Love your neighbor as yourself. Mark 12.31

Mark 12:31 (NIV) The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”

1. Love your neighbor. Sounds nice. Is it easy or hard?
2. Who is my neighbor?
3. What would the world be like if everyone followed this one command?
4. Try really hard to love your neighbor. Is that it? Is that the gospel? Try really hard?
5. How does the gospel empower us to love our neighbor?
6. What exactly does it mean to love? Action? Emotion?
7. Can you have love without action AND emotion?
8. What place does will—commitment—play in loving well?
9. Lewis said, “The rule for all of us is perfectly simple. Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbour; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.”[1] Do you agree?
10. I think Lewis overplays his hand here: “Love, in the Christian sense, does not mean an emotion. It is a state not of the feelings but of the will; that state of the will which we have naturally about ourselves, and must learn to have about other people.”[2] I think love includes emotion. Emotionless love doesn’t seem right to me. Thoughts?
11. A few paragraphs later, Lewis continues, “The worldly man treats certain people kindly because he ‘likes’ them: the Christian, trying to treat every one kindly, finds himself liking more and more people as he goes on—including people he could not even have imagined himself liking at the beginning.”[3] How does treating people with love change me?
12. I always like to think of baby steps. What baby steps could we take to become more loving?

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[1] Lewis, C. S. 2001. Mere Christianity. New York: HarperOne.

[2] Lewis, C. S. 2001. Mere Christianity. New York: HarperOne.

[3] Lewis, C. S. 2001. Mere Christianity. New York: HarperOne.