Love Your Neighbor

Love your neighbor as yourself.

Someone asked Jesus which is the most important commandment. He gave two.

And you shall love the Lord your God from your whole heart and from your whole soul and from your whole mind and from your whole strength. The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.

Love your neighbor as yourself is the focus of this commentary. Grasping the understanding of this phrase, you shall love your neighbor as yourself often stops at you shall love your neighbor. That stop limits this truth to expressing kindness, acceptance, and tolerance toward everyone for anything, regardless of validity or possible harm to that neighbor. But loving your neighbor is not helping them burn down their house because that is what they want to do.

What does it mean to love your neighbor as yourself? The key is grasping the last phrase, as yourself. In his book, Jesus the King, Tim Keller gives one of the best explanations of this commandment that encompasses the whole meaning of it.

I think God is saying, “I want you to meet the needs of other people with all the joy, all of the eagerness, all of the urgency, all of the ingenuity, creativity, and industry with which you meet your own needs. That’s the standard. That’s how I want you to live your life.”

That explains the depth and involvement when you love your neighbor as yourself.

Moreover, the word neighbor is overused to mean everyone a believer comes in contact with is their neighbor. We cannot make every person we come in contact with in our daily lives and make them our neighbors. It is impossible, and it will only discourage and burn us out. We must narrow it down to our actual neighbor who is to the left of us, to the right of us, in front of us, and behind us. We start with the people within our radius that we come in contact with regularly. And we start small by getting to know one or two neighbors.