Our Works Should Show Love to Our Neighbor
“Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God.”
“Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”
“The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”
“If you really fulfill the royal law according to the Scripture, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” you are doing well.”
“Let each of us please his neighbor for his good, to build him up.”
“One who is righteous is a guide to his neighbor, but the way of the wicked leads them astray.”
The second commandment of the entire Bible is to love one’s neighbor.
Great! That’s kind of nonspecific!
No worries, there are a lot of ways to show love! There’s addressing physical needs and creature comforts (i.e. providing meals, doing household chores, giving them a gift). There is providing spiritual and mental comfort (i.e. giving them a shoulder to cry on, offering words of encouragement, reading Scriptures to them). There is also providing financial support, childcare support, a kind greeting, changing a tire, buying them a plane ticket, etc. etc. etc.
Anything we can do, really can be loving — or unloving — to our neighbor.
So, how do we show love to our neighbor through our creations? The key to this is to not glorify sin.
To preface a little: Nothing we create will be completely sinless. There will always be mistakes, problems, and gaps where our little finite hands and minds couldn’t create The Perfect Thing. We won’t be able to create without sin, ultimately, until we finally complete our sanctification in Heaven.
This is an inescapable reality of the fallen world.
However, there is a huge, massive, gigantic, and expansive difference between ‘our creations have sin in them because we and the world are broken’ and ‘we are glorifying sin with our creations.’ The first one is bound to happen. The second one is intentional and unloving to those that enjoy our creations.
Lust, violence, and greed are usually the three major sins that are depicted in media. They absolutely have their place, even in Christian media (shocking, I know!); it is difficult to tell the story of how light defeats darkness without having any darkness.
However, when there is no light to defeat the darkness, when the darkness is being held in high esteem and presented as what is good and right, what should be aspired to, that is the problem. When the sins that should be used to reveal Biblical truth of God's love and mercy are instead uplifted and depicted as something desirable, good, or worth idolizing, that is when the creation is no longer loving one’s neighbor but encouraging them to stumble.
For example, violence in fiction can be used to carry the plot, to highlight the struggle between good and evil, and to make the protagonists stronger. It crosses into glorification, however, when the only point of the story is to commit violence with no moral grounding, no higher purpose, and no reason behind it. Glorification isn’t “a character punched someone.” Glorification is “the protagonist is going around punching people for no reason because he/she enjoys it and its fun, the end.”
So, keep watch! You don’t need to sanitize your stories to within an inch of their lives, leaving out all sin and all of the world’s brokenness, but you do need to make sure that your work isn’t upholding sin above God’s truth. Show love to your neighbor by putting sin in its proper place: underneath the heels of Righteousness!
Putting it into Action: how do you depict sin in the media that you create? Are you cautious with how it is used or do you “have fun” with it? Take a moment to reflect on this and pray, asking God for wisdom in creating media that is loving to your neighbor.
