The Ministry Next Door

Well, a very good morning to you, church family. Such a joy to be with you on this beautiful March 1st. Can you believe it's March already? It's crazy. Here we are. If you have your Bible today, Matthew chapter 22. We'll start with the words of Jesus today. And while you're turning there, I would love to just say good morning to all of the guests in the room. If your first time especially, man, we're so thankful to have you here and pray that you feel God's spirit and feel at home with us. Matthew chapter 22, verse 36. We'll start with the text today. Teacher, what is the greatest commandment in the law? And Jesus replied, to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all of your soul, and with all of your mind. This is the first and the greatest commandment. And the second is like it, to love your neighbor as yourself. All of the law and the prophets hang on these two commandments. So for Jesus, a life well lived is to love God and love people. Isn't that a beautiful way to just summarize and boil everything and what sometimes can feel like very complicated worldview to say, this is it. If you can get those two things right, you will go very far in your relationship to God and in love for people. But I can confess that I didn't always get that. The loving God part seems obvious, right? I mean, you go to church and you give and you pray, you try to read your Bible, you try not to do bad things. But I can't say that I was really proactively looking for ways to love my neighbor. Now I feel like I'm not mean to my neighbors, like I don't play loud music late in the night.

I don't crank the weed eater on Saturday mornings at 6 a.m. I can tell you I agreed with that statement. But there was a period in my life in which I didn't actually intentionally love them with action. Amanda and I have lived in the same house in Emerald Mountain for 20 years now. It's kind of hard to believe. And of our immediate neighbors, we have one on the left, one on the right, and a couple across the street. Of our immediate neighbors, three of the four have lived there for 17 years or longer. So we have been incredibly blessed with great neighbors. And the other one is a family in this church. We're surrounded by people that we know and love, but it wasn't always that way. For the early part of those years, at least the first five years, I'd see those neighbors walking or out with the dog, doing yard work, and I would wave and be friendly, but I'll confess I didn't even know most of their names. I'm like, what's up, man? What's up, girl? I'd never taken them, I'd never taken the time to invite them over, certainly not learn their names or build a relationship with them. Like many of you, work full-time job, busy, got small kids, ball practice, dance, come home exhausted, go home, close the door. I know how that functions. I've lived in a... American life as well, we're just busy people. One day I was out in the front yard of my house and I was talking with my next door neighbor and I was noticing that my across the street neighbor's yard had become very unkept and was uncharacteristic of them because they usually their yard looked immaculate and it was in the fall and the leaves and all of that

and I just made a comment like I went, like what's going on with them? I haven't seen them out lately. They haven't been walking their dogs and my other neighbor said, yeah, she's had breast cancer. She's been going back and forth to MD Anderson for six months and it was like a wave of conviction from the Holy Spirit, like how did she know that and I didn't know that? How come my neighbor knew to be meeting her needs and taking her food and I'm complaining about the leaves blowing across the yard? Like when I could have been serving, I could have been loving. I could have been doing something to help and enter into their situation and you know why I didn't do that? Because I didn't know my neighbor. And that was one of several instances in my life in which the Holy Spirit began to bring a conviction and by the way, when this is going on, is before we planted Redland Hills, I was a missions pastor. Like my job, but I was, one of the convictions was I was more in tune with what was going on across the world than I was my across the street neighbor and not to the exclusion of caring about across the world, but what if Jesus really meant love your neighbor? Like your immediate neighbor, like the one next door to you. So I realized I was nice to them, but I wasn't loving them

and Jesus didn't say to be nice to your neighbor, he said to love them. In fact, Jesus said in the text that we just read that everything hangs on those two things. Everything. We can get off on conversations about theological, very deep and very important theological issues, but what Jesus says, none of that will make any difference if you don't get that right. You gotta get that right. In other words, if you can't get the foundation right, everything falls down and the Pharisees tried to wiggle around this by like making justifications about who is and who is not worthy of being my neighbor. Thus, Jesus tells the story of the good Samaritan and in a Pharisees mind, a Jewish mind, a Samaritan is not my neighbor. They're like subhuman. They don't count. And Jesus very much pushes back on that ideology. But you know, Jesus also walked by example. I want you to think about what it would have been like to be Jesus's neighbor. There are many, I mean, Jesus grew up in a community. He grew up in a home. He would have had neighbors. He would have been the little boy at some point in his life playing with the other little kids next door. And he would have grown up and interacted with his community and think about the ways that Jesus interacted with people

