God’s love enables us to be good neighbors. We need God’s love because we are often better at allowing our differences to become barriers to neighborliness than we are at seeing how much love we can offer to someone else. God’s love isn’t a request that we ignore the differences, but rather that we love because God loves us. Loving like God is difficult to achieve, and in fact, isn’t within our ability to give apart from God first giving it to us. The good news for us is that in Christ, we receive God’s love in abundance so that we might love others in return.
Jesus modeled God’s unconditional love when He stood beside a woman accused of adultery, when he went to the home of a tax collector, when He ate with sinners, when he touched lepers, and when He lived His life engaging person after person others considered unclean or undesirable. When Jesus led His disciples into Samaria they were slow to comprehend that the barriers of race, religion, and culture could not and should not stand in the way of God’s love. Jesus had modeled this for them often, but again He showed them how to love.
The first Christians had to come to terms with the unexpected outpouring of God’s love and Spirit on people they considered “different”. They discovered early on that they were not only to embrace the Jews, but also the Gentiles. When Peter went to the house of the Gentile Cornelius, he saw the Holy Spirit come upon Cornelius, his family, and his close friends. Then Paul reported that he was called to the Gentiles. These new believers could not deny what was happening, for they saw it with their own eyes. God’s love wasn’t exclusive, but rather inclusive.
God’s love compels us to cross barriers. Ed Stetzer and Philip Nation wrote in Compelled by Love, “The completing work of God’s love in our lives finds no border. It is pervasive in its influence upon us. As the life of Christ revolutionizes our lives, God’s love cycles us to love others so His presence can have more power over us.” Jason Dukes expresses it this way in his book, Live Sent. “His love, given completely because of who He is, not because of how lovable we were, made everything right between us and God. And now, that kind of compelling love, mysterious love, change-everything love transforms our very relationships, allowing us to see each person through the lens of the love that we have ‘in us’ rather than the feelings of impatience, frustration, woundedness, or bitterness that we might have toward them.”
In other words, God provides the love we need to be a good neighbor.
