Summary: In This Episode: The Dangerous Act of Loving Your Neighbor: Seeing Others Through the Eyes of Jesus, by Mark Labberton. About the Author: Mark Labberton is president of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. He previously served as Lloyd John Ogilvie chair for preaching. Labberton came to Fuller after 16 years as senior pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley, California. He served as chair of John Stott Ministries from 2001 to 2004 and co-chair of the John Stott Ministries Global Initiative Fund from 2004 to 2007. Today he continues to contribute to the mission of the global church as a senior fellow of the International Justice Mission.He is also the author of The Dangerous Act of Worship. Big Ideas Labberton's jumping off point is simple: "Human hearts form the seedbed from which injustice thrives. ... Our hearts have the capacity to seek justice, but they are not usually calibrated to do so." Even though there are systemic injustices embedded in the world, these are not to blame nearly so much as the human hearts that are shaped by them and which reinforce them. "Self and society are mutually constitutive." "Changing our world depends on changing our hearts: how we perceive, name, and act in the world." True worship of God always results in our seeing, naming, and acting more with the mind of Christ. It keeps us from regarding anyone "according to the flesh" (2 Cor 5:16). Plunder We should practice saying and meaning "you're welcome" instead of "no problem". The former communicates warmth and hospitality, generosity and delight. The latter communicates that the kindness shown to the person in need is limited by our tolerance of the nuisance they've become to us. Language shapes our reality. We need to ask the Lord for sanctified perception, the ability to grow in our capacity to see others the way Jesus sees them: as part of the human family made in the image of God, and not merely as category fillers like "homeless", "poor", "minority". We must be careful to name others not as "other", or "them over there". We can't write people off as the sum of the diseases they are afflicted with or the circumstances in which they carve out their existence, lest "someone becomes something." Instead, we should habituate ourselves to call people "my brother, the slave", "my sister, the homeless woman". The my brings things out of abstraction and into proper view, with a proper name, and presses us to act in ways proper to this new view and name. The first step in "dangerously" loving our neighbor may not be a checklist of bold, heroic actions to take, or a check to write so someone else can take those bold, heroic actions. The first step is to enter into the heart of God toward the suffering of our neighbor, and then begin to love them in a way that imitates God, limited and finite though we are. Concrete action will begin to hit its target only once we've moved from abstraction toward personalization through a prayerful entry into the heart of God. Worship is the life of waken up to God and the full love and justice God has for the world every day. Corporate worship is the refinement and collection of our daily worship that "welcomes us, forgives us, heals us, calls us, and sends us to live our worship again". Liberating Good News The Bible itself doesn't shrink from an honest, face-to-face view of the brokenness and despair of the world. Eleven chapters in, we're already asking ourselves, "is there any hope for a world like this?" We would be prone to say "no". God did not. We can therefore take heart in knowing that God himself has beheld the mess and has reckoned it very much worthy of redemption. And from his perception, naming, and acting, he is working redemption. "The greatest hope for the human heart is the heart of God." The Big Challenge "The places and people from whom we might turn away are those to whom, in Christ, we are meant to turn.
