Yesterday I asked you to complete a neighbourhood grid.  How did it go?

This grid has been completed by people all over North America, and the creators report that about 10% of people can fill in every name on the grid.  About 3% can write down one fact about each neighbour, and less than 1% can write something of depth about every neighbour.

Yes, Jesus says love your enemies, and we should work towards this.  Unfortunately, we can’t start there very easily, since if we aim for everything, we usually hit nothing.  Trying to be neighbours with everybody all at once often means we’re neighbours with nobody.  We need to start somewhere.

In our culture, we often experience the opposite problem as  Jesus’ original hearers.  They  lived in a tightknit community with strong traditions and bonds.  Loving their similar neighbours came naturally, but loving enemies did not.  Their definition needed broadening.

In contract, our culture can make this story too metaphorical and remote.  We don’t regularly see wounded enemies laying on the road, and can tell ourselves, “if I do, I live in a country with universal health care so I can leave it to the profesionals.”  For us, our definition of loving neighbour can start out too broad, and needs narrowing so we can learn to truly love, and not just write people off.

There are two ways we will start off easy.  We’ll start with our actual neighbourhood or cubicle cluster.  Secondly, if love sounds mushy or weird, we can just start with learning names, and then we can figure it out from there.

mapthumbChallenge: For this week, work on learning all the names possible in your grid.  If you don’t know them all, just go knock on their door and ask.  You may find out they forgot your name, too!

Have you completed the neighbourhood grid yet?  If not, click here

Ryan Sim - September 11, 2013

Wednesday - Change It - Neighbours Matter

So what is the connection between loving God and loving our neighbour? If there is real love of God, there will be love for ourselves, and love for our neighbour. See how complete Jesus reminds us this love for God is meant to be: all our heart, soul and mind. We are so often tempted to hold something back. We want to love ourselves on our own terms – to love ourselves fully, like we should love God. But that would lead to a world full of Gods, and how would that work out? Or we are tempted to put these two loves in opposition. I can either be good, ethical, and law-abiding to love God, or I can just love people. The problem with this is that true love of our neighbour flows from the love ofGod. Our love for God leads to love of our neighbours, which leads us to want to act right toward them. Without love for God, and an experience of his love, we each have to define love for ourselves, and we all have different ideas about what love is! We’ll see tomorrow how Jesus’ self-giving love sets the pattern for our love, while freeing us from the traps of loving ourselves first, trying to use others to earn our salvation, or any other attempt to manipulate God or others. Question: Define love.

From Series: "Won't You Be My Neighbour?"

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