Loving Your Neighbor as Yourself

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Hey, everybody. I'm Pastor Jeff Durbin with Apologia Church. I want to thank you all so much for watching the content right here on Apologia Studios channel.

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So thank you again so much for watching these and sharing them. God bless you. I'm sorry about the heat.

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I know it's hot. And because of that, I am going to move quickly today. So the title of my sermon is

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Loving Your Neighbor as Yourself. Loving Your Neighbor as Yourself.

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Let's go ahead and pray. Father, thank You again. So I'm really unworthy of this task to teach

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Your people, to come before Your people. And I pray I would do it in a way that would honor You and glorify You. I pray that You would help me,

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Lord, to convey Your truth, that every word that I would have to say would come from me and would fall to ground, Lord. Your word would ring true in the hearts of Your people.

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I pray that You would sanctify them, that You would bless them, that You would challenge them, Lord, that You would bring us near to You, that You would help us to have a greater vision of Christ.

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Lord, we worship You. We love You. We really give all this time to You. It's in Your name that we pray.

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Amen. Loving Your neighbor as Yourself. And as you think about this subject, there's no way within this time frame

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I could even do it justice. But I'm going to do the best that I can. I asked Jeff what he'd like me to preach about, and this is what he wants to do.

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He wants to really work on, as a church, to create and to maintain and to build a culture of loving one another within our church.

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I think we do that, but it's been on his heart. We were at Cafe Rio a couple weeks ago, and if you don't know, that's

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Dr. White's favorite place to go in the world. I'm from San Diego, so I wish he would come and eat real

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Mexican food. But if you ever bring him out, that's all he really eats day and night is Cafe Rio.

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I don't think he eats anything else. But we were in Cafe Rio. We were walking through the place, and there was a guy outside, and he was kind of slumped over in his chair.

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And I saw him, looked at him for a second, and then I just went and got my food. And then Pastor Jeff comes in.

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He says, hey, we gotta help this guy. I could see at this moment he's strung out on heroin, so I'm gonna go get him some food, and let's go ahead and share the gospel with him.

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So in his heart lately has been this desire to care, and he really wants to bring this before the church.

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He really wants us to build and continue to maintain and build a culture of loving your neighbor.

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That word culture is kind of one of those overly used Christian buzzwords that go around in Christendom all the time.

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Sometimes we say the word so many times as Christians that it loses its meaning. But the word culture means the quality in a person or society that arises from a concern for what is regarded as excellent or important.

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It's the quality in a society that rises for a concern of what is regarded as excellent or important.

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I think we as spiritual leaders, especially in the American Evangelical Church, we get it wrong when we think that quantity is what it's all about, right?

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Not quality, but quantity. If only we had enough people, if only we had enough buildings and more money, the quantity of stuff, and then we've succeeded.

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But I think what we've done as spiritual leaders is we integrate success standards of the world inside of the way that we think about stuff.

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And it's not necessarily about quantity. It's about the quality of the people that God puts under your charge.

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Our focus should be on the quality of the body. And that, what does that mean? It means that we work on developing a biblically defined culture that's based on biblical values and biblical standards.

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And I think by and large as a church, I think we do, we're rad at this. And we've got our meal train ministries. It seems to me every single week, you know, we as a church are reaching out, reaching in, and caring one for another.

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And I think we have some of the most fabulous people on the planet. But what we want to do is maintain that culture of loving one another.

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Jesus explains the importance of the culture of love, the extreme importance of the culture of love in John 13, 35,

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I think a verse many of us know well. He says, by all this, all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love one for another.

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By this, all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.

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Maybe to simplify it, any truly authentic Christian body of believers will have a culture of loving one another.

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That's how you know that we are a valid Christian body of believers. It's a culture of love.

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That's one of the primary marks that validates the authenticity of who we are as Christians.

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No love flowing out of a church, no love flowing into the church, one to another and flowing out, then you can know that it's not an authentic church at all.

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The command is from Romans 12, 10. It says, love one another with brotherly affection.

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Outdo one another in showing honor. Brotherly affection right there, it speaks to this idea of cherishing one another, to care for one another tenderly.

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That's this culture that we need to build. That's this culture that we need to keep.

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Sometimes we as Americans can become so private and isolationistic in the way that we go about our lives.

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I'm just kind of focused on my own life, my own goals, my own values, and everybody else can kind of do their thing.

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But that is not what the true Christian church should resemble. Not a bunch of people just kind of coming in on a

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Sunday and doing their worship thing and then going about their lives in a kind of a private manner.

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No, it's about really the integration of our hearts and cherishing, cherishing one another, caring, lifting each other up.

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That's this culture of love that we need to build. You could clearly see it in the early church.

