In a sermon delivered at New Covenant Baptist Church in
Chicago (April 9, 1967), Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke of being committed
to loving our neighbors – all neighbors.
In that sermon, he said:
- There will be a day,
the question won’t be, "How many awards did you get in life?" … It
won’t be, "How popular were you?" … It will not ask how many degrees
you’ve been able to get … or “What kind of automobile did you have?" On
that day the question will be, "What did you do for others?"
Now I can hear somebody saying, "Lord, I did a lot of things in life. I did my job well … I went to school and studied hard. I accumulated a lot of money, Lord; that’s what I did." It seems as if I can hear the Lord of Life saying, "But I was hungry, and ye fed me not. I was sick, and ye visited me not. I was naked, and ye clothed me not. I was in prison, and you weren’t concerned about me.” …
What did you do for others? This is the breadth of life. Somewhere along the way, we must learn that there is nothing greater than to do something for others.
- from “The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life," by Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr.,
For Martin Luther King Day, I’d like to share some thoughts
of my own about showing love – and God’s grace – to all our neighbors. The following is excerpted from my brief
book, Faith Lives in Our Actions (available at Amazon). Bible quotations are from the World English Bible (WEB).
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Loving all
people
James, the brother of Jesus,
pinpointed lack of love as a pivotal problem in our lives as Christians. James wrote:
“If you fulfill the royal law according to the Scripture, ‘You shall
love your neighbor as yourself,’ you do well. But if you show
partiality, you commit sin, being convicted by the law as transgressors ”
(James 2:8-9).
If we could love with all our
hearts, we would do well. Love “is the
fulfillment of the law” (Romans 13:10).
Jesus had said that the first and greatest commandment is to love God
fully, and its corollary is to love your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:36-39). James called this the
royal law of Scripture. It is the heart
of the law, and it is where we fall most miserably short of what God expects of
us.
James pointed at favoritism as the
centerpiece of our lawbreaking. Even
after we have been converted to Christ, our old sinful tendencies diminish the
extent of our love. We may, for
instance, spend much to send our own children to Christian schools, but give far
less to extend Christ’s love to souls around the world. Or we are pleased to be part of God’s kingdom
ourselves, but often feel no great urgency to include others in his grace. Once, when my congregation was planning an
open house, I asked one of our members if he had invited his farmhands and
their families. He looked at me as
though I had proposed something preposterous.
The thought had never crossed his mind. When I brought it up, it made
him uncomfortable. Mexican weed-pullers
weren’t really the sort of folks he wanted in his church. To him they were only hired hands, a lesser
breed of people.
We try to convince ourselves we are
law-abiding. We set up church policies
and programs. We want everything to
honor God, according to proper guidelines.
But we forget what the real line is:
love. We callously, oafishly and
repeatedly step over that line. We
strain out gnats while swallowing camels (cf. Matthew 23:24). We make sure we have glorious choirs singing
in our balconies, but fail to notice neighbors in need across the street. When James described the sort of religion
that God accepts, he mentioned nothing of formal church activities. James had said, “Pure religion and undefiled
before our God and Father is this: to visit the fatherless and widows in their
affliction, and to keep oneself unstained by the world” (James 1:27). Those are the kinds of aims we are to seek.
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