“Do Unto Others” Study Guide: Loving Others Within and Beyond Our Walls
Week 3: Gospel – Loving Others Within and Beyond Our Walls
“Do unto others as you would have them do to you,” that rule we were all taught as kids, sounds like such a simple principle to follow. But if most people pledge allegiance to that rule, why does it seem like we live in a society marked by spiteful division? Why do we struggle so much with loving our neighbors? As we move through the Do Unto Others Kindness Campaign, we’ll live into an intentional season of growing in kindness towards our neighbors. Our hope is that, through this campaign, we’re sending a message to our community that kindness is the most important behavior we can exhibit as we seek to de-polarize our communities and love our neighbors. Use this four-week study guide to explore the scriptural call to bless others, examining the Bible’s rich meaning behind the simple rule and how to model it in our day-to-day lives.
Focus Scripture: Acts 1:7-8
Prayer: Jesus, help us to love those who frustrate us. We ask your help for the transformation of our hearts as we show kindness to others. Especially, Jesus, in a season in which Christians are so divided and angry with one another, teach us to love our brothers and sisters well so that we may have a faithful witness to the whole world. Amen.
Lesson: Last week’s guide explored the ways in which anxiety over difference – which is a normal response – becomes unhelpful when it is a reaction to danger that isn’t real. Just like Israel was called to love those outside their community, we have the same call today.
This lesson explores another important call – the call to love people inside our communities, too. To do so, we turn to Jesus of Nazareth, whose story is told in the four Gospels. In Jesus we find power to break our fear and to love those closest to us.
We often turn to the stories of Jesus and find a person who radically loved people who were different than him. However, a feature of his story that can get overlooked is his relationship with those in his home community. Many of the people most different from him – his fiercest critics and recipients of his rebuke – were in the synagogues close to home, not in strange faraway lands. Jesus knew that there were fundamental rifts within his home community, oftentimes due to the hypocrisy of religious leaders, the greediness of the wealthy, and the competition over limited resources. In order for his saving message to reach the world, Jesus f irst had to grapple with the brokenness in his own village.
This feature of Jesus’ story clues us into something important: we Christians are called to model love to members within our community if we have any hope of modeling it to the world. In fact, the Bible indicates that Jesus’ plan was to share his good news (gospel) with the members of Israel before it made it to the rest of the world (Matthew 10:5, 15:24). St. Paul had similar things to say, too, writing in Romans that the advancement of the Gospel was “first to the Jew, then to the Gentile” (1:16). And while it may be unhelpful for us today to think in terms of first and second, it is a reminder to us that the Gospel is given to people both inside our village and outside the village, and that it’s the former that we can struggle with the most. It is essential that we engage that struggle today. Christians oftentimes focus on making the world look more like the Kingdom of God, and we are right to do so. However, it is important that we also have our own house in order so that outsiders invited into the community can f ind a healthy family rather than a dysfunctional mess.
Perhaps the bitterness between Christians themselves is one of the reasons that treating others the way we want to be treated is so complex. Ironically, it may be easy for us to, in theory, be kind to an outsider, even if we secretly fear them. There’s enough difference there that we allow a degree of grace with our disagreements, excusing it for circumstances unlike our own. It’s when a person is somewhat like us, but who disagrees over fundamental issues, that the knives come out. It is no mistake, then, that the world looks at Christianity and sees bigotry. We are so incredibly mean to one another, especially those on different sides of key issues.
The question for us is if we are willing to treat neighbors with kindness just in the same way we would treat the others outside the neighborhood. Do we share what we have with other Christians, providing for their needs? Do we speak with love to other Christians? Do we advocate for the truth instead of lies? If Christians are so unable to love each other, how do we expect to love those who are outside our borders?
Jesus loved even the house of Israel that betrayed him, forgiving them with his last breaths. If that is our example, can Republican Christians and Democratic Christians not at least try to get along? Can Christians on different sides of social issues get along? If the call was to be kind to outsiders, we may be able to get our heads around that challenge. But if the call is for Democratic Christians and Republican Christians to get along, suddenly that’s not so easy. There’s a fear in both sides that the other side isn’t really Christian, convincing some that poor behavior is excusable in order to teach a lesson. Of course, this fear misses the point.
The gospel – good news - is that the same Spirit at work in Jesus is at work in us today, saving us, making us new, and growing us in grace. The complexities of love among those in the village and outside the village are great. But the spread of that message may just be dependent on Christians getting along.
Questions to Consider:
This lesson suggests that Christians need to get along with each other in order to faithfully witness to the world. Where do you see division among Christians?
How do you think Christians are perceived by the non-Christians in our communities?
We saw in this lesson that Jesus addressed conflict within the Jewish community by directing frustration at religious leaders. If given a listening ear by a prominent Christian leader, what would you want her or him to hear?
Can you think of a person in your life who adheres to a kind of Christianity with which you disagree, but who models love and integrity?
If you were challenged to reconcile a division with another Christian in your life, who is the first person you would reach out to?
*This study guide was adapted from Cultivating Kindness through Scripture and Community: A Four-Week “Do Unto Others” Study for Adult Small Groups