Wednesday - Change It - Neighbours to Acquaintances
Remember our story yesterday about Jesus stopping to help a hurting woman? It wasn’t just about interruptions. After helping the woman who interrupted his travels, Jesus carried on his way towards Jairus’ house, since he’d asked Jesus to heal his daughter. It turns out that Jairus’daughter had died in the meantime, but Jesus kept going, and arrived at her bedside and raised her from the dead. That’s the true point of this story – the resurrection from the dead is what we’re heading toward – ultimate goal. He gives us a glimpse in this story, showing us that our death will not be the end of us, but that Jesus offers to simply wake us up in his kingdom. It’s a matter of whether we want to join that party.
Jesus said the main thing was loving God, loving neighbours. The confidence to live that way, with all its sacrifices in this world, all flows from Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. It is our resurrection from being dead to sin now, and the physical death still to come.
We can be distracted by other things – even good things – and lose perspective. We can tell ourselves things will settle down, or that more will be enough, or that everybody lives like this.
But these are distractions. We can only do so many things well – why not make our specialty what God says is most important? We’ll have to slow down.
John Ortberg – Love and hurry are fundamentally incompatible. Love always takes time, and time is the one thing hurried people don’t have.”
Think of the difference between good doctor and bad doctor from a patient’s perspective. It often has to do with perception of being hurried – does the doctor seem to listen and care? I know someone who visited the doctor recently, and waiting for an hour in the exam room listening to him talk on the phone about golf, then she heard him tell a drug rep he was extremely busy. She knew it was a lie, and that he didn’t care about her as a person.
We don’t want to be like that with our neighbours!
Question: What good things might be keeping you from the “main thing” of loving God, who calls you to your neighbours?
We meet for coffee every Wednesday night at Starbucks in the Chapters Store in Ajax, in Durham Region just East of Toronto. Maybe we’ll see you there?
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Yesterday I asked you to define love. One common way people today define love is to be as tolerant and permissive as possible, as long as the other person does not to hurt others.
See what a low standard that is? Jesus defines love to a much higher degree, he says to love one another as oneself. He knows we are self-centered…and Jesus uses that to teach us love for others.
Between loving God with everything, and loving neighbours as ourselves, Jesus has declared self-salvation to be impossible. We may love God to one degree or another. But with everything? We can and should try, but we reach our limits since we are only human, and separated ourselves from God in sin. We need help.
Equally true, we may make ourselves harmless and never say a word to anyone who isn’t harming another, but we can’t make ourselves completely love others as ourselves – we always want more for ourselves than to be tolerated and put up with. We can and should try to love others as ourselves, but we need the help of another to do this.
Jesus made himself harmless, and willingly sacrificed himself on a cross in the ultimate action of love for God and others. He led the way, and did what would be impossible for humans, so we could follow him in love for God and love for others, rather than trying to trailblaze ourselves.
We’ll look at this more in this upcoming series on neighbours.
Challenge: How do your actions “hang’ under love of God or love of neighbour? Is there anything you’ve done in the last week that doesn’t fit one of those loves?
