Loving Neighbor
To love our neighbor as ourselves is no easy task… but by God’s love in and through us possible.
Sermon Discussion Questions:
How was “loving our neighbor” defined in this sermon?
How is love the fulfillment of the law?
Give some practical examples about how this would work out in real life.
Why is this so hard and how does God make it easier for us?
Why is “love” the power of the Kingdom to change the world?
Why should we not “wait to be loved”?
“God has not merely loved us in order that we might be forgiven and saved from hell and thus be rescued from the punishment of sin. God’s whole work in us was designed to produce a certain type of person. He has set out to produce a new race, a new generation, and we are all to be molded on the pattern of our Lord Jesus Christ. He is ‘the firstborn among many brethren’ (Romans 8:29); we have been ‘created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them’ (Ephesians 2:10)”
“So Christians are to be like our Lord Jesus Christ and to reproduce the love of Christ in their lives. Read the Gospels about Him, and you find that He had an eye of compassion; He saw need and suffering. He did not deal with people according to their deserts, but according to His own love. His attitude toward people was not determined by what they were, but by His love to them. And that, says John, is the kind of love that is to be in us; we love, because He first loved us. Thus the inevitable corollary or conclusion which we must draw from realizing that God has loved us in that we are to be creatures also who love; and we are to love in the same way as the Lord Jesus Christ Himself loved when He was here on earth, and as He still loves us from His throne in heaven.”
