Love Your Neighbour as Yourself

In 2018, I attended the Indianapolis 500. Every year, more than 300 000 people show up at the track making it the biggest single-day sporting event in the world. However, not everyone is there for the same reason. Some, like my brother and me, go there to watch the race. More than 50 000 other people ignore the race completely and watch concerts in the infield. Some are there to sell you drinks, hot dogs, or a new cellphone. When the race ends, everyone piles out of the speedway and heads in their own direction resulting in traffic jams all over the place. It took us more than seven hours to travel the sixty miles back to our hotel room.

As I thought about it afterwards, I realized that being in the same place does not mean that you are there together.

Sometimes, in church, we act as though being in the same place is enough. If we all go to worship on Sunday, see each other from across the room, and acknowledge one another’s presence, then we feel like everything is fine. We act as if unity and care result from just being in the same room, but that is not enough.

Paul’s prayer for the Thessalonian church was that their “Love would increase and overflow for each other and everyone else” (1 Thessalonians 3:12). It was not that they did not like one another or even those who were not part of the church. However, a casual acquaintance was not enough. Their love was supposed to be so deep that it could not be contained. It needed to overflow to all those around them. Only then would they be the family God intended his people to be. Only then would they have an influence on one another and their community.

God has never been interested in his people being a disconnected group of believers. Rather, he wants us to love him and love our neighbour as ourselves (Luke 10:27).

Our world could use a lot more connectedness in the coming year.

After all, being in the same place is not the same as being together.

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