Love your neighbour! How?

I am hearing a lot about how we Christians should love our neighbour as people discuss the cultural issues of our time.

We are told to love our neighbours with respect to tolerance, affirmation of declared identity, or various aspects of pandemic response. 

If our society declares that it is loving to praise any angry youth for venting their angst, should we automatically join in? If our society determined that good people always wear a glove on the left hand, would that make it so?

Now, I believe we absolutely should be loving our neighbour, but it is important to think through what that really means.

The default view of many, it seems, is that loving your neighbour means expressing kindness in the way our culture and the media has defined kindness for us. 

The basic idea is that Christians should be leading the way in expressing kindness as it has been defined. 

But how is the world’s track record at defining what is right or wrong?  We know the world doesn’t do well with defining wrong, so why should it be any better at defining right? 

What if loving our neighbour is more complicated than we are told?

This matters and if we don’t think carefully, we can easily let faulty logic slip into our preaching. This only reinforces the error.

Let’s take a historic example.  Imagine that we are living during the so-called sexual revolution.  “Love” was a big theme for many at that time.  What if Christians were to “love their neighbour” according to the cultural expectations of the day?

We always have the option of loving our neighbours and participating fully in their world as they have defined it. That was true during the sexual revolution, just as it has been true in the more recent variations of sexual identity and tolerance, or today, in our era of disease prevention. 

So, during the sexual revolution, perhaps some Christians participated in the “loving” according to the expectations of the day – or if not full participation, at least by affirmation.  I hope you can see how that would not actually be loving!

The counterpoint always seems to be a pendulum swing in the opposite direction.  If Christians are not going to love as they are told to love, then they must be anti-love and pro-antagonism. 

So, the logic goes, the only alternative to loving your neighbour is to criticise your neighbour, to be all about truth, to be relationally clumsy, difficult, awkward and unkind.  (Some Christians certainly have taken this approach, sadly.)

Surely there is an alternative?  We must let God’s values shape our view of right and wrong. We don’t have to look just like the world, but neither do we have to look like the world’s caricature of Christians. 

We can seek to live out that Christ-like combination of true love.  We can love our neighbours, understand them, be kind to them, care for them, show sensitivity to them, etc. 

And we can do so while still valuing truth, and reality, sharing the true hope that is found not in their pursuit of love, or safety, or whatever else, but the true hope of love and life and happiness found only in Jesus. 

It is not loving to perpetuate a lie to those around us.  In those revolutionary years, the lie of “free love” hurt many people.  The lies of our culture always do.

In a similar way, as a parent, I want to show love to my children. Do I always give them love on their terms? If not, is my only alternative a harsh unloving approach? Not at all.

I want to love my children and it often requires prayerful consideration to know what that should look like in a way that will actually help them.

Today we are living in a confused world.  Is the answer to be all in with the world’s plan for showing virtue?  Just love your neighbour and be essentially indistinguishable?  Or should we awkwardly proclaim the truth without love? Or is there a better way?  There is.

It is a way that is sensitive to their fears and concerns, a way that goes out of our way to demonstrate love, but at the same time lovingly speaks the truth and points to real hope.

Let’s be sure to love our neighbours, and let’s pray for wisdom to know how to do it.

Peter Mead is mentor at Cor Deo and author of several books. This article first appeared on his blog Biblical Preaching.