What does loving your neighbour have to do with loving God? What does it actually mean to love your neighbour in today’s world?

How Do You Really Love God?
Saying the Right Stuff and Singing the Right Words?
Define Neighbour
Others
Dying to Self


How Do You Really Love God?

One of Jesus’ more confusing statements is his first great commandment: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.” (Mark 12:30)

We all know that is what we are supposed to do, and a good many of our songs and hymns and sermons are devoted to that very topic – loving God. We have heard it so much that perhaps we take it for granted. But how does one really love God? Can you even get your mind around that concept? What does loving God actually look like?

To be frank, it is difficult to know where to begin. Is it a matter of conjuring up some gooey emotional response to the thought of our creator? That seems a little weak, a little artificial. It is not that emotions have no place in the worship of God, far from it. But we can all manufacture gooey emotional responses to cute puppies, and probably a lot easier than we can for God. Furthermore, one hopes that our love is not measured by the length of time we are able to keep our hands raised during worship, or the number of tears we shed during an appeal.


Saying the Right Stuff and Singing the Right Words?

So then, is loving God about believing the right doctrines, saying the right things and singing the right words? Certainly belief and doctrine have some part of this love we are supposed to show, especially as we are to love God with all our minds. Still, this cannot be the sum total of what loving God means. That would be too dry a love, less meaningful in many ways than the love between husband and wife, which really does incorporate body, soul, mind and strength.

Perhaps Jesus does the best job of explaining what loving God means in the second of his greatest commands: “Love your neighbour as yourself.” Jesus points out that this second command is like the first, that together these two commands support all the Law and Prophets, and that obeying these commands is more important than all the burnt offering and sacrifices. In other words, they’re pretty important.

It may be that loving the Lord your God actually consists primarily of loving your neighbour as yourself. That is something we can actually wrap our minds around. Loving our neighbours is something we can tangibly do, something we can take part in on a daily basis. And it seems that by loving our neighbours as ourselves, we are in actuality also loving God. Neither command makes sense without the other.


Define Neighbour …

Now, if we are really to love God by loving our neighbours, we are going to have to define “neighbour” in the same way that Jesus did, and his definition was fairly broad. It included the words “stranger,” and even “enemy”. Listen to these challenging words:

“If all you do is love the lovable, do you expect a bonus? Anybody can do that! If you simply say hello to those who greet you, do you expect a medal? Any run of the mill sinner does that! In a word, what I’m saying is, GROW UP! You’re Kingdom subjects now, live like it. Live out your God-created identity. Live generously and graciously toward others the way God lives toward you.” (Matt 5:44-48, The Message).

We are Kingdom people, so we have to live according to the principles of that Kingdom. It simply does not make sense to say you are following Jesus – to say you love Jesus – and not to love and live for others. No, if we are going to combine Jesus’ two great commands, we have to combine them completely. Which means that we have to love our neighbours with absolutely everything we have: heart, soul, mind, body, and strength. If a broken and hurting world is going to take the Church seriously at all, then complete love for our neighbours needs to be our calling card. Otherwise we need to let go of the claim that we love God.


Others!

One of the very earliest mottos of The Salvation Army was composed of one simple word: “Others!” It meant that a member of The Salvation Army no longer had the right to think of him or herself first or highest. “Others” would become the top priority, and Salvationists were to serve them with their lives or with their deaths. We can see one of the ways this played out practically in the following story:

“When the Empress of Ireland went down with 130 Salvation Army officers on board (May 29, 1914), 109 officers were drowned, and not one body that was picked up had on a life-belt. The few survivors told how Salvationists, finding there were not enough life-preservers for all, took off their own belts and strapped them upon even strong men, saying, ‘I can die better than you can’; and from the deck of that sinking boat they flung their battle-cry around the world – Others!”

These Salvationists took seriously the message of Jesus to consider others, even complete strangers, better than themselves. (Phil 2:1-11). To live for others, to love our neighbours as ourselves, is our inheritance as Christians, and particularly as The Salvation Army. This is what we have been commanded to do by Jesus himself, which suggests that we should all take a fairly long look at our lives to determine who we are really living for. We cannot just love ourselves if we want to serve God. We must serve others if we want to love God.


Dying To Self

How does that play out for you today? You may not have the opportunity to die for someone on a sinking ship, but you do have the opportunity to die to yourself every single day. We live in a world where at least 30 wars are currently raging. During your next Sunday morning service consider the fact that over that two-hour period roughly eight thousand people (including two thousand children) will have died of hunger or related diseases. These are our neighbours, and they are caught in a world scarred by evil, by selfishness. What if the solution was a simple as Jesus’ command to love our neighbours – all of our neighbours – as ourselves? What if, before we acted in every situation we faced in a given day, we took a moment to think: “Others”? And what if we chose to make our decisions in a way that would primarily bless our neighbours instead of ourselves?

It will take sacrifice for us to act in that way, of course, because right now most people are thinking of themselves first. But if we lead the way in following the commands and the lifestyle of Jesus, who knows who might follow?

If you simply say hello to those who greet you, do you expect a medal?