Matthew 22:39 (NLT2)
A second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’

A neighbour is anyone who lives near us, one who is near in sympathy or confidence to another, and one entitled to, or exhibiting, neighbourly kindness; a fellow being.
Are you a good neighbour?
The message of the bible does not allow the term stranger; we are expected to see everyone as our neighbours, especially a good neighbour according to Luke 10:36.
Who do you call a neighbour? Everybody has neighbours, it could be the person on your street, neighbourhood, or local community: do you know the person living on your left, right, opposite or behind you? Do you say hello to your next-door neighbour? Do you know their names?
Who is my neighbour? The expert in Jesus’ days wanted to know how many people to love and who a neighbour is. He expected Christ to say that a neighbour was a friend or at least an Israelite. The idea that a neighbour might be a foreigner never occurred to him. The Lord excepts everyone, especially, Christiana to be neighbourly. Christ appealed to the man’s conscience, not to his reason. If Christ had said a heathen is your neighbour, the man may have argued the point with his limited human wisdom. Instead, Jesus tells him a story of a foreigner treated like a neighbour, we know from this, that God expects every believer to treat everybody as a neighbour. The answer! the Samaritan, who stopped and showed mercy is the good neighbour.
We live in a digital society where everyone is a “paparazzi” with a phone. A degenerate society with a morbid fascination with evil, crime and death and no neighbourly love whatsoever. A generation that would rather stand by and film a situation than offer help; we’ve seen these time and time again, people standing around laughing while someone suffers. Proverbs 3:28 teaches that a neighbour is to be helped quickly, and not tossed around. It also implies that our neighbour is someone we see regularly. These verses in the Old Testament help us unlock the idea of who our neighbour is and then points us to how we need to respond.
The gospel points out how love should expand over cultural boundaries and ethnic lines, as the Samaritan is the one who stopped to help. This teaches us that our neighbours are not those who simply look, act, and think like us but those who demonstrate compassion. Everyone has issues, sometimes more than we know, but we hide behind polite smiles or surly manners, one way to know what people are going through, what they need, how to help them lies in how we demonstrate godly love good neighbours, Jesus commanded us to love in Matthew 22:37-38.
To love others, we must first be filled with the love of God. Our hearts, souls, and minds must be transformed and focused on the Lord before we can ever love our neighbours selflessly and intentionally. It delights the Lord when we strive to love our neighbours. It is in mimicking God’s character that our own godly character is developed. If we love others as we love ourselves, we are displaying the Lord’s work in our lives.
Be a good neighbour as Christ commands. Love your neighbour as yourself.
Shalom