It’s interesting that we’re so much like the religious leader in the account of the parable of the Good Samaritan. When Jesus said to love your neighbor, he’s the one who wanted clarification on who exactly qualifies as a neighbor. That way he would know the minimum requirements for who he had to love and who he could avoid.

I think we want to put qualifications on the idea of neighbors. We want to love them as long as they look like us, think like us, have the same convictions as us, and vote like us. Heck, we want our neighbors to be just as Baptist as we are (or Methodist or Catholic or whatever your preferred denomination might be).

Jesus doesn’t give us that option. He said to love your neighbor. Period. If there’s any qualification on which neighbor you are to love, it’s the one right in front of you. The ones who live on either side of you. The ones across the street and down the street. The ones you run into when you’re walking your dog. The ones you pass when you’re pulling out of your neighborhood on your way to work.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer said “Neighbourliness is not a quality in other people, it is simply their claim on ourselves.”

That’s true. Neighbors are the ones who need to hear about Jesus. They’re the ones where you live, work, and play that God put in your path for the purpose of having gospel conversations and showing them the love of Christ.

It seems lately that every time I get used to the nice fall-ish weather, it gets warm again. Then I get used to it being warmer and bam! It’s colder again. Welcome to fall in Tennessee.

Normally, I’m used to all the changes, but today was a bit much. I saw all kinds of people who were dressed up for the season and not for the weather, and here I am over here sweating like a pig that’s about to become bacon. I’m not judging all of you wearing flannel in 75 degree weather. Well, maybe a little. I am saying that I’m not as tolerant of heat as I used to be. Or warm weather when it’s supposed to be chilly.

I can be thankful that it was 75 and not 95. I can be thankful that the A/C in my car is working great. But can it finally be fall once and for all?

Honestly, I can relate to Peter. Math was never my strong suit. My worst nightmare at school involved those word problems where one train is traveling from Chicago at 70 miles an hour and there’s another one coming from New York at 90 miles an hour. I was never good at those.

But it seems to me that if you’re actually counting the number of times you’ve forgiven someone, you haven’t really forgiven them. You’ve stored the offense in your mind to bring up at a later time should they exceed the number of forgivenesses allowed to one person.

If you forgive out of a true and sincere heart, you lose count. You’re not keeping score anymore. You’re not saying that what they did was okay nor that they should be able to keep doing it. You’re saying that you release them from the expectation of putting right what they did wrong.

I’m thankful God doesn’t keep a ledger of how many times He’s forgiven my many sins. There’s no danger of me going over the sin limit and losing my salvation. Forgiveness from God means that my sins are removed as far as the east is from the west and remembered no more.

If I do that, I don’t have to do math as well as practice forgiveness. I think I like that.

I heard once that many of us are more interested in looking good and feeling good than in doing good and being good. We’re all about making an impression and cultivating an image through social media and other outlets, so that others will see us the way we want them to.

We’ve perhaps forgotten that people will quickly forget the impressions they had of us but not the difference we’ve made. And that is the difference.

To make an impression is me-focused, getting people to look only at us. Making a difference pushes the focus away from me to the transformation and the change. If we truly make a difference in the eternal sense, the focus will be on the God who does the transforming and changing.

The impression you make dies with you, but the difference you make will outlive you. It will be the ripple in the pond that continues outward long after the stone you’ve thrown has sunk to the bottom.

“I am a little pencil in the hand of a writing God who is sending a love letter to the world” (Mother Teresa).

If you don’t like how your story is going, it’s good to remember that you are not the author of your story. God is. Also, if you keep trying to snatch the pencil out of God’s hand, you’ll miss some of what God is writing.

I think you and I get into trouble when we see ourselves as the star of the story. We lose sight of the big picture of the grand narrative God is telling. Jesus is the central focus and we get to be a part of what He is doing in the world. When we see our story in the context of the Bigger Story, we can be less anxious about where we are and where we think we should be.

Trust the Author and let Him tell your story. You will not be disappointed.

I sometimes wonder if we think we’re above idolatry because we don’t literally bow down to little statues made of stone or bronze or gold. We don’t genuflect to an image carved into a block of wood or embroidered onto fabric.

But an idol is anything we value above God, anything that we give more time and attention to than we give to God. Idols can be just about anything from careers to children, from money to marriage, from status to sex. It can be the need for approval and affirmation. It’s often taking something that started out as good and expecting it to be a god, functioning in the true God’s place.

In the first scenario, we’re golden. In the second, we’re all idolaters to some degree. The only cure is to look to Jesus.

It’s like the old story about the treasury department. You would think that to be able to detect counterfeit currency that you would study all sorts of different fake bills. But that’s not the case. You study the real thing and become so familiar with it that you memorize every detail. That way you can easily spot a fake that doesn’t match up.