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Acts chapter 2, verse 45 through 47 says, and they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all as any had need.

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And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising

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God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day, those who were being saved.

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The last part of that last verse is pretty amazing because God responded to the internal care that the early church was demonstrating one to another by adding freshly saved souls to the church.

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God was blessing them. They were being faithful to how God wanted them to operate.

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They were being faithful to his commands. And by doing that, he responded in adding freshly saved souls to the church.

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It's kind of diametrically opposed to a lot of the evangelistic teachings that we hear.

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People say, well, I'm going to go out and win a soul, or I'm going to go out and get some salvations. That's not the way it happens.

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We can't do that. If you win somebody to Christ, you got to understand they're not one to Christ. Jesus wins people to Christ.

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The Holy Spirit draws those unto himself. But I think what's amazing is the quality of our internal culture dramatically affects our evangelistic effectiveness.

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That's what this is saying. If we're loving one another, if we're caring for one another, God pours out his blessings.

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God pours out his favor, and he does it in a way to where he adds people into the flock. So many guys, and I know this from experience, from being a pastor of my own church,

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I wanted to get people in. I just had to get them in and do whatever I can to get more numbers and more people into the service.

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But that is backwards. What we do is we're faithful to care for one another. And if we look internally and care for one another, then he is going to be the one that adds to the church.

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That is what happens. And that's what we want to see. We're commanded to love one another, I think, for many reasons.

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But our neighbors desperately need the love that only

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Christians can provide. The only people that can truly love as God loves are

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Christians. We're going to get more into that kind of definition of love a little bit later, but we have something inside of ourselves that nobody else in the world has.

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We truly love as God loves. It's not going to come from anybody but us.

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Our wives need to be loved. Our husbands need to be loved. Our kids need to be loved. Our unborn neighbors need to be loved.

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And our enemies need to be loved. I think you look at it in our society right now, and there's so many evils, there's so many ills that we complain about as Christians.

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And we should respond to things like abortion and whatever it may be, the many things that kind of infect our city and infect our culture.

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We do, I think, as Christians is we shake our fists, and these things continue to pervade our nation.

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And all the while, it's really built on the fact that we don't love our neighbor as ourselves.

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We get upset about the degradation of the nation. We get upset about abortion, which we should, but we don't really act in love towards our neighbors, which is going to be the vehicle by which

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God changes things, by which God transforms. No one on earth can love, again, the way that we can love.

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No one on earth has the capacity. That's why it's so essential and important we get that. Why do we work to rescue babies?

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Is it because, like people ask, is it just because you pick out a particular sin and just harp on that?

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No, we work to rescue babies because God commands us to love our neighbor as ourselves.

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That's why we go, the baby in the womb is our neighbor. Why do we work to rescue folks from cults all the time?

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It's because God commands us to love our neighbor as ourselves. Why do we work to win the island of Kauai, sacrifice, and just pack up everything and ship out there?

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It's because we're called to love our neighbor as ourselves, right? Why do we seek to do justice? It's because we are called to love our neighbor as ourselves.

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That is the reason why we do it. I think we can become so jaded to those two great commandments, to love

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God and to love people. If you go on any church website, you look up their vision and mission statement.

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It usually says, love God and love people. I mean, it's on shirts. It's everywhere around us. And sometimes we overly use those phrases.

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And we have to understand that knowing about them theologically or conceptually, but failing to put them into practice means that we're in error.

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We can know about them conceptually or theologically, but if we fail to put them into practice, if they're not being fleshed out in the way that we live our lives as God's people, everybody suffers.

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And so do we. I like what Heidi said. Garrett, she put this on Reform Pub.

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She put, just something on my heart. Our theology means diddy if it doesn't have feet.

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Go do something with it. I don't mean to embarrass you, Heidi, but I thought that was good as I was studying all through this.

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She says again, just something on my heart. Our theology means diddy if it doesn't have feet. Go do something with it.

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So what is she saying? It's not enough to simply know about something, to have it stored in your mind.

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We have to apply that knowledge of what we know, especially when it comes to the primary commands of God, right?

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I was talking to a guy at our strip club outreach on Friday. He was really, really kind of a rare individual that you run into on the street, super brilliant, super bright, was not intoxicated at all.

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And I actually asked him, what is your addiction here? Is it heroin? Is it meth?

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Because 99 % of the time you get down to the root of what their issue is. And he said, no, I'm not addicted to anything.

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I come to find out he's really in a lot of sorrow because he just went through a divorce, but he had all sorts of biblical knowledge.

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He said, you know what? My dad's a pastor. I grew up in the church. I'm a Christian. I've read the Bible front and back, but the issue was not how much biblical knowledge the guy knew.

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I said, man, you got to apply it. You got to apply this knowledge. You have to put it. You have to put it into practice.

