Adopt Jesus’ Lifestyle: Loving Your Neighbour Well
Last Sunday we continued our journey from the previous week, asking a very practical and deeply challenging question. What does it really look like to love your neighbour as yourself?
Pete Grieg puts it simply and powerfully when he says, “Adopt Jesus’s lifestyle.” If we truly take on the way Jesus lived, loved, and responded to people, loving our neighbour will no longer be an abstract idea. It will become a natural outworking of a transformed life. The greatest gift God gives us is love, and He invites us to live from that place.
Jesus reminds us in Luke 10:27 to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind, and to love our neighbour as ourselves. These two commands are inseparable. When we carry the heart of Christ, everything changes. It changes us. It changes our circumstances. And it changes the people around us.
Loving our neighbour is how the Kingdom of God expands. It is how people discover who Jesus really is. For many, the first glimpse of Christ they will ever see is not through a sermon or a song, but through the life of someone who follows Him closely. When we choose to adopt Jesus’s lifestyle, regardless of the cost, transformation follows. That choice is available to every one of us.
Jesus illustrates this so clearly in the parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10. The Samaritan showed compassion and practical care to someone who, culturally and socially, would have been considered an enemy. Yet Jesus ends the story with a simple instruction. “Go and do likewise.” True neighbourly love is not about convenience or comfort. It is about selfless action, even when it stretches us.
Carrying the heart of Christ takes discipline. Loving as Jesus loved does not always come naturally, but it is something we can grow in. When we allow God to shape our hearts, our love begins to change not only us, but the lives of those around us.
Paul reminds us in 1 Corinthians 13 that without love, everything else amounts to nothing. Love transforms. Love makes a difference. Love is patient and kind, not only toward others, but toward ourselves as well. Faith, hope, and love endure, and the greatest of these is love.
So we are left with an honest question. How will the world know Jesus if we do not love well?
It is not always easy, but it is always worth it. The growth of God’s Kingdom, the health of the church, and our own spiritual growth are deeply connected to this calling. As we allow God to touch our hearts afresh, may we become people who love boldly, generously, and faithfully, choosing to do things Jesus’s way and trusting Him with the fruit that follows.
