Week 1-NEIGHBOUR

STORY - An old neighbour loved our kids, gave them stuff randomly. Gave them a bin of marbles / sparkle ball later. House covered in marbles and sparkles now.

I’m gonna read two different scriptures here. He gets asked two different questions - but he gives the same answer to both.

Matthew 22:34–36 NIV

Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question: “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

Luke 10:25 NIV

On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

So, Jesus gets asked two different questions:

What is the greatest thing we can possibly do to obey God?

This question isn’t ‘what’s the only thing’, but it IS ‘what thing does God want to see first, and every time?’. There’s plenty of debate in the Christian world as to how much we should / have to do some things or other things.

But this guy says, above all of that - what’s the biggest overarching idea. That everybody, everywhere, at any time, no matter what, this is a big deal for them.

and the second question is

What do we need to do to inherit eternal life?

Two VERY BIG concepts going on here at the same time. Eternity with God, and the idea of what is the ONE THING that God wants above all else.

It would seem like, whatever Jesus answers here is absolutely foundational to faith. Right?

And he gives the same two answers to both questions. I’ll pull from the matthew account.

Matthew 22:37–40 NIV

Jesus replied: “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

Love God is the first one, and that one is ridiculously important. And it underpins everything we say and do. Everything we preach, everything we pray for, everything we do as a church and as a body is bent towards this outcome of loving God the most possible times in the most possible ways.

But the second one is this:

Love your neighbour

And I want to hover on that for a little while, for two big reasons:

one, that I think we miss something humongous by not taking time to appreciate how important this answer is to Jesus.

and two, I believe that every last man, woman, child, and church will do extremely well in their faith and their walk by taking this really seriously.

So, jumping back into this. Remember what happened. Two people asked Jesus two different questions (SAY THEM). And he responded with this.

Jesus said this was foundational. We treat it like it’s occassional

I was talking to someone during the week. I was telling them the point of my message. I said, ‘Love your neighbour is the answer to the question ‘What’s the greatest commandment from God?’, we act like it’s the answer to the question ‘I have this leftover pie that I don’t feel like eating, what should I do with it?’.

And don’t get me wrong, i think loving your neighbours with pie is one of the greatest ways you can love anyone.

But what if loving our neighbours isn’t meant to be an afterthought - what if it’s meant to be the main thing? What if it’s not what we do with our leftovers - it’s what we do as the main course?

So I want to talk for a few weeks about what it means in the bible to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’. And believe me - it’s not simple. But it’s so so important.

But before we get into the HOW, there’s some ideas we need to make sure we understand here.

A foundation is before everything else

When you build a house, generally, what’s the first thing you do when you’re ready to actually start? You dig and pour a foundation.

This one sounds obvious - but you’d be amazed how often we get it backwards.

Everything we do as christians towards other people needs to start with this question of, ‘how can I love them more?’. Every decision we make needs to point back to this idea of ‘I have to love them’. Everything we build as a body has to start with ‘We need to love people no matter what’.

BUT We look at loving and accepting the people around us as something we do after they’ve passed a series of tests.

I’ll love the person when they _______

When they live up to my standards. When they act the way I expect. And believe me - we usually have a really good reason for it. I don’t doubt that. I don’t believe that there’s too many people out there imposing harsh standards just for the joy of watching people suffer. I think, in some fashion, we belive we’re doing the right thing. But to Jesus, we’re still building the walls before we laid the foundation.

We’re not just putting the cart before the horse - we’re dumping all the stuff we want to carry on the ground in front of the cart, and then throwing the horse behind all of that.

We see the conversation as, ‘I’LL accept THEM when THEY (blank)’.

Maybe we need to stop seeing loving their neighbours as ‘I’ll accept them when THEY (blank)’ and start seeing it as

God will accept ME when I ______

Now, i’m not going to stand here and say our salvation depends on how many people we’re able to be nice to. It’s not a works-based thing.

But I will say that the two most important things that Jesus will look at on that day is your love for God, and your love for other people.

And that changes things, right? How do we think we should act if we said ‘God is going to look first at the love I pour out on other people’. How much of a standard do we want to set? If the biggest metric God looked at in a church was how loved new people felt coming in, what would we change?

A healthy faith starts with a strong love for God and others

Second point:

A foundation holds up everything else

STORY - House in toronto had a 6 foot drop from one corner of a room to another. And the room wasn’t even that big.

When we say that ‘love your neighbour’ is foundational, we’re saying that everything else sits on top of that idea. And however level that foundation is, whatever shape it is - it determines everything else.

This is so ridiculously important, that Jesus taught that the standards we hold against others will be the standards he holds against us - or to put it another way, the way our love welcomes people is the way God’s love will welcome us.

Matthew 7:1–2 NIV

“Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.

Now, sidebar:

When we read this ‘the measure you use will be used against you’, we MAY be inclined to use that as a badge of honor. ‘I only accept real and pure righteousness - and I’ll be fine if God only accepts that with me too!’.

But Jesus says - one day,

God will measure you with the same stick you measured others, so therefor DON’T JUDGE PEOPLE

The infinite God of the universe is pointing out, if we want our own sticks held up against us, we need to understand - if we start judging, if we start putting ‘if’s into the equation - that won’t go well for us.

And there’s lots of reasons why. And most of those reasons center on our own arrogance and sinfulness. But at the end of the day, Jesus taught - just don’t do it because it’s not going to go as well as you think.

So, Jesus says, love God, and love your neighbour. And he says that God will look at how judgmental (or how loving and accepting) we can be towards other people as a standard for how he’ll treat US.

But the size and shape and quality of the foundation determines the look and strength of the final product. Jesus even taught this - he told a story once about two guys, one who built a house on sand, and one who built it on rock. (summarize).

Jesus says that loving God and loving our neighbours are the foundation -

How big your love is determines how big your ‘house’ is

Or another way to think about it is this: The more love we make available to God, the more he can do with us and in us and through us.

I think you will find in life that hate and spiritual maturity don’t mix. Becoming more spiritually mature means becoming more loving. Becoming less loving means becoming less spiritually mature.

If that sounds a little blunt, you should hear what the bible has to say!

1 John 4:7–8 NIV

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.

When I was writing this message, I wrote out something and then deleted it. And it was simply this - you can’t have both God and hate in your heart. And when I wrote it, I thought to myself - this is too strong.

But maybe it’s not. Maybe God is calling us to such a form of radical spirituality and faith that if we see our love start dipping, we NEED to say ‘ok, i’m going off course’. Maybe there aren’t excuses. That if we allow hate in, we’ve done something really wrong. And maybe love needs to be so transformational because we’re so far off of how God feels about every single person that he’s ever created.

So as we go through this series on ‘How to be a neighbour’, I want us to open ourselves up to this kind of radical love. And we’ll spend time defining and exploring what that love looks like practically. But today, it’s really, REALLY important that we understand just how vitally important love is to what it means to follow Christ.

God loves you so much

John 3:16 NIV

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.