Sermon quotes on neighbor
Don Everts
Even Christians living through a hostile season are called to stand with their neighbors and become zealous for the common good.
Taken from The Hopeful Neighborhood: What Happens When Christians Pursue the Common Good by Don Everts Copyright (c) 2020 by Don Everts. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
John McKnight and Peter Block
[A Neighborhood is] the place where you live and sleep—it could be your block or the square mile where you live. It may or may not have a name.
The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods (Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler, 2010)
Anthony of Egypt
Our life and our death is with our neighbor. If we win our brother, we win God. If we cause our brother to stumble, we have sinned against Christ.
Athanasius, Life of St. Anthony
Peter L. Berger
A few years ago, a priest working in a slum section of a European city was asked why he was doing it, and replied, ‘So that the rumor of God may not completely disappear.”
A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural.
Andrea Bocelli
When I get on stage, my first goal is not to show my expertise, but on the contrary, to give a bit of happiness, of joy, of cheerfulness. I am firmly convinced that in order to sing well, you must love your neighbor and be passionate about life.
Frederick Buechner
If we are to love our neighbors, before doing anything else we must see our neighbors. With our imagination as well as our eyes, that is to say like artists, we must see not just their faces but the life behind and within their faces. Here it is love that is the frame we see them in.
John Calvin
The Lord commands us to do good unto all men without exception, though the majority are very undeserving when judged according to their own merits… [The Scripture] teaches us that we must not think of man’s real value, but only of his creation in the image of God to which we owe all possible honor and love.
Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life
G.K. Chesterton
The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.
Daniel Darling
2,000 years later, religious people are still asking Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” And Jesus says that our neighbors are the people we are most likely to ignore, to dislike, to pass by.
Francis de Sales
Examine your heart often to see if it is such toward your neighbor as you would like his to be toward you were you in his place. This is the touchstone of true reason.
Francis de Sales
Ought we not to love dearly the neighbor, who truly represents to us the sacred Person of our Master? And is this not one of the most powerful motives we could have for loving each other with an ardently burning love?
Miguel de Unamuno
Your neighbor’s vision is as true for him as your own vision is true for you.
Jacques Ellul
The Holy Spirit alone can do this, the Holy Spirit alone can establish this link with one’s neighbor.
Lailah Gifty Akita
There is no greater life, than to love God. And to love thy neighbor as thyself.
Martin Luther King Jr.
The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’ But… the good Samaritan reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’
John Locke
To love our neighbor as ourselves is such a truth for regulating human society, that by that alone one might determine all the cases in social morality.
Martin Luther
God does not need your good works, but our neighbor does.
Martin Luther
As our heavenly Father has in Christ freely come to our aid, we also ought freely to help our neighbor . . . and each one should become . . . a Christ to the other.
“The Freedom of a Christian (1520), (accessed July 11, 2019).
Brian D. McLaren
To be truly good means more than not robbing people . . . To be truly good means more than being righteously religious . . . To be truly good means being a good neighbor. . . . And to be a good neighbor means recognizing that there are ultimately no strangers. . . . Everybody is my neighbor! . . . Everybody is my brother! . . . There are no isolated monads wounded on the other side of the street! . . . We’re all connected.
A New Kind of Christian: A Tale of Two Friends on a Spiritual Journey
Gustave Martelet
While man is at home with animals and the stars, he is also the cosmic neighbor of the Absolute.
Jurgen Moltmann
In Christian terms, evangelization and humanization are not alternatives. Nor are the ‘vertical dimension’ of faith and the ‘horizontal dimension’ of love for one’s neighbor and political change.
Fred Rogers
The underlying message of the Neighborhood is that if somebody cares about you, it’s possible that you’ll care about others. ‘You are special, and so is your neighbor’ – that part is essential: that you’re not the only special person in the world. The person you happen to be with at the moment is loved, too.
Fred Rogers
When we look for what’s best in the person we happen to be with at the moment, we’re doing what God does, so in appreciating our neighbor, we’re participating in something truly sacred.
John Stott
Social responsibility becomes an aspect not of Christian mission only, but also of Christian conversion. It is impossible to be truly converted to God without being thereby converted to our neighbor.
Cornelius Van Til
So, as we have our tea, I propose not only to operate on your heart so as to change your will, but also on your eyes so as to change your outlook. But wait a minute. No, I do not propose to operate at all. I myself cannot do anything of the sort. I am just mildly suggesting that you are perhaps dead, and perhaps blind, leaving you to think the matter over for yourself. If an operation is to be performed it must be performed by God Himself.
Louise Beal
Love thy neighbor as thyself, but choose your neighborhood.
*for contrast
C.S. Lewis
Do not waste time bothering whether you “love” your neighbor; 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 them.
John Stott
Social responsibility becomes an aspect not of Christian mission only, but also of Christian conversion. It is impossible to be truly converted to God without being thereby converted to our neighbor.
Dorothy Day
We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever widening circle will reach around the world. We repeat, there is nothing we can do but love, and, dear God, please enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbor, to love our enemy as our friend.
“Love Is the Measure,” Catholic Worker, June 2, 1946.
C.S. Lewis
Do not waste time bothering whether you “love” your neighbor; 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 them.
C. S. Lewis
The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbor’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken.
Jay Pathak, & Dave Runyon
What if the solution to our society’s biggest issues has been right under our noses for the past two thousand years? When Jesus was asked to reduce everything in the Bible into one command he said: Love God with everything you have and love your neighbor as yourself. What if he meant that we should love our actual neighbors? You know, the people who live right next door.
Ed Silvoso
Prayer evangelism is talking to God about our neighbors before we talk to our neighbors about God.
D.L. Mayfield
God’s ideal economy banks on the idea that you shall know your neighbor who is suffering and that you shall be compelled to do something about it.
Taken from The Myth of the American Dream by D.L. Mayfield Copyright (c) 2020 by D.L. Mayfield. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Mennonite Tradition
Q: “Are you a Christian?”
A: “Ask my neighbor.”
Barbara Brown Taylor
The only clear line I draw these days is this: when my religion tries to come between me and my neighbor, I will choose my neighbor…Jesus never commanded me to love my religion.
Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2019)
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