Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love. For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” If you bite and devour each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other.

• Galatians 5:13-15

“‘Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbor as yourself.  I am the Lord.

• Leviticus 19:18

I have covered this, maybe in part, in other posts, but it is hard to love one’s enemies.  It is even hard to love one’s neighbors, but to love anyone as yourself is kind of strange.

For example, I am an introvert.  If I loved someone as I love myself, I would leave them alone.  At most, I might wave and smile at the neighbor when I take the garbage out once each week.  When I am feeling really bold, I might ask my female neighbor how her husband is doing and if his knee surgery is finally on the doctor’s schedule.  But this entire time, we are in excess of fifty feet from each other.

I do not think that is what God means by that, but those particular neighbors have said that my wife and I have been the best neighbors they have ever had.  They are probably introverts too in that they rarely visit the neighbors, but my wife was always baking them something, until she got too sick to do that sort of thing.

Another example, this in what does not work, is the example of my youngest two grandchildren.  The nine-year-old grandson is extremely extroverted, just like my wife had been.  His eleven-year-old sister is extremely introverted, just like me.  Her little brother invades her personal space, and she punches him, never in the face.  He is undeterred, because his way of thinking is that the reason, she did not love him as he had loved her is that he did not get close enough.  So, he hugs her as she pummels him with her fists, not hard, and obviously not hard enough for her little brother to get the idea that she wants more space without him in it.

You see, we have to understand the other person before “loving someone as we love ourself” makes sense.

Understanding the other person takes a lot of observation.  And it can be painful at times.

And it will always be tainted by our sin nature.  The whole time we are trying to figure out how to love our neighbor the way they wish to be loved, we are wondering, “Will our neighbor be watching us as intently to love us the way we wish to be loved?”  We might even think, “What’s the point?  We will be pretending to be something we are not, just to make the neighbor comfortable while we might just be extremely uncomfortable.”

And as I said in a Sunday school class recently, if you use “relationship evangelism” by being really nice neighbors with your neighbor, it is never “evangelism” unless you work something like “God loves you and I do too” into the conversation.

But why do we love our neighbors?  For one thing, it works better than being the neighbor everyone else wishes to avoid.  But the main reason is that God wants us to, and it does give us the chance to say that God loves them.

And for my Scottish friends out there, have a glorious Burns Night.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.