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


Good morning once again, happy Sabbath. 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. Praise the Lord. My wife and I just love it here.

It has been an amazing summer. 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. Take advantage of it while you can. 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. Matthew 22, verse 37.

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. 1 after another, they are silenced.

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. The first 4, love God. 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. Praise God for that. You're not going to steal from 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 your neighbor as yourself. Jesus could have said, love the world.

That would have been appropriate. 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. Jesus says love your neighbor. It is a word dealing with distance or radius.

It is a word dealing with approximation. Meaning that it is someone that is near you. It is not just talking about the person that lives next to you, your neighbor. Jesus said, love your neighbor. He takes it from the abstract, the philosophical.

You know, love the world. I mean, that's just the concept. 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.

Love your neighbor. 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. I loved his wit and his intelligence. All these things about him. We kind of had a bromance, as it were. 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.

And I said, I like you too, man. Let's just room together. 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. I said, oh, what a fantastic idea. I would love to room with you.

And so my friend became my neighbor. 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. He was my neighbor. 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. You can love the world. 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. Us infinitely. And so in this paradigm, we are to have a healthy self-worth, self-value.

I as a young person was always picked last when it came to athletic sports. Second to last. Second to last. But you know what? I still loved myself.

I had extremely crooked teeth. They were just like crowded all over the place. It looked like a domino set in my mouth. But you know what? I loved myself.

I find that I am very forgiving with my own mistakes. Come on now. Very pat, very patient and I convince myself, you know what, next time I'll have a better opportunity and I will do it right. With all of my foibles, my idiosyncrasies, my faults and flat spots, I still love myself. John Piper put it this way, I want to read to you a quote in reference to this notion of loving yourself.

You all want to be happy. You all want to live life and to live it with satisfaction. You all want food for yourself, you want clothes for yourself, you want a place to live for yourself, you want protection from violence for yourself, you want meaningful and pleasant activities to fill your days, you want some friends to like you and some to spend time with you, you want your life to count in some way, all this is self-love. Self-love is the deep longing to diminish pain and to increase happiness. This is what Jesus meant when he said, love your neighbor as you love yourself.

We care for ourselves, and we should. I am a water, I don't know what the right word is, a water snob. I want my water to taste a certain way. It has to be just a certain taste. And I just can't drink water out of the tap for some reason.

Back in Michigan, I would haul around. All right, Michigan, we heard about Flint, right? All right, Michigan, I would haul around these five-gallon jugs, 3 of them, 15 gallons, you know, haul them around. 1 of them was glass and incredibly heavy, you know, and I would haul them around, go to the pristine, hopefully, water dispensers that were supposed to be reverse osmosis and buy this water and bring it back home and lug it in. Why?

Because I want good water. Why? Because I love myself. I am very particular about my oral dental care. My dentist will be happy to know I floss every day.

I brush my teeth after every meal. Why? Because I love myself. Think of all the things that we do to care for ourselves and seek happiness because of this self-love. And John Piper goes on and says, love your neighbor as you love yourself, which means as you long for food when you are hungry, so long to feed your neighbor who is hungry.

As you long for nice clothes for yourself, so long for nice clothes for your neighbor. As you work for a comfortable place to live, so desire a comfortable place to live for your neighbor. As you seek to be safe and secure from calamity and violence, so seek comfort and security for your neighbor. As you seek friends for yourself so seek to be a friend for your neighbor. As you want your life to count and be significant so desire that same significance for your neighbor.

As you work to make good grades for yourself so work to help your neighbor make good grades as you like to be welcomed into strange company so welcome your neighbor into strange company as you would that men would do to you do also to them in other words seek for your neighbor the same things you seek for yourself, but also seek them in the same way, with the same zeal, energy, creativity, and perseverance. That is a big ASS. Love your neighbor ASS, in the same way, in the same manner, with the same intensity, with the same zeal that you attempt to care for yourself because of self-love, do that for your neighbor. This is a tall order. I wanna be honest with you, as I studied this, I said, I can't do that.

This is impossible. And that's precisely the point. I believe that the key to loving your neighbor is actually found in the first commandment. We cannot take that out of the equation. In other words, as we come to God for total, ultimate fulfillment.

He is the living water. We go to God, he accepts us, we respond to his love, and he fills us. That filling overflows to our fellow man. That vertical context becomes the horizontal context of our relationships with other people. And this is a supernatural, divine, dynamic, and process that takes place as we go to God every single day.

And he fills us with unconditional, unmerited love. He gives us the divine capacity to love people as we love ourselves In the Greek language, there's 3 different types, well, 4 different types of love. Storge, love for family, brother and sister, mother, son. It's a natural affection, and it's almost exclusively in the family context. Then you have phileo, which is a love, a brotherly love, similar to the 1 between David and Jonathan.

