Love Your Neighbor

First Series – Sermon Ten

Original by George MacDonald

Paraphrase by Dale R. Howie

 

I find it interesting that loving our neighbor reflects a previous sermon, the Higher Faith. The way we come to know the Father Himself is by coming to share His heart toward His children.

Pulling on this thread of divine love begins to unravel all our selfishness and self-seeking. As I have come to know my Father, even if only a little, I have discovered how easily I fashion my view of God after myself. When I am hurt and angry, I prefer a God of justice—the One who rights every wrong. When I believe I possess "the truth," I am drawn toward a God of dualism, where everything is black or white, either-or. Whatever change has come into my life has come through abandoning these simple forms of idolatry. The heart of the Trinity is revealed in love's expression, and that heartbeat is wonderfully different from my own.

 

Outline

Sermon Question: What is the central message of this sermon?

P1 - Love Fulfills the Law – We are not made for law, but love.

     P2 - Purpose of Law – Law, is the tutor that leads us to Christ!

            P3 - Good Samaritan – Keeping the law this way, not in the letter, but in the Spirit, with your actions.

                   P4 - Universal Neighborhood – The beginning of love is recognizing our universal neighborhood.

                        P5 - Loving God – Only when we love God with all our hearts can we love our neighbor.

                         T - The Maker's Design – Our actions are our response to our Maker's design, doing our part, participating in the creating of our true selves.

                        R5 - Loving Your Brother – A love that resembles the Divine's, rushing forward in utter self-giving to live in consideration of his brother.

                  R4 - One in God – We are seeing the human face as the face of the Divine!

            R3 - Freedom! Prison of Self - This love of neighbor is the only door out of the prison of self! The prison that is ourselves.

      R2 - Oneness – Oneness is not the loss of our consciousness or well-being, but the one that is far deeper and complete. God and our neighbor will return it to us as pure Life.

 

Matthew 22:37-39 GNT

"Jesus answered, 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. 'This is the greatest and the most important commandment. The second most important commandment is like it: 'Love your neighbor as you love yourself.'"

Romans 13:10 NASB

"Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfillment of the law."

 

Love Fulfills the Law

Question: What fulfills the law?

Moses first received these words from God:

"Do not take revenge on others or continue to hate them, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord."

Jesus had no desire to be original. Whenever the Old Testament expressed the Father's heart, He gladly quoted it. But when these words came from His lips, the Word had become flesh, and what had once been written as command now came to us as Spirit and Life.

Paul repeats these words twice, James once, and each says the same thing:

Love is the fulfillment of the law.

Is the reverse also true? Is the fulfilling of the law itself love?

Paul writes, "Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfillment of the law." But does merely avoiding harm mean we have loved? No. Love fulfills the law, but the law cannot fulfill love. A person does not become a lover by keeping rules. Rather, because he is becoming a lover, he naturally keeps them. No heart was ever satisfied with rules in place of love.

Can the law at least fulfill itself apart from love? I do not believe it can. Without love it is impossible to keep the law toward our neighbor. The law reaches into the smallest details of life, and the one who strives hardest will often become the one most aware of his inability to keep it.

We were not created for law but for love. Love restrains us because it is infinitely greater than law. It belongs to a higher order altogether—the very source from which law came. Love gave birth to every "shall not" found in the commandments. Once given, those commands reveal themselves in justice, though often only in the lower forms of self-protection and worldly fairness. Even there, love is their beginning.

If love were not already present within us, where would our sense of justice come from? Without it, we would be consumed only with ourselves and our own desires.

I am not suggesting we are always conscious of this love that gives rise to justice. I am saying only that justice itself could never exist apart from love woven into our very nature. Even now there are weak and corrupted forms of love that fall far below true justice, but they will one day give way to something greater as God's own love continues its work within us.

Answer: Love fulfills the law because it is the very source from which the law came.

 

The Purpose of the Law

Question: Why was the law given?

What, then, is the purpose of the law? It is the tutor that leads us to Christ. It awakens us to the truth of our own hearts and reveals our deepest nature through the presence of God within us. He educates us, in part, through our failures. He shows us what even our greatest efforts of will are capable of accomplishing—and what they cannot.

Our strongest efforts cannot even keep us from wronging our neighbor. Who among us has not claimed to love his neighbor while quietly wishing only to keep the law? Who could honestly say that he has never, in thought, word, or deed, openly or subtly, misrepresented or harmed another?

Who can judge his neighbor rightly except the one whose love refuses to judge him at all? That is why we are told to love rather than judge. Love is the only justice we are capable of, and when perfected, it contains all truth.

