Have you ever found someone difficult to love? Listen as Pastor David expounds on what it means to truly love your neighbor as yourself.

<p>Have you ever found someone difficult to love? Listen as Pastor David expounds on what it means to truly love your neighbor as yourself.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Hillside O’Malley SDA Church

David Shin

Love Your Neighbor as Yourself

You know when I first got the call to move to Alaska, I said, Lord, what did I do wrong?

I want to tell you, this is like the best kept secret in the lower 48.

I never thought I'd say this, but I'm actually looking forward to winter when I can go to bed at 10 o'clock.

Summer has been a lot of sleep deprivation.

And suddenly, our house has become a destination site for all these people in the lower 48 family and friends.

And so what a privilege it is to live in this blessed state, praise God.

Well, I've redacted my sermon a little bit, but I pray that it still is able to get the weight and the thrust of this very important commandment found in the Gospels, and I want to invite you to bow your heads with me as we pray this morning.

Father in heaven, we thank You for the privilege that we have to know You as our God, to call You our Father.

We thank You for blessing us abundantly above all that we can even ask or imagine.

As we pause for a few moments today to reflect on these 2 great commandments.

We pray that you would speak to our hearts.

May the Holy Spirit that inspires be also the Spirit that instructs in Jesus' name, amen.

Open your Bibles to Matthew 22, 37 through 40.

This is our scripture reading today, the focus of our study.

And Jesus said to them, "'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.

This is the first and great commandment, and the second is like it.

You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

On these 2 commandments hang all the law and the prophets." Remember what's happening prior to this, Jesus is being questioned, he's almost being interrogated, he's being analyzed theologically by the Pharisees and the Sadducees, And 1 after another, they give Jesus their best theological question, trying to trap him in his words.

And finally, a Pharisee, a young and upcoming lawyer, comes to Jesus and poses the question, Rabbi, what is the great commandment?

Jesus responds immediately with these 2 commandments, and some people misunderstand the statement of Jesus assuming that this is a new commandment but really he's quoting the Old Testament the first 1 thou shalt love the Lord your God with all your heart soul and mind Deuteronomy chapter 6 known as the Shema the second 1 love your neighbor as yourself Leviticus chapter 19 Jesus quoted the Old Testament showing that on these 2 commandments, love for God and love for your neighbor, essentially does not do away with the 10 Commandments, but actually summarizes them.

It shows the motivation for the 10 Commandments.

If you love God, you're not going to take his name in vain.

You're not going to have any other object or idol before Him.

The last 6, if you love your neighbor, you're not going to kill him.

You're not going to lie to him, and you're not going to commit adultery.

So essentially what Paul said, love is the fulfilling of the law.

Love is the motivation for why we keep his commandments.

Now we can spend a lot of time on these 2 commandments, practically an entire series devoted to it, but I want to spend the majority of our time today focused in on the second commandment.

Love humanity, love human beings, love people.

But Jesus uses this fascinating phrase and in the Greek language it literally means the person that is near you, your neighbor.

It is a word dealing with distance or radius.

Meaning that it is someone that is near you.

It is not just talking about the person that lives next to you, your neighbor.

He takes it from the abstract, the philosophical.

And we as finite human beings cannot grapple with that.

So Jesus brings it all the way down to the concrete and says, love your neighbor.

Love the person that is adjacent to you, that is in proximate distance to you, that is near you at any time during your day.

I found that in the Christian experience, when you accept Jesus into your heart, you come to him just the way that you are, praise God.

You accept him into your life, your name is written in the Lamb's Book of Life.

But because the Lord loves us and wants increased happiness, you go through a process of character transformation.

Now you're saved at every point in the process.

But for maximum happiness, you go through character transformation.

And what the Lord did for me, because I have so much baggage, He brought 3 pivotal roommates into my life.

These roommates were specifically designed by the Lord to hone me and to mold me into a more loving and lovable Christian.

For those of you that have had roommates, you know what I'm talking about.

I specifically remember this particular roommate of mine.

Before we had a long distance friendship, this was when I was single, We would email each other.

He was 700 miles away, and we met up 1 time in this particular town that will go unnamed and we said, hey, let's go out to eat and then we ate out and we had such a great and wonderful time and I remember distinctly pulling up to his apartment in this particular town and he said, hey David, I like you so much.

Let's just cut down costs and we can find a nice house in this town and we will split our rent, split our utilities.

He went from far away, the abstract, the wonderful concept, to the reality of living in the same residence as me.

And suddenly, I would wake up in the morning to go open the refrigerator for my daily cereal and reach for the soy milk and pull it out and it was an empty carton.

I would go to the cupboard to eat my cherished Doritos, and all that was left in the bottom of the bag was crumbs.

I would have to wear these noise-canceling earmuffs at night, sweating profusely because they were not ventilated, they were cheap.

Because my friend had invited 40 people into our living room and it was 3 o'clock in the morning.

This man had become my neighbor And you know what I found?

It is a whole lot easier to love people as long as they are far away.

But as soon as they come into a certain proximity to me, they are very difficult to love.

And so Jesus brings it all the way down and says look love your neighbor love the person that is near you at any point throughout your day that person that cuts you off on the street and yells out all these profanities that is your neighbor That person that is so rude to you at the cashier line that is your neighbor that person living in your house That is your neighbor If you can love the person that is near you at any point in your day, you can love anybody.

Suddenly when people come close, there is a different dynamic that takes place.

It's 1 thing to look at a poster of a humanitarian crisis and our hearts are warmed and we are motivated to give and I believe that we should give, don't misunderstand me.

But it's another thing when you're walking down the street at Anchorage and someone with just as much need, reeking with alcohol, asks for your help.

Suddenly it takes on a totally different dynamic.

Jesus said, love your neighbor, love the person that is close to you and we know this in our married life it is 1 thing to be dating and it's another thing to be married.

Let's be real, love at first sight is easy to understand it's when 2 people have been looking at each other for years that it becomes a miracle.

So Jesus says, love your neighbor, love the person that is in proximate relative nearness to you in distant at any part of your day and then the next part of his statement here is love your neighbor as yourself.

The second part of this axiom is actually an implication that we should have a healthy self-love.

Jesus did not say love your neighbor instead of yourself.

Jesus said love your neighbor as you love yourself.

Now I'm not talking about narcissism or self-centeredness, but I'm talking about self-worth coming from the recognition that Jesus loves us infinitely.

And so in this paradigm, we are to have a healthy self-worth, self-value.

Love Your Neighbor as Yourself

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