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So James says in James 1, 22 through 25, but be doers of the word and not hears only deceiving yourselves.

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For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his face, a natural face in a mirror, for he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like.

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But the one who looks into the perfect law of the law of liberty and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets, but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing.

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Just because we intellectually assent to the doctrines of Scripture, again, doesn't mean at the same time those doctrines and those truths are being fleshed out in our lives, right?

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Realistically, the validity of a genuine faith, the validity of the genuine faith, the fruits of a genuine faith is the working out of that faith and how we particularly love our neighbors.

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That's what James says here in chapter two, verse 14 through 18. He says, what good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works, can that faith save him?

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If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to him, go in peace, be warmed and filled without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that?

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So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead. But someone will say, you have faith and I have works.

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Show me your faith apart from your works and I will show you my faith by my works.

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True, genuine faith is always going to bleed out in the way that you live. It's always going to affect the way that you speak, in the way that you live, and particularly in the way that you treat your neighbors, treat the people around you.

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I think this subject is so right for us, particularly as apologians, just because of the nature of our ministry.

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We are a rare church, praise God. We are a militant church and we're always out in the field, we're always in the fray, we're always working to rescue babies, we're always in it.

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And that's something that's amazing. But we need to understand that if we cannot go about our mission to rescue babies, to rescue folks out of colds, to spread the gospel, we cannot continue if there's no love in our hearts for our enemies.

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Can't do it. And this is, I'll tell you one thing, this has been such an amazingly convicting and refining sermon for me in particular, because it really, as you go through the study, it shows you how unloving you are and how unloving you can be.

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Look at what Paul says here in 1 Corinthians 13. He says, if I speak with the tongues of men and angels, but do not have love,

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I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. A noisy gong or a clanging cymbal is just purposeless.

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They are not serving the purpose for which they were designed, right? An annoying gong is something that's annoying.

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It's unpleasant. It's disruptive. It's a whole lot of noise being made, but nothing is being effectively accomplished.

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And that's if you go about ministry and you go out preaching and you go out just in your regular lives with the gospel on your tongue, but you don't have love in your hearts, it's all in vain.

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It's all in absolute vain. Without love, our work will be purposeless. Again, annoying, disruptive, impotent, and therefore fruitless.

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We need to love the folks that troll our social media pages and call us all sorts of stuff.

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We need to love them. We need to love the people that malign us, slander us, beat us, spit on us, berate us.

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That happens, if not weekly, monthly. We need to respond to them in love.

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We need to love the death squirts that usher pre -born children to their deaths. And that hits home with me in my heart.

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We need to love Serena. She's a head of something called the Arizona Clinic Defense Force, and she's responsible for untold amounts of baby deaths.

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Who knows? But we need to respond to Serena when we see her in love. We need to love our enemies and not verbally abuse or mistreat them.

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If we do, we're no different than them, meaning there is no light in us to dispel the darkness that they're in.

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You can't treat them in like manner. We have to respond to all the vitriol in love.

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Look what Charles Spurgeon says, one of my favorite quotes. He says, justice demands that we set our face against our adversaries and their evil actions, but not our hearts.

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We're supposed to be angry. The Bible says be angry and sin not. We should be angry when babies are being murdered.

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We should be angry when the society is going downhill so fast. But it says into sin not.

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It's an anger. It's an outrage over evil. The Bible says that we're supposed to hate even the garment stained by the flesh.

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But in our anger, we have to temper our responses with love. Luke 6, 27 -29 says, but I say to you who hear, love your enemies.

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Do good to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who abuse you.

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To one who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also. And from one who takes away your cloak, do not withhold your tunic either.

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Again, especially for all of us that go out to the clinics. I think this is one verse you have to remember.

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Romans 12, verse 21 says, do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

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I can't even think of a more dark place, a more disturbing place, sorrowful place than standing out in front of a clinic on the public sidewalk.

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It's just the death there is palpable. And when I started going to the clinic in about 2016, that's when

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I started going to the church. I would spend so much time. I spent 12 to 20 hours out there. And actually,

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I was in sin. I was way out of balance, neglecting my family and having too much of my time being involved in ministry.

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But you can get so overcome by the darkness of a situation that you begin to act like they do.

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Act like those who berate you, act like those who malign you. And that's what I would do. I mean, they would fire something out at me verbally, and I would just respond, not in love, not with a tempered spirit, but with vindictiveness.

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So we have to be careful as we're going out and we're reaching out, we're receiving all of this backlash from the world that we don't respond in like manner.

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It says, do not be overcome by evil. It means to be conquered or to be subdued to where, again, we're behaving just like those who are hurting us.

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But we overcome and conquer and subdue them by being good to them, by being gracious to them, by being loving and merciful and kind to them, regardless of how they treat us.

