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I am so thankful to have this opportunity to share my thoughts with you about the important work Lynn Cory has been doing over the past several years. My heart is with the Neighborhood Initiative under Christ. It’s the only thing that can bring life to our cities now. Neighborhood Initiative has been raised up in our time by the Spirit of God to address the special conditions of our cities. One way of putting that is to say that our cities have, in a manner of speaking, outgrown neighbors. It’s hard now today to know who our neighbors are and how we’re to approach them and be with them. The key to understanding the teachings of Jesus still remains: Loving our neighbor as ourselves in the power of God. And when you think about what that means, you realize that if that were done, almost every problem that we have in our cities would be solved. All we have to do is to simply follow Jesus’ words.


Of course, loving God with all our hearts, soul, mind, and strength comes first. Without that, you can’t love your neighbor as yourself. You have to have the resources, the insight to do that, and that comes from our love of God and our devotion of every aspect of our being to His work which He’s doing in our world. God is present in our cities. He is there as the great God who created the world and our cities and everything in them. And now He’s inducting us and bringing us into His work as we learn in His presence to love our neighbor as our self.

When He says the Great Commandment is to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and your neighbor as yourself, that’s one of His great statements about how this is all you have to do. If you just do this, everything else will take care of itself. One of the things that we often miss is that His mission in the world is incarnational. It comes through people. Incarnation is not just a theological doctrine. It’s a doctrine about how we live. And if we’re going to bring Christ to our world, our cities and our neighbors, then we do it in our own person: skin on skin contact, face to face relationships with others in which we manifest a love that is beyond human possibility and yet is within human actuality because God makes it so.

The rest of the message can be read HERE.