in a neighborly way. The Samaritan woman at the well. She's by herself. Again, Jews don't talk to Samaritans. What does Jesus do? He goes out of his way to engage and have a conversation with someone that everybody else was like, don't talk to them. Or Jesus is walking the streets and encounters a funeral procession. And he could have just paused and watched it go by. But Jesus interacts with this widow woman who's just lost her only child and enters into her pain and shows compassion. Jesus, the neighbor, went to weddings. Jesus, the neighbor, hosted people for dinner, even though it wasn't at his house. When his neighbors were hungry, i.e. feed 5,000 people, he fed them and took care of them. I mean, Jesus was a neighbor. And what does it actually mean to love your neighbor? Astoundingly, the thing that Jesus said was the second most important thing the church in America talks very little about. You would think that the second most important thing would get lots of airtime and we'd have classes about being a neighbor and emphasis like all the time talking about it because Jesus said this is the second most important thing so we better do this really well.

and yet most of us don't know how to do this well and what if we took Jesus words very seriously I came across this quote this week that said this in this life we can only do a few things really well so I think it's a good idea to make certain that one of those things is what Jesus says is most important so one of the ways we think what does it actually mean to love our neighbor is to consider what we do for ourselves like ask yourself what do you do for you because Jesus said love your neighbor as yourself what do I do to love myself I feed me I take a bath I dress me when I don't feel good I take me to the doctor I like to do fun things I like and enjoy having a house a roof over my head I like to play I like to be safe I like to feel when I go out in public that someone's kind to me and feel respected I appreciate it when people treat me with fairness I appreciate being considered I like it when people know my name so how about as we ask the question what does that mean to be a neighbor we do that for other people because that's what we want for us so that's the standard for Jesus is how do I love my neighbor think about how do you want your neighbor to love you do that start there and I think we'll get pretty far with that whatever I want for me that's a great starting place for what I should want for you so let me offer a couple of very practical things for your consideration this morning as I've already alluded to the first one is very easy but can be intimidating and that is we need to start with our neighbor's name like can we just learn their name because their name is a gateway to building a relationship because how can you love them if you don't know them like you can yes you can stop on the side of the road and help a complete stranger and that's good and you should do those kinds of things but when they're your neighbor you have extra responsibility no one should be able to love my neighbor more than me because they're my neighbor God gave them to me I want you to think about your immediate neighbors that surround your property so think about whatever your land looks like whether you live in a subdivision you're out in the farm wherever you're at like your immediate properties that are adjacent to yours how many of those neighbors do you actually know their

name now admittedly as I said earlier I did not know my neighbor's names for many years I recognized their faces but I would have struggled to call them by my name now my wife was much better at that than me or sometimes when they would say their name to me I forgot it like really fast but not knowing their name was symptomatic of not knowing anything else about them and when I learned their name it opened up the door to learning more about their name and more their story their family what they do for a living what their needs are in their life do they have family around here are they alone is there a physical struggle and then taking it to the next level I think all my neighbors ought to have my phone number and then when I get their name and maybe their phone number as well I'm gonna write all that down or I'm gonna put it in my phone right then like hey let me add you to my contacts right now in this second and then one of the things we did as a church plant 12 years ago was I encouraged my entire church draw it on a piece of paper a grid of all the properties that touch yours and write your neighbors names around your house and tape that to your fridge that's what I had to do in order to learn my neighbors names and fortunately they haven't moved very much so I've been okay with learning that and take that to meet your mirror like you see their names and then not only do you remember their names but it's a call to prayer for your neighbors cuz what did Jesus say love your neighbor and I don't know how to what other great thing you could do to love them and by praying for them but it's helpful when you know their name to be able to pray for them and what's the goal of learning somebody's name I want to move from Stranger to acquaintance to relationship. If your neighbors stay your strangers, we're not loving them very well. We gotta move to relationship, that's the goal. And when we encounter strangers, usually, often, strangers are fearful to us. I don't know you, I don't know what kind of person you are.

