Love One Another
I don’t know about you, but I have someone to show love to this year. In fact, I have someone to show love to every single day, not just on one designated day of the year. Guess who? I’ll tell you now, it’s not a boyfriend. It’s my neighbor. In Matthew 22:39, Jesus tells the Pharisees the second greatest commandment is to love your neighbor as yourself.
What is a neighbor? It’s someone that lives next to you, or in your immediate area. Sure, if we live in a space we have literal neighbors, but I think when Jesus was saying this, he meant more than just lending your next door neighbor, Leslie, sugar the night before bake sale day at her daughter’s school. Thanks to the Blue Letter Bible app, neighbor means “a friend” and also “any other man irrespective of nation or religion with whom we live or whom we chance to meet.” That puts a twist on things, doesn’t it?
Jesus doesn’t tell us to only love other Christians. He doesn’t tell us to only love those who are from the same place as us. He tells us to love everyone with live close to, but not just them, love everyone we meet as well. The cashier at Safeway, the professor who doesn’t curve grades for their course, Sister Susie that took your parking spot last Sunday at the church lot, the man you pass by on the street asking you for something you walked too fast to hear him even say. Every single person we encounter. Bro…HOW?! It sounds crazy, maybe even…impossible? But shout out to the God we serve, the One who makes all things possible :)
One thing I’ve learned about love is that it looks different to and from everyone. Love can range from, me picking up something because it made me think of a friend to spending time at a hospital with a loved one. It can be volunteering my weekend to your church or picking up a younger sibling up after school. It can be even something like, I don’t know, dying on the cross for the sins of a people so messed up so they can have a relationship with Our Father. 🙂 John 15:39 says, “The greatest love a person can show is to die for his friends.” Note that it says this is the greatest form of love, not the only form of love, meaning there are other ways for us to show love to those around us. God isn’t expecting us to go out and die for those around us, Jesus has already done that. He is looking for us to be “full of good-will towards”, to “wish well”, to “regard the welfare of”* the people we encounter.
Loving everyone isn’t always easy. It really can be quite difficult at times, especially when we do not have a relationship with the person. One thing I think to keep in mind, though, is that Jesus still showed us love, even though we hadn’t developed a relationship with Him yet. So yes, it can be hard. Yes, Christ suffered, but He still fulfilled that call of love. Because Christ is in us, we have the ability to exude such divine love as well. Love that is in spite of if we have a relationship or not, in spite of how someone has treated us in the past, in spite of how we feel in that moment.
Love is a very powerful thing. I think we both know that. It’s time for us to really be intentional about how we love our neighbor. We don’t know what our relationship will be with all the people we encounter with those in our lives, but one thing we can leave with them is how we showed them love. Whether someone is in our life for 10 seconds or 10 years, something they will remember is how we showed them love in the time we spent together.
Ask yourself this: Who am I show showing love to daily? Do I show love to everyone I encounter or just the people I know? Do I only show love to people who think like me? Do I love people that do not look like me? In what ways can I be better in how I love my neighbor?
Wishing you much love always,
Kumam 💝
*definitions were taken from the Strong’s definition on The Blue Letter Bible app.