New Believer’s Path · Lesson 5 of 7 · Loving Your Neighbor as Yourself · about 5 min
How should I treat my neighbor?
He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.”
Luke 10:27 · WEB
In the mid-nineteenth century the young Hudson Taylor was studying medicine in Hull, England, working as a doctor’s assistant. Going over his accounts one Saturday evening, he found he had only one coin left—a half-crown. The next day, a Sunday, at ten in the evening, a poor man came and begged him to come and pray for his dying wife.
In that room four or five children stood about with sunken cheeks, and the mother lay on a wretched pallet beside a baby only thirty-six hours old. He thought: if only this half-crown were two coins, how gladly he would give them part of it. But it was one coin. He knelt down, and scarcely had he begun ‘Our Father who art in heaven’ than conscience said within, ‘Dare you kneel down and call Him Father with that half-crown in your pocket?’ When he rose, the father begged him to help them, and the words ‘Give to him that asketh of thee’ flashed into his mind. He took out the coin—it was all he had. He later wrote that as he went home that night, ‘my heart was as light as my pocket.’
Source: Hudson Taylor, A Retrospect, chapter 3
The last lesson said that faith means caring for one another. This lesson goes one step further out: loving someone near you who needs help.
Someone asked Jesus how to inherit eternal life. The answer was just two lines: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” (Luke 10:27) Loving God and loving people go together; those who love God slowly learn to love the people around them.
Then the man asked, ‘Who is my neighbor?’ Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan—a foreigner passing by who stopped and cared for a wounded man by the road. Your neighbor is not the person who lives closest, but the person in front of you who needs help, and whom you happen to be able to help.
Proverbs says, “Don’t say to your neighbor, ‘Go, and come again; tomorrow I will give it to you,’ when you have it by you.” (Proverbs 3:27-29) Serving does not have to wait until you have lots of money and time; start with what is at hand: a meal, a ride, a phone call, sitting with someone for a while.
This week: do one small, concrete thing for one person. You don’t need to tell anyone, or wait to be thanked. When you have done it, you can pray one sentence for that person.
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your ___ as yourself.”
According to this lesson, where can serving begin?
Do one small, concrete thing for one person.
Just this one thing, so small you cannot fail. Write it down and it goes into your Rule of Life card.
Added to your Rule of Life card. Tap each day you do it this week: