God’s Word commands us to love our neighbor. Last week, we looked at the fact that God is love, and we are loved by God; therefore, if we have received God’s love in our lives, then our lives should show God’s love to those around us. The people around us are our neighbors. A neighbor is any one that is not you. Your neighbor can be next door or in your neighborhood. However, your neighbor is also your fellowman who is all around the world. Today, we are looking at God’s will for us to follow His example in being neighborly unto our neighbors. I would imagine that you, like myself, are thankful for God being neighborly to us here on this earth as His creation. He saw our need and our struggle due to our sin, and He offered to us the remedy for our helpless condition. Today, we are focusing our attention on a question that Jesus asked a very religious and intelligent man that had very little need in the world’s eyes, but Jesus saw his heart and his greatest need. His greatest need was the pride of his heart in his religious, self-righteousness and that is what Jesus addressed in His parable. Jesus asked who was neighbor unto this man, and the lawyer had to admit that it was not the religious leaders, such as himself, who would not bother to risk becoming unclean by helping an injured man, but rather the one who the Jews despised nationally as illegitimate. The one the self-righteous elites saw as worthless was the one most like God in this parable because he was the one that was neighborly, he was the one that showed compassion on the injured man and gave of himself to meet the needs of another human being. God is compassionate to meet our need of sin to enable us to be made right with Him by Him. The Bible declares in several places that God is “full of compassion” to us, and like we saw last week, we need to love others because God has loved us. We need to love others with the same type of love that we have received from God to meet our greatest need. Showing compassion on our fellow man is a neighborly act that helps us act like God. As Mr. Rogers use to remind us every weekday morning many decades ago, “It is…a beautiful day for a neighbor, Would you be mine?” Let us go and do likewise by being neighborly to our fellowman in showing compassion to help them in their need. The greatest need any person will ever have is their need of Christ as their Saviour. Be neighborly, show compassion, share Jesus!