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I think, again, we do this well. We had the protester woman that came out,

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I can't remember her name, Deanna. I think it's been getting hot, so she hasn't been hanging around. But I think you all have been so exemplary in treating her with kindness and love and grace.

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But we always have to keep this in the forefront of our thoughts. There's nothing like the subject of love that aligns your heart and aligns your mind and kind of gets you back to where you need to be.

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Because what I'm trying to tell you is we can be so involved in the world and reaching the world with the gospel that we begin to be overcome and conquered by it.

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But you really got to ask yourself, am I loving in the way that I'm going about the work of Christ?

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Am I loving in the way that I'm doing what God has called me to do? If we do not keep ourselves in check, then we default to vindictiveness and we default to vengeance.

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Loving your neighbor is absolutely crucial. So for the rest of the message, again, this message is really just a message to myself and it's really exposed how horribly

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I failed to love my neighbor. Matthew 22, 39.

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Matthew 22, 39 says this, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

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And I just want to be simple and clear, about as simple and clear as I could possibly be and just answer and kind of break down those three topics for the rest of the time.

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Love neighbor and as myself. How do I love my neighbor as myself?

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What does it biblically mean to do that? I think if we don't understand what

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God means by this command, we will never create a culture, we will never maintain.

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And ultimately, if we don't know what God means by loving your neighbor, then all of our efforts and whatever we do will be all for naught.

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That crucial component of love is the most important aspect of it all. We cannot love our neighbor as ourself on our own.

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It's impossible. You can't just white knuckle it and grit your teeth. You cannot do this. This is something we can't produce.

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We have to understand genuine love is produced by God himself. It's God resident in the heart and the life of the believer, the born again

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Christian. It's he who produces that love. God is love and the source of all the genuine love going on on this planet.

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So ultimately he gets all the boasting and he gets all the glory and all of it. But he's the one that loves through us. First John four, seven through eight says, beloved, let us love one another for love is from God.

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And whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know

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God because God is love. Another way to put it is genuine love is the byproduct of the work of the spirit of God in the heart of the believer.

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It's all through from him, through him and to him. We must be in relationship, of course, with Christ.

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We must be saved to generate any type of love, any type of true love for our neighbor.

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Look what John Piper says. He says, we tap into this, this type of love when we understand that God loved us first.

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He's the source of our love. God loved us even before Jesus gave himself for us.

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God, the father is a source of all love. Before we can give this love, we need to receive it for ourselves.

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You can't give what you don't have. In other words, loving our neighbor as we love ourselves is not something that we can do on our own.

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We do it by the Holy Spirit. It's just so crucial. And I know a lot of us, this is just a reminder for many of us that you have to know

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Christ, that you have to have a new heart to generate any type of love. But you also have to let that burden sink on you or kind of sit on you that it's only you that can love the world the way that we need to love the world.

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It's only you. It's your responsibility to love your neighbor. What is love?

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Well, I think a couple definitions from the world. Love is a word you use to express your devotion or your excitement for something.

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Love is a word you use to make people happy. If only you would say I love you to me, then

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I'll be happy. Love is a word we say to please people.

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Love is a word you use to express your attraction to a certain person or thing. And I think what we see in our society so prolifically is that love is not only tolerating but supporting the sinful choices of the people around you.

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That's what it means to love according to the world's standards. It's not only tolerating but supporting the sinful choices of the people around you.

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Now what we do in our evangelistic schedules, we go out to a lot of pride nights and pride like sporting events.

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We preach the gospel. We set up a speaker and we just preach the good news of Jesus Christ. And we expose the sin of homosexuality and we biblically define it.

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And we call people, we plead with people to repent, to turn from it, and find new life in Christ, be born again, be made a new creation.

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We do it all the time. And many times we'll be stopped as we're out there preaching the gospel at the pride night.

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And people say, you know what, I'm a Christian. Actually, this just happened at the strip club a couple nights ago. And they'll say, you know what,

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I'm a Christian. And you know what, you're doing it. Jesus would never do this. Jesus would never go to somebody and tell them the truth.

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Huh. But mainly, what you do is you answer, they say, you know, I'm a

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Christian. And we answer like this. We say, how can you tolerate and support and celebrate this sinful activity that God says that he hates?

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That in God's, according to God's terms, this is an abomination in his sight. And if we're really loving homosexual people, we're going to, or people who profess to be homosexual, we're going to tell them about their sins so they can run to Christ, so that they can turn to Christ as savior and repent.

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That's true love. And I think the answer that you get from Christians, when you ask them, how can you as a

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Christ follower support this thing, which is damning people to hell, they tell you this, it's because my

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God is a God of love. We're called to love people, not to judge them.