Even more, refusing to love our neighbor is itself a great wrong against him. To fulfill even the simplest command concerning another, we must rise above the law itself to the Spirit and Life from which the law came. Therefore, if we would truly keep the law concerning our neighbor, we must first love him.

Man was created for grace, not law. We were made on far too grand a scale to have our relationship with God or one another defined by justice alone. Justice is only an ideal, pointing beyond itself to something greater. The law awakens within us a longing for grace—for the divine life in which love reigns. For God is Love.

Answer: To reveal our need for Christ and lead us beyond law into grace.

 

Good Samaritan

Question: What does the Good Samaritan teach us?

What Jesus meant by loving our neighbor was never merely the outward keeping of the law. Rather, it is the condition of the heart from which the law is naturally fulfilled.

He made this wonderfully clear in the parable of the Good Samaritan.

"Who is my neighbor?" the lawyer asked, hoping to limit the command. Jesus answered by removing every limit. Anyone whom we meet, anyone to whom we can show mercy, anyone whose need crosses our path—is our neighbor. In that sense, all humanity is our neighbor.

Notice what is absent from the parable. We do not see someone carefully measuring the limits of the law. We see love acting freely. Love stands above rules, making the breaking of them impossible. Here love appears in its fullness.

The Samaritan sees a wounded man, but more than that, he sees his neighbor. Compassion becomes action. The Samaritan's heart finds its expression in the Samaritan's hands as he pours in the oil and wine, binds the wounds, carries the injured man to safety, and provides for his care.

Jesus' story is so complete that I almost hesitate to say more.

Suppose someone listening had asked the very question we have been considering: Can I keep the law without loving my neighbor?

Would Jesus not have answered,

"Keep the law in this way—not merely in the letter, but in the Spirit—and in acting as a neighbor you will soon discover that you have begun to love your Samaritan."

So whenever questions arise within us, let us ask them. God welcomes honest questions. He does not answer them with disrespect or impatience. Jesus never intended His written words to answer every question apart from the living Spirit. The questions of a willing heart may always be brought before Him with confidence. Those who sincerely seek more will always discover there is more to receive. In asking, we open ourselves to the guidance of the Spirit, who is the Lord.

Answer: Love does not measure limits. It simply becomes a neighbor.

 

Universal Neighborhood

Question: Who is my neighbor?

"But how?" asks the one who gladly accepts this universal neighborhood yet finds himself unable even to fulfill the simplest demands of the law toward those he loves most. "How am I to rise into this higher realm, this heavenly life of love?"

The beginning is simply this: set your heart to love your neighbor.

Very quickly you will discover that this love is no more within your reach than the law itself. You cannot keep the commandment without first entering into the love of your neighbor, and you cannot truly love your neighbor without first rising higher.

The whole operation of the universe rests upon this very principle. Everything moves toward its center.

We cannot love our neighbor by an act of will alone. Only the one whose life is centered in God can truly love. Only the one whose life finds its source in God can love another whose source is also God. The mystery of our individuality and our relationships is as profound as the beginning of humanity itself. Such questions can only be answered by the One who has known them from the beginning and resolved them in Himself.

Answer: Every person whose need God places before me.

 

Loving God

Question: Why must we first love God?

Only in God do we truly meet one another. In Him the lines of life touch without ever destroying our individuality. As the mind of Christ flows through us, His life fills our whole being. Then the love of our brothers and sisters becomes no mere human affection but the very life of Christ shared among us. From Christ, through our neighbor, comes the life that makes us members of one body.

Is it really possible to love our neighbor as ourselves?

Jesus never asks the impossible. Yet many unconsciously treat His words as impossible so they need not obey them. Before we can live His words, we must first understand them. No one sees anything clearly until he begins to live it. Still, he must first believe that what Christ commands is possible.

A man who knows he does not yet love his neighbor may nevertheless believe that such love exists. He may even recognize that there is no higher goal toward which humanity is moving. This is the Father's will, carrying all creation toward its fulfillment.

So let us continue pressing toward that end. Let us not grow weary because God's day is as a thousand years and His millennium but a day. Today He is already at work within us, patiently bringing us toward that very goal.

It is certainly true that only when we love God with all our hearts can we love our neighbor. Yet many paths are drawing us toward that one destination. We can cooperate with that work by learning.

Suppose we begin by taking Jesus at His word—that He meant exactly what He said and that what He commanded is possible.

Then we begin thinking about our neighbor. We attempt to love.