If we get to know the heart of God and know His character well enough, we can better know that those counterfeit gods are phonies. We know they’re nowhere close to the real thing. The cure of idolatry isn’t so much about abstaining from little gods as it is adoration of the real God. It’s making so much of the big G God that there’s no room for little g gods.

When our hands become His hands we let others see the cross. When we work together, we become the visible body of Christ in this world for people to see and hear and touch and know.

I heard once that while one person might read a Bible, ten will read the Christian. They will watch your interactions, your reactions, your responses. What they hope to see is not perfection but authenticity. They want to know that you really believe what you preach and that your belief isn’t confined to your head but reaches through your heart to your own hands and feet.

And the best representation of Jesus in the world is not when we act solo but when we serve in context of community and fellowship. They want to know Jesus when they see how much we love and serve each other and by how much we love and serve them.

It’s amazing how much we worry. Especially after you consider the fact that the vast majority of what we worry about and that keeps us up at night never happens. Typically, the outcome is way less than the worst case we envision.

Once you add in the fact that nothing can separate one of God’s children from His love, that takes away the ultimate worst case scenario. Anything else is doable. Anything else you can survive because God is with you.

The truth of the matter is that even if that dreaded worst case scenario came to pass, you’d still be in good hands. God is not taken by surprise at anything that happens to you or that happens because of you. He factored in our stupidity when He set His plans in motion. And no, I don’t mean that we are stupid but man oh man, do we do and say some stupid stuff sometimes.

I love that nothing that could possibly go wrong can derail God’s plans for you. Not angels or demons or anything else in all the world. Not even you. Not even the dumb stuff that you and I are capable of doing. Nothing.

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So, what do you think? With God on our side like this, how can we lose? If God didn’t hesitate to put everything on the line for us, embracing our condition and exposing himself to the worst by sending his own Son, is there anything else he wouldn’t gladly and freely do for us? And who would dare tangle with God by messing with one of God’s chosen? Who would dare even to point a finger? The One who died for us—who was raised to life for us!—is in the presence of God at this very moment sticking up for us. Do you think anyone is going to be able to drive a wedge between us and Christ’s love for us? There is no way! Not trouble, not hard times, not hatred, not hunger, not homelessness, not bullying threats, not backstabbing, not even the worst sins listed in Scripture:

They kill us in cold blood because they hate you.
We’re sitting ducks; they pick us off one by one.

None of this fazes us because Jesus loves us. I’m absolutely convinced that nothing—nothing living or dead, angelic or demonic, today or tomorrow, high or low, thinkable or unthinkable—absolutely nothing can get between us and God’s love because of the way that Jesus our Master has embraced us” (Romans 8:31-39, The Message).

I think this came from Max Lucado. If I’m not mistaken, it’s from his book When God Whispers Your Name, which I highly recommend.

I sometimes wonder how much we want to know God. How much we want to follow Jesus. Is it enough for us to allow ourselves to be inconvenienced? It it enough for us to give up creature comforts? Is it enough to cause us to say no to other things — possibly even good things — to make room to hear from God?

I read earlier this week that maybe we shouldn’t complain about not hearing from God when are Bibles are closed. Maybe we shouldn’t wonder that we barely know Jesus if we barely make an effort to get to know Him. And by we, I mean me.

The good news is that God in Jesus wants us to know Him. He knows every single thing about us — even those ugly secrets that we don’t ever tell anyone — and still He wants a relationship with us. Still He reveals Himself if we’re paying attention. Still He chooses us.

Maybe it’s time to start cutting some holes in some roofs and climbing some trees and jumping out of some boats to get to Jesus. Maybe it’s time to open that Bible again.

I once heard a pastor say that if you don’t live it, you don’t believe it. In other words, you can talk about Jesus and believing in God all day long, but if the way you live doesn’t reflect Jesus, then it really doesn’t matter what you say because your words mean nothing.

I think it’s important to have beliefs that line up with the Bible. But it’s more important to have behavior that matches your beliefs. I’m not saying you need to be perfect, but you do need to be consistent. So much of that I’m seeing is people will post on social media about how much they love God, then turn around and post things that don’t reflect God’s values. It’s one or the other, not both.

Above all, the heart that truly belongs to Jesus can’t stay the same. If we’ve been identified with Jesus, we are being transformed into His likeness. We can’t stay the same old sinners we were when we first met Jesus. We can’t continue to live the same old lifestyle if we’re truly saved. Sin robs us of peace and kills our joy, so can those who can keep sinning and feel no remorse or need of repentance really say that they belong to Jesus?

But the beautiful promise is that if we confess our sin, God is faithful and just to forgive us and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. His love for us will never cease, even when we stray or fall short. He will finish what He started in us.