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And how many times, if you've been out talking to people, how many times have people said that to you? And that word love and that word judge, it kind of messes with the mind of Christians because we hear that and we say, oh, wait a second,

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I'm supposed to love. And these people are saying, I'm not loving people by what I'm doing here. But I think the translation of what this

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Christian said, they said, oh, it's because my God is a God of love. We're called to love, not judge people. What they're actually saying biblically is that the

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God that I've constructed in my own heart tolerates sin. He's fine with it.

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He actually demonstrates his love by tolerating sin. No, love is not the toleration of sin.

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It's not this. This came out of Bethel churches. They just wrote this on one.

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I can't remember if this is on their Twitter account, but this is what they just posted a couple of days ago, I think three or four days ago.

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They say this, God loves all people, LGBTQ plus and straight. The message of change has never been all must change.

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We share these stories specifically for Christians who are unfulfilled in identifying as LGBTQ plus.

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For those of you who feel fulfilled and happy as you are, we love you. Look at, listen to what they say.

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God doesn't force people to change and people, including Christians, shouldn't force others to change either.

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God doesn't force people to change, require change. That's a word called repentance.

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And of course that is the gift of God. Look what Jesus says that if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away.

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For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell. They go on to say this change is a safe place for Christians, safe space for Christians seeking an alternative to LGBTQ plus as they follow their faith according to their own personal convictions that came from a church that they would just follow your faith to your own personal convictions.

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You have to understand we are not loving the homosexual community in any way, shape or form by saying, you know what?

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God just created you as you are. You just go about your own personal convictions. If you feel fulfilled and identifying as a homosexual, just go on and do what you do.

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God loves you. That's not loving them. That's hating them by saying that.

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If God tolerates sin, then there is absolutely no need for the coming of Christ and the crucifixion.

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If he just tolerates sin, why would Jesus have to come and atone for sin? Why would there have to be a penalty absorbed for sin if he just is okay with it?

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If it's just something that that he's created you to identify with? No, unfortunately, the

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God that Bethel Church purports is not the God of the Bible. We have to understand that clearly.

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The God that Bethel Church purports is not the God of the Scriptures. And therefore, because of that, the gospel that they preach is a false gospel and their teachers are false.

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And we have to warn people of that. If that God were real, that just simply tolerates the sin of homosexuality, if he were real, then he'd be lacking in holiness, righteousness, justice, goodness, true love, and on and on and on.

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And we wonder why God hates idolatry so much. This is a fictitious

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God that they've created, right, to appease the masses, to appease the spirit of the age, which is tolerance, right?

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God hates idolatry so much because all idolatry distorts who God truly is and it's a blight to the glory, his own glory that he's after.

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So what is love according to the Bible? What is love according to the

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Scriptures? Love, and to put it as simply as we can, if we're going to love our neighbor, we've got to know what love is.

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Love is selfless giving. That's what love is. Love is selfless giving. I think this is one of the best definitions.

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If you've got a better one, you can let me know. But this is one of the best definitions of biblically defined love.

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Love is the act of giving to others at the expense of yourself. Love is the act of giving to others, your neighbors, those around you, at the expense of yourself.

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See, the great difference between the love that the Christian has in their heart by way of the

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Holy Spirit, how it differentiates from all these other standards or definitions of love that we see in our culture, is that it is selfless and it's only

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God resident in us that can produce a selfless love. Love stained by sin.

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Love in the heart of the fallen man is always self -centered. It is always for self, even though it masquerades to be selfless.

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But love is the act of giving to others at the expense of yourself. You see it in John 3 .16, for God so loved the world that He gave

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His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life.

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God showed His love by what? Selflessly giving of His own Son. Selflessly coming in the incarnation.

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Selflessly coming to die on the cross for our sins. 1 John 4 .10 says, and this is love, not that we have loved

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God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.

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Romans 5 .8, but God shows His love for us in that while we were still sinners,

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Christ died for us. Love is selfless giving. That's how you know when you're loving.

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God demonstrates His love by selflessly giving to us that which we need the most, and that is the

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Savior and His salvation. The greatest gift that God ever gave to a lost humanity, a totally undeserving lost humanity, was the gift of Jesus Christ.

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Coming was the greatest gift that we could ever receive. And we, in like manner, we demonstrate our love to our neighbor by giving to them what they need the most.

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Now the question is, what do we need the most? A slimmer waistline. It'd be nice.

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More stuff. Stuff, stuff, stuff. We just continue to get storage units and pack all our stuff in there.

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Clothes, more money, more vacations, more pleasure, sexual fulfillment, companionship.

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What is it? Those are the things that we run after, right? The approval of man is what we're all after, right?

