2. The Greatest Commandment
February 21, 2010
Love your Neighbor
I find it amusing when people talk about the loving feeling they have for each other. We often think of love as this warm blanket on a cool winter night. Love is like snuggling up to a fire it just fills you with nice toasty feelings all over. I don’t believe that people who think like this know what love is. Erwin McManeus writes in his book the Barbarian Way that love is not so much a guarantee of warm feelings and happiness as love is a promise of pain. The more you love someone the more you give them permission to hurt you. You see the truth is love is not an emotion. Loving like Jesus is not about having warm fuzzy feelings towards people it is about living a lifestyle where the community of the church impacts the world around them like Jesus did.
I heard about this guy in Lexington Kentucky who was eating at a Waffle House and his waitress was a single mom with a lot of medical bills and financial trouble and she was working really hard trying to just provide for her kids. This guy left her a $1,000 tip with a note and than ran out and hid in the bushes. He watched as she read the ticket and was so overwhelmed she just started crying. He went back in side and began to talk with her and to share Jesus with her and you know that is what we are talking about when we say love like Jesus. Now I know that most of us don’t have an extra $1000 lying around but we have something. You may not be able to do something like this, but you can do something.
We looked last week at the most important commandment in the law to love God with all that you are. That is the foundation for learning how to love like Jesus. If you don’t love God with all that you are you cant love like Jesus. Then the second most important commandment to love your neighbor as yourself. The whole law is summed up in these two commands. If we want to love like Jesus this is where it starts we have to love our neighbor.
There are some lessons we learn in life the hard way. For example as a son growing up I can tell you that it is a bad idea to tell your mother or anyone else that speaks with your mother that some task or chore is woman’s work. Growing up I wanted to go hang out with a friend of mine but his dad said no they had to do the laundry to which I replied but that’s woman’s work. Well guess who did that woman’s work for the next 10 years of his life. A few years later I made a similar statement about doing the dishes and once again I found myself acquiring a new woman’s chore. You see there are certain ways in which people say things to indicate that they are speaking from experience. If you look at basically the entire book of 1 John but look at 4:20. John writes of love with a strange degree of familiarity.
1Jn 4:20 If anyone says, “I love God,” yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. 1Jn 4:21 And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.
John and his brother James are given the name Boanerges, the Sons of thunder. These guys were passionate, and vindictive, and maybe even obsessed with their own fame and glory. They wanted to cast down fire from heaven to destroy a village that did not welcome Jesus because Jesus was a Jew and they were Samaritans. They were ready to kill an entire village simply because they did not want Jesus coming to their town. Later John saw an exorcist casting out demons in Jesus name, and demanded that he cease for he was not a disciple. Throughout Jesus ministry we see John is passionate and proud. But I want you to picture him differently.
Just picture John as he is writing this epistle, here is the last living apostle of Christ, one of those who was closest to Jesus while he was on earth. He is this old man, at the end of his life, after watching all of his friends be killed for their faith, and being exiled for his own, and the only thing that he has to say, his passion is to preach love.
Do you see the power of love just in what he is writing? John has been transformed, from an intemperate youth, seeking glory, power, honor, and fame, but now all he seeks is to share that which has overcome him. The love of God has filled him so much that it leaks out of his writings. Love one another, love each other, love God, love, love, love. The same man who wanted to call down fire from heaven and wants to sit at Jesus right hand records a gospel where he does not even mention himself by name. John no longer cares if you know him, he is no longer concerned with his name. He wants to be known by the one thing that is most important to him: the fact that Jesus loved him. John recognized that he was not special because he was a great speaker, or because he was a disciple, but because Christ loved him and because Jesus loved him John teaches us to love each other with the love of Jesus.
I am reminded of a girl named Jess who was waiting tables at a Longhorn restaurant. One night she had a table pay with a credit card and then they left quickly. When she got back to the table she saw they had left $100 tip on a $60 ticket. She couldn’t believe it. At the bottom of the ticket was short note saying that Jesus loved her. She had another table that same night that paid with a $50 gift card and they left $50 cash in an envelope as cash and on the envelop they simply wrote: Jesus loves you. She said she couldn’t believe it. In one night two different families changed her life. She talked with a friend that she worked with and they told her “Jess God is trying to tell you something.” She had grown up going to church and went to every service until she was 17. She had been itching to go back to church but it was not until she experienced the kindness of these two strangers that she found her way back. She said this moment was a defining moment in my life and I have found my way back home. Their love, strangers showed helped Jess find her way to Jesus. That is what we are talking about, just showing unreasonable kindness to others so they may see Jesus love.