So if strangers create fear, we certainly don't want our neighbors to be that way. And then when we learn their name, we get their phone number, it may not be that we're best friends yet, and I don't know a lot about you, but at least now we're an acquaintance, I can call you by name, but I don't wanna just stay an acquaintance, I wanna move into relationship, because in relationship, I begin to learn some of your story, and you know some of mine, and we can actually be more loving to one another. But to get to relationship, you're gonna need something more, which is number two, to look for or create opportunities to interact with our neighbors. Interactions where we can have conversations with one another. And a wave in the front yard is very important, okay? Like, I don't underestimate the power of a what's up neighbor across the street. But I wanna get to more than that, because when I learn your story, and about your family, and your needs, then I know how to serve and love you better. And I think it's unfortunate that in 2026, most of our interactions with our neighbors

are on our HOA Facebook page, where everybody's whining and complaining about the other neighbors. We need positive and friendly interactions. I wish that all of us were serving on our HOA boards in our neighborhoods. Let's change the tenor of our communities, because we're in it. Let's change the dynamic, because I believe that loving my neighbor is the second most important thing. Let's go serve in the school. Let's go volunteer in the community, because these are our neighbors. So I have a spiritual practice. If I'm in the front yard, or I'm walking the dog, a lot of you see me from time to time running in the mornings. I have a spiritual, personal spiritual rule in my life, is that whatever I'm doing, whether I'm laying pine straw, cutting grass, or walking, if a neighbor walks by or pulls in their driveway, I see them, I turn off the lawnmower, I'll pause and stop, and try to engage in conversation. And sometimes they're busy, and they're like, hey, what's up? And they go inside. That's fine, I'll go back to doing what I'm doing. But many times, that winds up being the start of a conversation.

Would I like to get done with my yard work and all those other things quicker? Sure. But if Jesus said it is the second most important thing, it gets priority in my life. I've had to learn how to do that. But you can also take that to a strategic level. When we were in the beginning phases of launching Redland Hills Church, Amanda and I were trying to be better about this, loving our neighbor, because we knew we wouldn't build a church with advertising. We would build a church by loving our neighbor. That would be the DNA of what we were gonna try to do. So we were trying to think, what can we do to get people out of their house? Because we pull up in the driveway, in the garage, the garage door goes down, everybody watches Netflix the rest of the night, right? So how do we get people out of the house? And we're like, we're gonna throw a party in our front yard. And so we decided, one April spring day, we had two ice cream makers that were given to us as wedding presents. We hardly ever used them. Let's use them. We're gonna make homemade ice cream for our neighbors, and we're gonna take the kids, and they went down 10 houses that way

and 10 houses that way, take invitations. Like, hey, Saturday afternoon, four o'clock, y'all come over, we're gonna make ice cream. Y'all bring a topping, bring a lawn chair, we're gonna sit in the front yard and kind of meet neighbors and enjoy. And wouldn't you know, that was the coldest April Saturday we have ever had. And it was a little rainy earlier, and I'm like, nobody's coming to my ice cream party. You know, I was like a first grader, you know, like, nobody's coming to my party. Fortunately, the rain tapered off, the sky cleared up, it was still cool. But we did what we said we would do, and we made ice cream. And at the time that we set, neighbors began to trickle out of their house, and a few minutes later, we had a front yard full of people. And it was. It was awesome to be able to interact with people. And I had neighbors two houses this way and two houses this way who'd lived on the same street for 15 years who had never met each other. And everybody's like, we should do this again. And nobody else volunteered to do it again. So a few months later, we decided again, hey, how about we have, we'll cook hot dogs, we'll pull the grill out in the driveway, same thing.

Bring a lawn chair, bring a dish. We had somebody else in our small group. We put an inflatable in the front yard and we played some music. And we just like sat around on a Saturday afternoon and had a great time. Again, it was just a chance to get to know neighbors. People sat for hours. I mean, this isn't rocket science. Why do we make neighboring so complicated? Because I'm just simply trying to be obedient and find ways to love my neighbor. Because Jesus said, it's the second most important thing. And then when you get to know them and you start to build a relationship with them, then number three, you look for opportunities to show compassion to them. I've learned to think about my neighbors more often and to be generous towards them. Generosity is a way of expressing care and love to needs that they have in their life. If I'm carrying yard debris, like limbs and clippings from my house to the dump, I always stop to look at the elderly couple across the street. Do they have limbs in their yard that I can carry off with mine? I didn't used to think that way. I've had to retrain my brain. Oh, let me think about you as well