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Is that what we need the most? You know what we need the most that God created each one of us to need the most is truth.

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It's truth. That's why the enemy always wants to take truth out of us or distort the truth that's coming to us.

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Truth is what we need the most. Gospel truth. Romans 1 .16 says,

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For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes to the

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Jew first and also to the Greek. Why is truth what we need the most? Because the message of the gospel truth is that by which

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God saves the soul of the lost person. That's why we need it the most. Truth, gospel truth, is what saves sinners.

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God uses that to save, to effectually save His own elect. The greatest, listen to this, tell me, you can tell me if I'm wrong, but the greatest lovers on earth are truth -proclaiming

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Christians. Those are the greatest lovers. The ones that would selflessly proclaim the truth, the good news of the gospel.

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And we love our neighbors at the highest level by sharing the gospel truth with them because we are caring for them in their greatest need, which is the state of their soul.

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One of our primary jobs on the planet is to share the saving truth, the gospel saving truth, to condemn people because we are the only ones with the truth and empowered by God to complete the mission.

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When we get up here and I say things like this, if you're truly loving people, you're going to share with them the gospel truth.

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It's not to guilt you into anything. It's not to beat this over your head to get you moving, but it's just the brass -tacks truth of the situation that we live in a lost world that people are headed to a literal hell forever.

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And we are the ones indwelt by the Spirit of God. We are the ones with the gospel truth.

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We are the only ones that can complete the mission, not just a couple people who are intellectually amazing, right?

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It's every single one of us taking up that call and taking up that mission. See, we do ourselves a massive disfavor as an

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American evangelical church by only pointing to a couple one in a billion individuals and saying, you know what, these are the guys that are going to accomplish the mission for us.

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Look at them, one in a billion people, when that's not the way that God has constructed this all to happen.

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It's each and every single Holy Spirit indwelt Christian understanding the gospel, loving their neighbors selflessly, and affecting their sphere of culture.

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That's what I want desperately. You ask me what I want as a pastor, what I want to do with the remainder of my life,

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I want to do everything that I can to empower every single Christian that God puts around me to fulfill their calling, to preach and effectively communicate the gospel.

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We all do that. We pastors all do that. Man, we're looking at massive, massive, massive change and revival and people coming to know

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Jesus. That's what I live for. If we aren't disseminating the gospel truth, then you could say we're not loving

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God and we're not loving people because true love selflessly gives to people what they most need.

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And your neighbors and your families, they need the gospel truth more than anything. If you apply that definition, and I'd love to get into 1

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Corinthians 13, I'm not going to do it, but apply that definition of love being selfless giving.

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Apply that to 1 Corinthians 13. Love is patient and kind. 1 Corinthians 13, 4 -8.

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Love is patient and kind. Love does not envy or boast. It is not arrogant or rude.

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It does not insist on its own way. It is not irritable or resentful. It does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.

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Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.

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Isn't it amazing all these qualities of love has to do with the way that we really respond to one another in kindness, in patience, not envying selflessly, not being irritable or resentful.

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And it all takes death to self to accomplish this. It's all about neighborly love.

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That's what it is. Okay, the second big issue, we just define what love is. And one more thing about love that was kind of so liberating for me.

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Loving people, if it's selfless giving, loving people is not trying to make everybody happy all the time.

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Loving people truly is not people pleasing. We don't have to do that. Isn't it amazing that we just as sinners, we default to people pleasing, thinking that we got to make everybody happy.

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We got to make our husbands happy. We got to make our children happy. But one of the most liberating things that you can learn is no, it's not your job to make anybody happy.

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It's not your job to please anybody because the Bible says that true joy comes from the Lord. It's in His presence, pleasures are forevermore.

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Because most of the time when we just want to seek the approval of man and please people, we've created in that person an idol, thinking that if we please this person, then we are going to get what we need.

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Now, you don't have to please people. Please don't do that. Who is my neighbor?

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Who is my neighbor? That word neighbor, it comes from two German words. The first, ne, which means nearby.

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And the second is geber, which means dweller. It's a nearby dweller. That's who your neighbor is.

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It's anybody who you're near. Anybody who is open to your influence. It's not only nearness physically, but it's people that you have contact with, could be on social media, wherever.

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But everybody is pretty much your neighbor. We can't get out of it. I think we'd be totally amiss if we didn't look at the

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Scripture where somebody asked Jesus who his neighbor was, and that's Luke 10, verses 25 through 27.

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It says, and behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?

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And he said to him, what is written in the law? How do you read it? And he answered, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all of your strength, and with all of your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.

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And he said to him, you have answered correctly. Do this and you will live. But, this is important, but he desiring to justify himself said to Jesus, and who is my neighbor?

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Jesus replied, a man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him, and departed, leaving him half dead.