The deepest desire in the heart of every person is just to love and to be loved. When we love others by how we live we show them Jesus. When the world looks at us they should see our love both for each other and for them. A church without love is not a church of Jesus. If we get one thing right let it be our love. Let us love others with the unconditional love of Jesus.
If love is just a feeling then what you are feeling isn’t love. I read the awhile ago about this pastor who had a woman come to him for counseling. In their session she told him that she hated her husband, and she wanted a divorce. But she wanted more than that. She wanted to hurt him because she hated him so much. So the pastor gave her this very unorthodox advice. He told her to go home, and act as if nothing was wrong. To be the best wife should could be, and to act like she was madly in love with him. To make his favorite diner, watch his favorite shows, and to love him to the best of her ability to make him need her love. Then after four months when he had become dependant on her love, she could leave him, devastated because he thought everything was perfect. The woman grinned happily at the devious plan and went home to put it into effect. Four months went by and the pastor had heard nothing from the woman. So he contacted her asking when she wanted to divorce her husband. The woman replied: “Divorce him? Why on earth would I do that, I love him I truly love him with all my heart.” You see Love is not an emotion, it’s an action. God loved us by sending his son to save us. Jesus loved us by dying on the cross for us. Love is an action, and if your actions contradict your words, than you are a liar and the love of God is not in you.
1Jn 3:16 This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers. If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth.
Love is an action. It is something that we do. Through our actions people may see the God that we serve. Jeff was a pastor of a church in San Francisco which is basically the homosexual capital of the world. In his community there was a homosexual couple that Jeff had been ministering to for some time. He had talked with these men, he had shared Jesus with them but they still did not believe. They had not felt the touch of God in their lives and as homosexuals in the church, they had not experienced His love even from His own people. They had felt rejection, ridicule, and shame by the people from the people who were suppose to be characterized by their love. One day Jeff was in his office working on a sermon, and his phone rang, it was Steve one of the homosexual men he’d been witnessing to. Steve asked Jeff to come over because his partner, Chris was really sick. When Jeff arrived at the house he came in and immediately he was overwhelmed by the foul odor of vomit. Chris had been really sick, he had thrown up all over the place and the room smelled like sulfur. Because of the lifestyle they had chosen both Chris and Steve had HIV. Chris was laying on the couch to sick to move, vomit on the floor next to him, Jeff simply went to the bathroom, got a towel, got down on his hands and knees and started cleaning up this smelly vomit off the floor. It was just at that time that Steve came down the stairs and saw what Jeff was doing. He said, “it was then I saw what Jesus looks like He looks like Jeff.” This is what we are talking about. That is what loving like Jesus looks like. Jesus was all about caring for others and sometimes something as simple as cleaning vomit off the floor may be the thing that opens someone’s eyes the love of Jesus. Giving, serving, and sharing the heart of Jesus through how you live is loving like Him.
We must love God with everything we have and we must love people. If you don’t love people then you don’t love God because Jesus says if you love me you will keep my commands and He commands us to love. In order to be Jesus in people’s lives we must show them the love of God. We are not all evangelists. We will not all stand up and preach sermons and teach lessons but every one of us is responsible for being Jesus in the lives of the people we know. Most of us are not wealthy so what do we do? You know Jesus primary way of showing love wasn’t through giving people money. It was through seeing a need they had and finding a way to do something about it.
When I think about showing the love of Jesus I think about Brady. He will be mad that I shared this with you but he is an example of this. You know Brady goes over to visit Donnie. He goes and picks Donnie up and drives him places. He helps him around the house. He helps him clean things up. Brady looks after Donnie as if Donnie was a part of his family. You know that is it. I asked Brady to be a counselor for the how part of our something is happening because Brady gets it. Loving like Jesus is as simple as caring for people and helping them. In order to love like Jesus we all need to find our own Donnie, our person who we take care of and show love to by being their for them and helping them when they need it.
Jesus didn’t live in the four walls of a church. Jesus love was seen in what He did for people. Our love will be seen in what we do for people. You know most of those people wont deserve the love you show them but that is what makes it so powerful. Maybe that means bringing in lunch for a co-worker who is having a hard time with finances. Maybe it means sitting down and offering to talk with someone who is clearly upset. Maybe it means you mow the lawn for an elderly neighbor, or watching a friends kids so they can have a date night with their spouse who they don’t see enough. The first step to really looking like Jesus is loving others regardless of how they treat you or have treated you in the past. Love may be forgiving a family member who hurt you. Or maybe it is as simply as intentionally developing a relationship with a non-Christian and slowly beginning to share Jesus with them.