while I'm thinking about me. And my neighbors know that they can borrow anything. I got a call yesterday and I'm like 100%, yes, you can borrow that, please. Because that's an exchange of love. Because sometimes I need to borrow things too. My neighbors call me to take in their Amazon packages when they're at work or out of town because they have my phone number. When we cut a watermelon, me and Amanda and Lily cannot eat all the whole watermelon by ourselves. We call the neighbors. Y'all want some? So we'll text the neighbors and say, y'all come over tonight or we've got extra this or extra this. And the neighbors that I spoke of earlier who had cancer, we built a relationship with them and they don't have any family here. And so we decided one year we noticed that every holidays they're by themselves. And I have a huge family, so we always have lots of family around Thanksgiving, Christmas. And we decided, you know what, we ought to invite them over to join our family for Thanksgiving and Christmas. And now they come to my daughter's volleyball games. A few years ago when the husband had a heart issue and was in a long-term rehab facility, he wanted one thing, the Lazy Boy from his house. He didn't want the hospital Lazy Boy

because we know those are trash. He wanted his Lazy Boy from his house. So guess what, because my neighbor had my phone number, she could call me and say, would you take your truck and pick up his Lazy Boy and bring it to the rehab place? Of course, I can do that. It's a simple thing, but an act of love. That's how people know they're loved. And by the way, I don't just give compassion, I'm also the recipient of it. A few weeks ago at the end of January, remember we had that super cold spell that came through? On Sunday morning, we were all bundled up, it went into the teens. I was still at church, my next door neighbor, who's in the room right now, called me and said, hey man, water's running down your driveway and shooting out the side of your house. I'm thankful my neighbors have my phone number. He went, turned the water off at the house, set the meter, took care of it for a few hours until I could get home. Like, that's the beauty of neighboring. I don't just give, I'm also a recipient of it. We bless and we are blessed. And why would we go to the lengths to take time to do that? Because again, you're busy, I'm busy, we got stuff to do, we're going places. is most of us don't leave margin in our lives for extra time for this. Why would we do all of that to share resources and give love away?

Because Jesus said it's the second most important thing, right? And we believe that our neighbors are image bearers of God. Am I go day? That our neighbors, regardless of who they are, what they look like, where they come from, what their economic status is, they bear the image of God in them because they were created in the image and likeness of God, their people created by God. And God loves them. Therefore, I have a responsibility to love them as well. This is what John says in first John, chapter four, verse 11, says that dear friends, since God loved us, i.e. I'm the recipient of the love of God. We also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God, but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us. Who is the us, by the way? The us isn't like just us in this room, like an exclusive. John is not being exclusive with us language like us and them. It's us in humanity. God loves us. Big picture us. And he's poured out his love, and therefore I get to pour out that love into other people. Because God loves you. It's impossible for me to love God and hate and disrespect or ignore a person for whom Christ has died. And what's the evidence of my love for God? John is very clear my love for you. How do I how do you know that West loves God? Is how well does West do at loving other people? And some of you might think I may not love God very much.

The more I love you, the more God's love is alive in me. And flows through our relationships, because God is the source, he's poured out of me, I don't have to manufacture it, I'm just the recipient of it, and then it flows into my relationships. And by the way, if some of you are feeling like questioning whether or not God loves you, what if that love has not yet been made complete because you're not passing it through, you're not serving, you're not loving other people? Notice the conditional language, if. Maybe I need to back up here, if we love one another, God lives in us, if. That may be some scary language, right? So a failure to love our neighbor is a failure to love God. You can talk all you want and sing about this morning, the love of God, but unless you put it into action by loving people, it will ring hollow and empty. And so John says in no uncertain terms, same chapter, a few verses later in verse 20. Whoever claims to love God and yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother or sister whom they have seen cannot love God whom they have not seen. So you can't claim intimacy with God while avoiding the very people he places in front of you. Those people are the assignment to loving God. You're right in front of me, you're tangible, you have needs, you have a name, you have a story, you're proximity to me. I have a personal rule about the rule of proximity. I'm responsible for people across the planet and loving and being a good neighbor for people in different countries, but I have a greater responsibility if you live on my street. And if you can't love your neighbor whom you can see, you won't love the God whom you can't see. Your love for them is their experience of God's love for them. How will they know that God loves them? Because you love them. And if you're going to ask me what the most powerful way to lead people to Jesus is,