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Now by chance a priest was going down the road, and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side.

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So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place, saw him pass by on the other side as well. But a

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Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was, and when he saw him, he had compassion.

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He went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he set him on his own animal, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him.

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And the next day he took out two denarii, and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, take care of him, and whatever more you spend,

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I will repay you when I come back. Which of these three do you think proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?

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And he said, the one who showed him mercy. And Jesus said to him, you go and do likewise. And of course in this section of Scripture, there's so much that we can go into, but the lawyer in this situation, he was trying to justify his lack of love for Samaritans.

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That's what it meant by he was trying to justify himself. But Jesus shocks him by using the

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Samaritan as the exemplary figure. That it was the Samaritan who was the neighbor, who was the most loving of the neighbor.

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And really the moral of the story, this is so important for us, is your love should extend to people that you don't believe are worthy of your time and effort or resources.

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This is something we, especially in the culture that we live in as Americans, we need to grasp onto.

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This is what it's talking about, that the neighbor is not just somebody that's close to you, deemed is worthy from who they are, from their actions, whatever it may be.

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The priest and the Levite, who are the men of God, the men supposed to be representing who

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God is, they saw the man in need and they judged him completely unworthy of their help and they went on their own business, which was not what

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God would have them to do in that situation. Can you believe the priest and the Levite, who were supposed to be men of God, leading people to God, representing

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God, God's will in that moment, in that situation was completely off their radar. If you get in a place where you're a spiritual leader and you don't even know the will of God at the moment, you're in a bad place.

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And so we can understand why, of course, judgment was visited upon the house of Israel, because of how off track they got, because how into the darkness they had become.

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The priest and the Levite, they're an example of what is so wrong,

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I think, in our nation. But I think the question we have to ask ourselves is how many folks, how many people are suffering because we deem them unworthy of our time and our effort?

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How many babies continue to die in our city and our nation because we as Christians deem them unworthy of our time and our effort to go and to love them as the neighbors that they are, the pre -born neighbors as they are?

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We might say that they're humans. We might say that they are worthy of protection.

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We might applaud those who go and rescue them and work to rescue them. But if we are not going to them, if we are not caring to them, then we are no different than the priest and the

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Levite. I think the parable of the

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Good Samaritan is a perfect illustration of why the majority of Christians are completely derelict of their duty when it comes to loving their neighbor.

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I'm not just talking about babies in the womb. I'm just talking about neighborly love, neighborly love to share the gospel, neighborly love to come alongside of this world and care for them.

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The majority reason why that happens is because they follow the lead of their spiritual authority.

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If the spiritual leaders are too busy to attend the primary commands of God, the people will follow suit.

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If pastors are too busy with unbiblical pursuits, then their people will always, always, always follow the leader.

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Just like at Cafe Rio, being a pastor, I walked right by that guy who was addicted on heroin.

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Jeff said he was almost at death's door. We don't even know. He could be dead right now. So this is not me pounding this into your head necessarily.

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I'm that guy that just kind of passes up my neighbor in need. Here's an amazing quote.

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What the prince does, then do the many. For upon the prince are the eyes of all.

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We as spiritual leaders must take a very sober and I think serious evaluation of where we are headed because that's where we're leading the train of God's people.

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If you want to ask the question really bluntly is why is the church failing so miserably at loving their neighbors?

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It's the fault of the spiritual leadership because like the priest and the Levite, we have erected all sorts of stuff that we think that we need to be doing that we shouldn't be doing.

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So the priest and the Levite going on that road, they had plans, but at that moment they weren't doing what

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God had called them to do and that is the American church. We come up with so many programs and so many areas that we place our effort and our attention to and focus upon when they are not the primary things that we need to be involved with.

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We do that as humans because we look at the commands of Christ. I mean what did the

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Samaritan do? It cost him. It was not convenient for him to do what he had to do. It wouldn't be convenient as we go about our daily walk to just stop everything and say you know what

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I'm caring for this individual and I'm going to give them the money that I have and I'm going to lead them. What did he do?

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He took him over to get his wounds taken care of and then he said whatever expense comes up I'm going to pay for it myself.

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That's not convenient. That's costly. That's selfless, right? But what we do

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I think as Christians is we look at the commands of God and what do we do? We alter them to suit our own comfort.

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That's why we distort the commands of God. That's what they did. They distorted the commands of God to suit our own innate desire for comfort and for just selfish pleasure and selfish pursuits.

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I think another reason we pass up the most needy of neighbors among us as we're talking about the reasons why we don't get involved, it's the us, for, and no more mentality.

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The us, for, and no more mentality. It's just an ideology. It's a way of thinking that it hinders us from caring for our neighbors because what it's all about is

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I just care for my kin. I care for my family and that's it. If you have a problem and you're outside of my family, then it's not my problem.

