The "Great Secret" to Loving Your Neighbor

The quote below came to me from C.S. Lewis' classic work, Mere Christianity. It's been years
since I read the book, but, thankfully, an ECCer emailed me the quote in response to our worship on Sunday.  To the question of how we are to love our neighbors, Lewis writes:

The rule for all of us is perfectly simple. Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbour; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less. There is, indeed, one exception. If you do him a good turn, not to please God and obey the law of charity, but to show him what a fine forgiving chap you are, and to put him in your debt, and then sit down to wait for his ‘gratitude’, you will probably be disappointed. (People are not fools: they have a very quick eye for anything like showing off, or patronage.) But whenever we do good to another self, just because it is a self, made (like us) by God, and desiring its own happiness as we desire ours, we shall have learned to love it a little more or, at least, to dislike it less. (Mere Christianity, p.131)

I've said for years that loving our neighbors (or our enemies, for that matter)  is not about how we feel.  It's about how we act.  Biblically speaking, to love our neighbors is to do the loving thing for them, whether even like them, or not.  When we act lovingly, we begin to feel what we could not have imagined feeling before.  That is "one of the great secrets" Lewis writes about.  

On Sunday I quoted a line from the film 42.  It was a line where Branch Rickey stated that the command to love your neighbor as yourself is one of the most repeated commands in the Bible.  I'd like to finish with one more quote from the film.  In this scene Herb Pennock, General Manager for the Philadelphia Phillies calls Branch Rickey about an upcoming game with Rickey's Brooklyn Dodgers.  After you watch the scene, consider this: If you were to meet God one day, what neighbor have you failed to love enough? And if God asked you why, would your reply be sufficient? I'll let you know that there is a bit of brief, mild language in the clip.

Peace,

Pastor Stacey