this is my answer. The most powerful way to lead people to Jesus is, this is my answer. Love people well. Just love them well. You don't have to have a theological degree, you don't have to know the answers to all the Bible questions, but you do have to love people well. Because if you don't do that, they won't hear the truth that you have to speak. Not love for them as a project, by the way. People are not our project. Not argue and debate away their wrong ideas. Not shame them for their behavior. Not scare them out of hell. If God's love is made complete when we love one another, then love is our most powerful evangelism tool that we have. Because people are created by God to need love. And when they don't have it, there is an ache in their life that nothing else can feel. And by the way, you don't have to go very far to live this out in your life. Then we're talking about next door. Doug mentioned China, and we've had some people in this church who've been full-time missionaries in China before. And whether or not that's your calling, most of us probably not, you do have a calling to live the person, love the person next door. We're surrounded by people, and as a local first responder, I get inundated by seeing how many needs are just in my neighborhood. About a year ago, we got a call to a house in Emerald Mountain to an elderly man. It was during the Thanksgiving, it was the day after Thanksgiving. And he had been lying in his recliner unattended, no one to check on him, unable to get up, sitting in his own urine for three days. In my neighborhood. Not some impoverished community, my neighbors. And I wish, by the way, I could tell you that story is rare, because it is not. And serving neighbors is how I share Jesus. A few years ago, I was in a church in the middle of the country, and a few years ago, I was at our volunteer fire department in the Emerald Mountain community,

and a guy showed up to volunteer, was interested in volunteering with the station, and struck up a conversation, gave him a tour, began to learn like, oh, this guy lives on my street, you know, how cool is that? And we began to interact with one another, and even hung out some, got to know his family, and his kids, and Easter rolled around a few months later, and I didn't know anything about their faith at this point, but just simply said like, hey, Easter's coming up. I don't know if you have a church, or what your beliefs are, but would love to just invite you to, would you join me at Easter? I don't even think he realized what my right role is here, so it might have surprised him on that day. But he and his family came, and it would be a few months later before his family would make a return visit. I wasn't sure, like, maybe we scared him off, or, you know, maybe he didn't like it, but whatever, but then one day, they showed up again, and then a few weeks later, I said, hey, on Wednesday nights, we have some people that come to our house. We have a meal together. We have a Bible study. I would love for you and your wife to join us, and they came, and some months continued to pass, and our friendship grew, and I didn't know all of the ways that his faith was developing and growing as he was encountering the love of Christ in him, and we just kept having good conversations until about a year and a half later, one day, he came to me and said, would you baptize me? And it was one of the great joys of my life, great honors to baptize Jason Blair into Christ, and today, he's one, him and his wife are some of the core people in our church, but he was my neighbor before he was my brother in Christ, and if we want people to know Christ, how about we love them first? What if being a neighbor is the pathway to sharing Jesus? And by the way, if you want to know Jason's full story, if you open the sermon app this morning, there's a link to a YouTube video in there where he and Janina give their amazing and beautiful story. I would encourage you to check that out. I don't know who your neighbors are, you know who they are, hopefully, you at least know their faces today, but what if by this time next week you knew their names? What if you knew their stories? What if this week you could just take one step towards them? It may even start with an apology by saying, hey, I know we've lived next to each other

for a few years and I am so sorry, I can't remember your name, please forgive me, remind me right now and I'm going to write it down. Maybe that is the pathway, the gateway. That's perfectly fine. Most of the time they may say, yeah, I forgot yours too, all right? We've got to take initiative because Jesus said it was the second most important thing. May God give us help and wisdom and guidance to be good neighbors. If you want to be a good neighbor this morning, say amen. Let's stand to our feet. Lord Jesus, we thank you that you are a neighbor to us and that you came to our planet and you came to our, came in the form of a human and you loved us and came and showed us what it looked like to love people well and to be a neighbor. And Father, I pray today as we struggle with this in America, in our communities, we don't always know what this looks like, we're embarrassed, we're intimidated, we're skeptical. Father, I pray that you would help us overcome all the cultural barriers that we have to loving people well as the second greatest command. Father, would you let us be known collectively as a church that cares about our neighbors, that we're the people who show compassion and mercy, that we of all people know how to transform communities and HOAs and school systems and neighborhood blocks. Lord, I pray that you would inspire us to great and awesome things, not for ourselves, but for the glory and the name of Jesus. We pray this today in his name. Amen.