Love Your Neighbor Beyond Your Comfort Zone: Love Foreigners as You Love Yourselves

Elm City Vineyard Church Talks

As we love our neighbors beyond our comfort zone, this includes neighbors who have recently arrived to our country. Scripture has a long witness of blessing the stranger in our midst and showing them hospitality - the goodness of God in practical ways. In the book of Leviticus it says, “do not mistreat foreigners living in your country, but treat them just as you treat your own citizens. Love foreigners as you love yourselves, because you were foreigners one time in Egypt. I am the LORD your God.” This invitation stands in contrast to the way we can vilify foreigners casting them as a shadow on our land, a competitor for our goods, or simply too strange to engage in a daily way. The Kingdom offers a different way: service and compassion to people experiencing displacement just as God served His people in Egypt, just as God serves us as we learn how to belong to a heavenly country that we get citizenship to only through Christ. This work takes courage. Come hear this message of hope.

- Series Description -

Jesus’ greatest commandment is to love God and love neighbor. Paul, a famous church planter, simplifies it even more: love your neighbor as yourself. In a city like New Haven, there are many people to love. Some are lower on our list because some of us have to move in and past discomfort to love people God has placed nearby. Some are simply harder to reach. In this short series, we will look at what it means to neighbor New Haven. This will include an overview of the topic, a specific look at folks in the incarceration system, immigrants, and people others see as “wrong” to love. Multiple Sundays will have tangible ways of serving our neighbors that we can do during our worship service. If you want to grow in loving people in the new year, be a part of this series!