Immediately we discover that our neighbors sort themselves into groups.

Some are easy to love because we already enjoy them. Their kindness has made them lovable to us. But this is no great achievement. Jesus reminds us,

"If you love those who love you, what reward have you?"

So we move on to another group—not enemies yet, but simply those difficult, dull, or irritating people whom we naturally avoid.

Now what shall we do?

Despite all our effort, we discover the goal remains as distant as ever.

Why should I love my neighbor as myself?

The answer is not merely, "Because the Lord said so."

We ask the question because we genuinely want to obey Him. God's purposes are never arbitrary. They are always natural, fitting, and necessary. He desires that we understand His ways and willingly participate in them. Yet even before we fully understand, obedience remains the right path.

Still we object.

"I know my own thoughts, but not my neighbor's. I know my own feelings, but not his. His life is his own, not mine. I want to love him—but how?"

Here we uncover the deepest mistake in our thinking.

We mistake individuality for separation.

Yet the very opposite is true.

Our distinctiveness is the foundation of love, not its obstacle. Love does not arise because we are the same. It arises because we are wonderfully different and yet belong to one another.

Once love awakens, the very things that once seemed barriers become reasons for loving.

Find someone who has fallen among thieves. Become his neighbor. Pour oil and wine into his wounds. Bind them. Carry him to safety. Pay the cost.

Even if you begin from duty alone, there is already virtue in obeying the truth. Even imperfect obedience belongs to the truth. You will go on your way loving your Samaritan neighbor more than you thought possible.

Answer: Because only the Father's love enables us to truly love one another.

 

The Maker's Design

Question: How do we grow into love?

He will not stop to question his motives or spend time defending them. If he truly desires to love his neighbor, he will discover a higher place than he had ever expected. We are a whole. As soon as we unite ourselves with obedience, the truth already within us begins to reveal itself.

Our actions are our response to our Maker's design. We participate in the creating of our true selves as we yield to the All in all. We are moving with the current of the Life for which we were made. From that moment on, our future begins to open before us.

As we aspire toward our Maker's design, we soon discover that our actions must often come before our feelings. In time, our feelings learn to follow where obedience has already begun.

As it concerns our relationships with others, the whole purpose of God's education is to teach us to love our neighbor as ourselves. This is not a lesson we discover on our own, nor one we master by obligation or argument, any more than we can discover the difference between right and wrong apart from experience.

Many still do not recognize loving our neighbor as one of the central truths of the Gospel. Some even hope for eternal life while imagining that caring for themselves is more important than caring for those around them. Yet the whole order of human society exists to teach us the two great commandments: the love of God and the love of our neighbor.

I will not say more here about the mysteries of family relationships, for they belong to another discussion. Yet this much may be said. We enter this world looking up into the face of love.

Though often imperfect, the love of a parent is the first image we receive of the Father's heart. Family becomes our earliest school of love. Through these relationships we begin learning both God's love for us and His love for our neighbor.

(Footnote: God created human relationships after His own thoughts, making them among our greatest teachers of love. Yet relationship with God Himself, and with our neighbor through Him, remains infinitely higher and the truest education of all.)

Sadly, many would find it much easier to love God had they not first encountered such poor reflections of Him in their parents. Self-seeking, impulsive, purposeless, and faithless fathers and mothers often cast long shadows over the hearts of their children.

Answer: By responding to our Maker's design through faithful obedience until love becomes our nature.

 

Loving Your Brother

Question: Where does love begin?

Now we come to the second commandment: loving your brother.

Why has God given us brothers and sisters? Why has He surrounded infancy with trust and helplessness? Is it not so that we might discover a love beyond words—a love that reflects His own? It is a love that rushes forward in joyful self-forgetfulness, living in thoughtful consideration for another.

Our sibling is our first neighbor.

Whether we choose it or not, we grow up side by side. While our hearts are still tender, we begin learning the meaning of brotherhood. The love we discover there is the first heartbeat of the universal brotherhood into which we have all been born. We are brothers and sisters because we are first the children of our eternal Father.

Then another neighbor appears.

Who is he?

Anyone whose life touches mine.

Anyone with whom I have dealings.

Anyone God places in my path.

Not only the friend who shares my table or my thoughts, but also the one who makes my clothes, prints my books, drives my cab, asks for help on the street, or even looks down upon me.

Every encounter becomes an opportunity to be a neighbor.

Sometimes that means nothing more than speaking truthfully, acting honestly, dealing justly, and thinking kindly. Such simple acts become the soil in which love quietly grows. Right actions clear the springs of good affections until their waters begin to overflow.

