Love your neighbor ______ yourself

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Core Stewardship November 11, 2012 Text: Matthew 22:34-40 (p. 828) Jesus ________________ linked two commandments together. He said it is impossible to love God without loving people, and it is impossible to love people as we should without loving God.

Love your neighbor ______ yourself. We are to make what we want for ourselves the ______________ of how we love others! That is a bit beyond being “neighborly.” We’re afraid that if we follow Jesus radically in this way – pursuing others’ happiness as I would for myself - then my own desire for happiness will always have to be _______________. Real love means we give (Jn. 3:16). And if we give – if we “love our neighbor as ourselves” – then we’re afraid we’re going to run out of whatever we give and not have _____________ for ourselves. So what do we tend to do? We tend to substitute “love your neighbor as yourself” with “be a bit more _______________.” And though that feels ___________ – it feels like the only way we can love ourselves (which Jesus assumes we are supposed to do) – we are actually keeping ourselves from what our hearts long for.

The first commandment makes the second doable and takes away the fear that the second commandment is really ______________ to the pursuit of our happiness. Our Father has more than we can ask, think or imagine. And far beyond what many people feel, our Father isn’t a miser, a scrooge or stingy in any way. In fact, it is just the _____________. We will be made ___________ in ___________ ________ needed so that we can be generous. Why would God want us to be generous? (2 Cor. 9:10-11)

Generosity – loving our neighbor as ourselves - brings us great _________. Haven’t some of the best times of your life – the times when you have felt the deepest level of satisfaction – haven’t they come as a result of ______________? (Acts 20:35) Core to our lives as followers of Jesus is giving – generosity - loving our neighbors as ourselves. It is ___________________ to loving God. __________________ means that everything we have – our time, our talents, our treasures – they’re really not ours. They belong to God. But God gives them to us to manage. What are we to do with these resources? We are to ______________ what the Father gives (love ourselves because the Father loves us) and also ___________ to others (love our neighbors as ourselves). Stewards make sharing their resources a ______________, meaning it is planned. We don’t give what we have ________________.