Your Neighbors Are Hungry for Love

 

Our neighbors are hungry for neighborly love. According to Barna, more than a quarter of U.S. adults live alone, and it is not uncommon for people to have no regular visitors in their home. What psychiatrists call “chronic loneliness” is common in modern American life.

The neighborhood used to be where people could predictably find friendship in the midst of loneliness and help in time of need. But since the end of World War II, that’s been changing.

As Brian Fikkert and Kelly M. Kapic detail in their book Becoming Whole, the local neighborhood is no longer a place where we are known or meaningfully connected. Isolated people now purchase from professionals the care previous generations received from neighbors.

The time couldn’t be riper for Christians to resist yielding to bitter antagonism and instead choose the ancient path of neighborly love Christian exiles before us faithfully walked.

What if we, too, refused to blend in, refused to strike back, and instead became zealous to pursue the common good of our neighbors? What if the non-Christians around us began to see a wave of Christians who were humbly pursuing the welfare of their neighborhoods and cities rather than joining in on the electoral yelling or divisive culture wars?

Neighboring is essential in fulfilling the Great Commission. Throughout Scripture, you see the principle of living together as integral to the revelation of God’s plan of salvation for a lost and dying world. God placed Israel in the Promised Land to be a light and a good neighbor. Through them, He would bless all nations (Genesis 22:18).

Jesus stressed the importance of neighboring with the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37). In Acts 2, we see how Early Church members took care of one another, not just in their own pews but also in their community. It was part of why they grew! Paul says in Galatians ‪5:14 that the whole law is summed up in the command to love your neighbor as yourself!

So, here’s the question: Do you know your neighbor? God has placed you where He wants you for a reason.

Are you an involved and engaged neighbor? Engaged neighbors care for each other, checking in on people when they’re sick or looking after their homes while they’re away.

Neighboring is messy. It requires sacrifice and effort to be a good neighbor — and patience to deal with the difficult ones around you. Regardless, God calls us into the mess.

He has called our church to be a good neighbor too. Too often, our churches and members are invisible to their communities.

If our church ceased to exist tomorrow, would anyone in the community know we were gone?

We can ask a similar question of ourselves: if we sold our house and moved tomorrow, would any of the neighbors care? They would if we were engaged and loving.

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Does this article make you interested in taking the Engaged Neighbor pledge? Five categories and 20 principles to guide you toward becoming an engaged neighbor. Sign the pledge online at http://engagedneighbor.com.

Contact the blog author, David L. Burton at dburton541@yahoo.com.