We do not choose our neighbors. We receive the neighbors God sends us.

Hidden within every one of them, whether easily seen or not, is a beautiful brother or sister.

Your neighbor is simply the person beside you at this moment—the one whose life has just touched yours.

Answer: It begins with the people God has already placed beside us.

 

One in God

Question: How do we begin to see others differently?

In this way love will spread, spreading with ever wider and more powerful rhythms, until everyone becomes lovely to us. Even our deeply flawed brothers and sisters remain our God-born neighbors. Any rough-hewn image of humanity will, in time, move us to reverence and affection.

This love is more difficult for some of us to learn than for others. There are those whose first response is to push away rather than receive. Yet learn we will, and learn we must. Even they will grow in grace until a presence once unknown awakens within them deep feelings of affection. Such feelings may seem almost like pain, for there are no other words to describe them. Such a person can only give himself to God and wait.

When we see the human face as the face of the Divine, and the hands of our neighbor as the hands of our brother, then we begin to understand what Paul meant when he said,

"...for my people, my own flesh and blood! For their sake I could wish that I myself were under God's curse and separated from Christ."

Then we will no longer understand those who remain so far from this love for their neighbor that they expect to be relieved of its burden in the world to come. They imagine that, for God's glory, they may confine His all-embracing love within the narrow walls of their heaven. There, looking toward hell from a safe distance, they say to one another,

"Listen to their cries, but do not weep, for they are our neighbors no more."

Paul would be heartbroken before the presence of God if he believed there were even one person beyond the reach of God's mercy. What then shall we say of our Brother Jesus Christ, who upholds all His brothers and sisters in His love? If there remained even the faintest hope that He might yet help them in the ages to come, would He not rise from the company of the blessed and descend into the place of despair? Would He not sit beside the last of the unredeemed—the last of Judas's race—and count Himself more blessed in the pains of hell than in the glories of heaven?

But this is foolish talk, for God is, and always will be, All in all—the Father of all our brothers and sisters.

You will not, dear brother, become less glorious because Christ has taught you to think of others. When you go into the wilderness to seek the lost, you will not return until you have found them. Who in heaven, possessing the mind of Christ, could discover that one of his companions still remained in darkness and not feel compelled to rise and go?

I speak of one who has Christ's mind and the Father's love dwelling within him. However dreadful the journey, he could do nothing else but descend into the smoke and fire, traveling wherever he must to find his neighbor. He would go even into hell because the religious had become so hard and heartless toward the brothers and sisters God had given them. They cared nothing for their freedom because they did not know His heart. They did not know His love.

Answer: By seeing every human face as one deeply loved by God.

 

Freedom! The Prison of Self

Question: What sets us free from ourselves?

Just one more word.

This love of our neighbor is the only door out of the prison of self!

We imagine that our self-awareness is our life. But our true life consists in breathing God, and our knowledge of the universe is found in His truth. Life is to have Him, to know Him, and to enjoy Him. If only we could forget ourselves, our life in God and in our neighbor would increase beyond anything we now imagine.

The center of our life is in the Spirit of God, with friends, neighbors, and all our brothers and sisters as one. This is the larger world in which alone our souls can find room.

It is within himself that a person is imprisoned.

If you do not feel this now, you will feel it one day. You will feel it as a living soul would feel death if imprisoned alive within a dead body.

Our life is not in knowing that we live, but in loving all that lives.

Everyone is created for the whole, for God is the All. He is our Life. The deepest joy of our existence is found in the freedom of the whole. Our delight, like that of eternal Wisdom, is with the sons and daughters of humanity. Our health is found within the body of which the Son is the Head.

The world of Life stands open before us.

We must live in it—or die.

Answer: The love of God flowing outward toward our neighbor.

  

Oneness

Question: What is true oneness?

This oneness does not mean the loss of our individuality or well-being. It is the gaining of a consciousness far deeper and more complete. God and our neighbor will return our love to us as pure Life. No longer will we struggle to generate life from within the darkness of our isolated selves. We will know the glory of our own being in the light of God and our brothers and sisters.

Yet we may have only begun to love our neighbor, hoping that in time we will learn to love him more.

Then, as though we were beginning all over again, another word comes to us from the Lord. It appears harder than the first, though in truth it is not. It can only be reached through obedience to the former command—the loving of our neighbor.

Just when we think we have reached the summit, Jesus leads us one step farther.

“But I say to you, love your enemies.”