And then you have eros, which is a sexual love, a passionate, sensual longing. And then the fourth is agape. Agape is a love that is regardless of the circumstances. It is unconditional. And when Jesus said, love your neighbor, he didn't say, storge.

He didn't say, phileo. He said, agape. Love people that are near you with unconditional love regardless of the circumstances. I want to Wrap up our discussion today with a story. It was in an eastern country where there were arranged, excuse me, arranged marriages.

This family decided to unite their family through the bond of marriage. The wedding night was chosen, and unfortunately for this young man, he was not allowed to see his wife until after the wedding because she had a veil. So the wedding went without a hitch. It was the night of the wedding and it was time for the husband to see his new bride and you could understand that he was quite nervous because like every superficial man looks matter. I heard 1 preacher say if a man says looks don't matter he's either lying or blind.

And so here this man with sweating palms and shaking hands, reaches over to uncover and look into the eyes of his new bride, and he reaches over and unveils her, and his mouth drops open, and he is stunned by what he sees because she is so unattractive. She has had mumps at her early age and her face is deeply scarred. Story goes he ran out of the room angry at his parents. Divorce was not a question. Their marriage was not a happy marriage.

He treated her with disrespect, anger, cruelty. Somehow they had a daughter. As they reached senior citizen age And their marriage started to develop more and the years went by. This woman exhibited a character that was beautiful. You know, there's different types of beauty.

There's ugly, beautiful. Ugly on the outside. Beautiful on the inside. Then there's beautiful, ugly, beautiful on the outside, ugly on the inside, and then there's beautiful, beautiful. Now that's my wife, praise God.

But then there's the thing that none of us have an excuse for, and that's ugly, ugly, right? Well, this woman was not so becoming on the outside, but she was beautiful on the inside. And every time the husband would come home in a rage, she just exhibited a beautiful Christ-like character. It was just a response that was not merited by her husband. Kindness, love.

The husband noticed 1 day in his elderly years that he was starting to lose vision. His eyes were not working properly so they went to the doctor. The doctor told him that he did not have very good news, that 1 of his eyes was degenerating at a very rapid rate. He was going to lose total vision in 1 of his eyes unless they found a cornea transplant, a donor that had checked the donor card saying that they would want to be a donor and passed away. And so they waited.

They got on the donor list and they were waiting and waiting. His eye was getting worse and worse. They had about given up hope, and then they got a phone call. We have the eye. We have a donor.

It's going to be possible. And so they scheduled the date. They went to the hospital, the family, and the surgery was a success. The doctor told him he was going to receive total vision in that 1 eye. The wife had prepared the favorite dinner.

As the husband came home, he sat down, and as they were sitting at the dinner table, the daughter seemed a little bit shaken up and she said, father, look at your wife. She was sitting there at an angle where Only 1 side of her face was visible, and so as he turned to look more closely, dead on to his wife, he noticed that she had a patch over her eye. He broke down in the recognition that this woman had been the donor. I want to tell you friends, when we recognize The love of Jesus for us that is unconditional, unmerited. All of us have done things to Jesus that has broken his heart.

But even still, he gives us agape. Regardless of anything that we have done or will do. Agape, always agape. And from that frame, as we come to God and we experience this love that is so undeserved, so sacrificial, so just beyond our imagination. And that love fills us.

And we recognize our just wretchedness, yet so infinite a cost and value. That from that recognition, we can go out to the community in which we live and work and that love spills over so that the reflection of God by the grace of God is seen in you and in me. Wouldn't it be a marvelous thing if every person in this room could experience that, and this community that is dying in Anchorage could see Jesus reflected in each 1 of us. Let's pray together. Our Father in heaven, Lord, we thank you for your agape love for each 1 of us.

Lord, we can't even comprehend the countless times that we have broken your heart. And yet time and time again, you extend to us this love that is so profound and so deep that we can't even fathom it throughout the ceases ages of eternity. Father, may you fill us, may we experience this in our own lives, may we recognize the infinite value that we are in the eyes of God, and Father, from this filling of your spirit, may we go out into our workplaces, into our communities, and in our very homes, that any person that comes and becomes our neighbor, any person that is near us, may they see the character and the love of Jesus portrayed in our actions, in our tones, in our voices, in everything. May they just see Jesus in us. This is our prayer, Father, that people would see a living epistle in this community.

Bless us, we cannot do this on our own. May the God of peace work in us, both to will and to do of your good pleasure. For we ask these things in Jesus' name. Amen. Or if you

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Love Your Neighbor as Yourself

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