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This is not what we're being taught in the scriptures when it comes to loving our neighbor. This is not what we are being taught from the scriptures when it comes to priorities as a

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Christian. We can't just say, hey, me and my kids, my two kids and my wife, and then you go and fend for yourself.

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What happens when we have that mentality? What happens when we think that, when we have that philosophical way of viewing our own lives and our own duties?

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People suffer. Our neighbors suffer. That's it. More babies die.

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More souls are lost forever because, you know what?

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I'm just taking care of me and my own. Yeah, you should take care of you and your own primarily.

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That is your first calling to take care of your family. That is our first ministry as men and women, right?

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But we have to look at our lives like a pie chart and if all of the color is only in taking care of your own family, you're off.

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You're off course. You're off base. The pie chart of our life, it should involve the care for our neighbor if we're going to live that balanced

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Christian neighbor -loving life that God has commanded us to live. Lastly, what does it mean to love my neighbor as myself?

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We know that love is selfless giving. Our neighbor is anybody within our vicinity, anybody we have connection to, we should love.

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But what does it mean to love my neighbor as myself? And real clearly, it means this.

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The care and the concern and love that you innately give to yourself, you now are to show to your neighbor.

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So we innately love ourselves too much. But nowhere in Scripture does it command us to love ourselves because self -love is the disposition of the sinful nature.

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The Bible doesn't command us to love ourselves because the problem with loving our neighbor is we love me too much and I have nothing left over for those around me.

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The Bible says now that we are in Christ, born again, new creations, this is now all that sinful self -focus that you have, now you are to divert that to your neighbor, loving them as you love yourself.

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The world will tell you, and I think many people read this verse upside down, the world will tell you that you will only love people, you only have the capacity to love people and to care for them and to contribute if you love yourself, but that's an absolute lie.

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Again, we love ourselves too much and that's what prevents us from loving our neighbor. The priest and the Levite were too concerned with their self -centered and self -constructed priorities that prevented them from loving the man that needed the help.

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And again, they were self -constructed and self -prevented because Jesus even said, this wasn't the right thing to do at the moment.

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Who was the neighbor? Who was the one that was doing the right thing? It was the Samaritan. Look what Barnabas Piper says about all this.

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This is John Piper's son. He says, as Christians, we know that the origin of genuine love does not come from within.

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And in fact, the reality of self -love is a twisted, idolatrous worship. We love others because we are loved, because God loved us first, because from Him comes our worth.

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We love others because we make ourselves better than others. Sorry, we love ourselves because we make ourselves better than others and seek to be our own

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God. When we seek to love our neighbors as ourselves, we are not to idolize self. No, we are to be aware of our propensity for self -care and self -comfort and transfer it willingly to others to care for and to comfort them instead.

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We are to love them as we love ourselves, not because we love ourselves. Simply again, how do we love our neighbors as ourselves?

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All the energy that you and Haley place to you, now you focus that now to the way that you love your neighbor.

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I think I mentioned it a couple times. This is convicting. It's an immensely refining sermon.

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I think if you're doing family worship with your family, it would be great for you to look at, just take the concept of love as selfless giving and 1

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Corinthians chapter 13. Break down all of those components of what it means to truly love and then go to the

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Gospels with your kids and see if you can find how Jesus perfectly exemplified what it meant to love.

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Find all the ways that Jesus was patient, Jesus was kind. Just go down the list and that is going to be an absolutely excellent study for you.

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It is such, like I said, it's almost going to a spiritual chiropractor. I know it's kind of a cheesy way of explaining that, but looking into love absolutely aligns the way that you were supposed to go about your mission in life regardless of what you were doing.

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And again, I think the greatest thing that we find our hope in is that God is not looking at our performance to be the basis of our salvation.

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I think you get convicted by your own lovelessness. I do. But I think the hope here is that Jesus was the perfect law keeper on our behalf.

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He was the perfect neighbor lover on our behalf and that is what we place all of our faith and all of our hope.

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Serious stuff. Loving your neighbor is absolutely crucial. Again, evaluate your life.

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How are you doing? As you go through this, I'll just admit it's rough.

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It's rough to do it. It's rough to look at your life and really say, am I the priest of the

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Levite or am I the Samaritan? But we need to. The babies that are dying every day need us to rise up and to love them.

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People are heading into eternity without Christ. We need to love them, to show grace to them, to show mercy.

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Our husbands need to be shown patience. Our wives need to be shown patience and kindness, self -control.

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It's absolutely crucial, even though it's seemingly just one of the most simple things that we can know as Christians.

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We hear it all the time, love your neighbor, love your neighbor. But if you start doing it and affecting your family and affecting the people that are around you,