Answer: Not losing ourselves, but discovering our true life in God and in one another.

Sermon Answer: We were not created merely to keep laws, but to become people who love as the Father loves.

 

 

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Continue your Quest . . .

Next Sermon - Love Your Enemy

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CLIFF NOTES WITH MACDONALD’S ORIGINAL QUOTES

 

 

Love Fulfills the Law

 

“I am certain that it is impossible to keep the law towards one's neighbor except one loves him. The law itself is infinite, reaching to such delicacies of action, that the man who tries most will be the man most aware of defeat. We are not made for law, but for love. Love is law, because it is infinitely more than law. It is of an altogether higher region than law—is, in fact, the creator of law.”

 “Were there no love in us, what sense of justice could we have? Would not each be filled with the sense of his own wants, and be for ever tearing to himself?”

 

The Purpose of Law

 

“Of what use then is the law? To lead us to Christ, the Truth,—to waken in our minds a sense of what our deepest nature, the presence, namely, of God in us, requires of us,—to let us know, in part by failure, that the purest effort of will of which we are capable cannot lift us up even to the abstaining from wrong to our neighbor.”

 “What man can judge his neighbor aright save him whose love makes him refuse to judge him? Therefore are we told to love, and not judge. It is the sole justice of which we are capable, and that perfected will comprise all justice.”

 “It is but an abstract idea which, in reality, will not be abstracted. The law comes to make us long for the needful grace,—that is, for the divine condition, in which love is all, for God is Love.”

 

Good Samaritan

 

“And the Lord taught him that every one to whom he could be or for whom he could do anything was his neighbor, therefore, that each of the race, as he comes within the touch of one tentacle of our nature, is our neighbor.”

 “Keep thou the law thus, not in the letter, but in the spirit, that is, in the truth of action, and thou wilt soon find, O Jew, that thou lovest thy Samaritan?”

 

Universal Neighborhood

 

“The whole system of the universe works upon this law—the driving of things upward towards the center. The man who will love his neighbor can do so by no immediately operative exercise of the will. It is the man fulfilled of God from whom he came and by whom he is, who alone can as himself love his neighbor who came from God too and is by God too.”  

 

Loving God

 

“A man who knows that he does not yet love his neighbor as himself may believe in such a condition, may even see that there is no other goal of human perfection, nothing else to which the universe is speeding, propelled by the Father's will.”

“But while it is true that only when a man loves God with all his heart, will he love his neighbor as himself.”

“Now, here lies the mistake at last. While the thinker supposes a duality in himself which does not exist, he falsely judges the individuality a separation.”

“But let a man once love, and all those difficulties which appeared opposed to love, will just be so many arguments for loving.”

 

The Maker’s Design

 

“For his action is his response to his maker's design, his individual part in the creation of himself, his yielding to the All in all. For man is a whole; and so soon as he unites himself by obedient action, the truth that is in him makes itself known to him, shining from the new whole. For his action is his response to his maker's design, his individual part in the creation of himself, his yielding to the All in all.”

“The whole system of divine education as regards the relation of man and man, has for its end that a man should love his neighbor as himself. It is not a lesson that he can learn by itself, or a duty the obligation of which can be shown by argument, any more than the difference between right and wrong can be defined in other terms than their own.” 

 

Loving Your Brother

 

“A love namely, in which the divine self rushes forth in utter self-forgetfulness to live in the contemplation of the brother.”

“A man must not choose his neighbor; he must take the neighbor that God sends him.”

 

One in God

 

“Thus will love spread and spread in wider and stronger pulses till the whole human race will be to the man sacredly lovely. Drink-debased, vice-defeatured, pride-puffed, wealth-bollen, vanity-smeared, they will yet be brothers, yet be sisters, yet be God-born neighbors. Any rough-hewn semblance of humanity will at length be enough to move the man to reverence and affection.”

“When once to a man the human face is the human face divine.”

“Hark! Listen to their moans. But do not weep, for they are our neighbors no more.”

 

Freedom! Prison of Self

 

“This love of our neighbor is the only door out of the dungeon of self.”

“The region of man's life is a spiritual region. God, his friends, his neighbors, his brothers all, is the wide world in which alone his spirit can find room. Himself is his dungeon.”

 

Oneness

 

“Nor thus shall a man lose the consciousness of well-being. Far deeper and more complete, God and his neighbor will flash it back upon him— pure as life. No more will he agonize "with sick assay" to generate it in the light of his own decadence. For he shall know the glory of his own being in the light of God and of his brother.”