And Thy Neighbor as Thyself

His vertical life is in good order and his horizontal life is a disaster, and he has managed to keep those two facts in separate rooms for about twenty years.

The first is genuine. He prays. He reads. He has had real dealings with God, including two he does not talk about, and when he says he is at peace with God he is not performing.

The second is also genuine. He cannot stand most people. Not violently. He is unfailingly polite. But there is a man three doors down whose voice makes something go tight in him, and a woman at church he has been avoiding for six years by means of a route around the back of the hall, and a brother-in-law he has not forgiven for something from 2011 that he could not now describe accurately.

He would say, if pressed, that he is a vertical man rather than a horizontal one, and that God knows how he is made.

Here is the sentence he has never said out loud.

He has arranged his religion so that the part he is good at counts and the part he is bad at is a temperament rather than an obedience.

Read the answer He approved

There is an exchange in Luke where a lawyer answers his own question and Jesus tells him he is right, and the answer is one sentence with two halves.

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself.Luke 10:27

And thy neighbor as thyself.

Notice there is no full stop before that clause. The lawyer produces it as a single answer, and Jesus says thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live.

And notice what happens next in the chapter, because it is the whole point. The man asks who his neighbor is, which is exactly the move you've been making for twenty years, and Jesus tells him a story in which the hero is a man from a group the lawyer would have despised.

He does not narrow the second half. He widens it, deliberately, in front of a man who was hoping for a boundary.

Your two halves arrive as one sentence rather than as a ranking, and Luke 10:27 keeps them joined and calls the whole answer right. That is what the word actually gives, not a burden I am adding, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a vertical man out onto his own street.

Temperament is a real thing and it is not a category

Now the plain thing, and I will grant you the first half of it.

Temperament is real. Some people find others easy and some find them a great deal of work, and that difference is genuine and it is not sin, and I am not going to tell a naturally private man that he must become gregarious to be right with God.

But you've used a real thing to build a category that does not exist. Vertical man is not in there. There is no arrangement anywhere in Scripture where the second half is optional for people who find it hard, and if there were, the entire book of James would have to come out.

And notice how the avoidance has worked practically. It is not passive. A route around the back of a hall for six years is a piece of engineering, and it takes effort, and you have spent that effort every single week.

And nothing about your temperament has ever exempted you from the second half. Scripture gives both halves in one sentence and widens the neighbor rather than narrowing him, and the Holy Spirit is not accepting a man's private religion in place of the whole of it.

One concrete thing, for the worst one

Here is the practical piece, and it is deliberately aimed at the hardest target.

Do one concrete thing this week for the person you like least.

The man three doors down. Not a warm feeling about him, which you do not have and cannot manufacture, and I am not asking for it. A thing: bins, a parcel taken in, a hand with something heavy, an actual conversation at a gate that lasts four minutes.

Concrete matters because you can do it without feeling anything, and because the second half of that sentence is about action from beginning to end. Everything in the story that follows the lawyer's question is physical: he went to him, bound his wounds, set him on his own beast, paid.

Not one line of it is about how the Samaritan felt.

You are able to do the second half while feeling nothing, and the doing was the whole shape of it. Luke 10 answers who is my neighbor with a man's hands rather than his affections, and the Holy Spirit is the One who moves a private man three doors down the street.