hall, then how much of God’s love do you have within yourself?

Does God base His Love for us on our being worthy of His love?

Jesus is speaking in Verse #2.

Listen to what he says about loving one another:

Jesus said, “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

~ John 13:34-35

? This is not a suggestion for a better life, it is a command

What is a command????????

? Selfless love is the primary characteristic that identifies us as Jesus’ disciples.

Love is more than being friendly.

Being friendly, nice, or pleasant is good and important, but it is only the first step toward the kind of love that Jesus has called us to share.

Jesus was personal with the woman at the well. Jesus was personal with the blind man at Bethesda. He wasn’t just a nice man, right??? He immediately made it known He cared for who He was talking to and what they were going thru.

He empathized.

Let’s look at how God showed His love to us. Look at Verse #3:

This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. ~ 1 John 4:9-10

Anybody know what “atoning” means?

To Atone is to Pay For

? A loving friend looks at the needs of others and gives what they can to help that person to stand, or to become complete, without any expectation in return.

How many of us know somebody who keeps score on favors? Or somebody who remembers our every wrong doing and reminds of them endlessly?????? That’s not a true friend!

? God loved us so much that He gave Jesus, His greatest treasure, to make us complete.

? God did not wait for us to reach out to Him, He came to us first.

How would our lives be if Jesus never came to us? Think about that for a minute????

? Do you know anyone who does not know Jesus?

? Do you know someone who is not experiencing the blessing of Jesus’ grace and friendship?

? Do you know someone who does not have a friend to value, help, or care for or even about them?

The God who lives in you, loves them, and wants to be their friend

Can I get an Amen to that????

Let’s look at Verse #4:

Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another,

God lives in us and His love is made complete in us. ~ 1 John 4:11-12

Since God loves everyone we will ever meet, He wants us to love them also!