What does First B Jackson teach about loving your neighbor?
Drawn from the messages where it was actually addressed: the words said from the front, the passages taught, and where to hear the whole thing.
At First B Jackson, the teaching on loving your neighbor starts with a simple but demanding answer to the lawyer's question in Luke 10: your neighbor is whoever you are in contact with. Brad has pressed this point across two messages in the series on the church's mission of loving God and loving others. The circle has no edge. The person at your job, in your neighborhood, on the sideline at your kid's game, is there by God's design, and you are there as an ambassador. The foundation underneath all of it is Ephesians 2:8-10, the idea that we are God's handiwork created for good works prepared in advance, and that in light of the great commandment, love is the good work.
Brad is careful about what love actually means. He carried a definition through both messages: love is sacrificial and active, an outpouring of a genuine desire for the highest good of another person. If it does not cost something, he said, it is not agape love. That cost shows up in money, in service, and especially in time, which he described as our most precious commodity. The Good Samaritan did not stop to calculate whether the injured man deserved help or whether the moment was convenient. He felt compassion, acted on it at real personal cost, and expected nothing back. That is the picture Jesus sets in front of us. Brad also drew on the C.S. Lewis passage from The Weight of Glory about there being no ordinary people, and pressed the congregation with the question of whether we are using people to get things or using things to get people.
On the question of evangelism and neighbor love, Brad pushed back against treating people as projects. The best evangelism, he said, happens inside real relationships, because people generally have to trust the Christian before they will trust Christ. Simple questions, asking someone how you can pray for them or whether they know how much God loves them, open doors that arguments rarely do. Pastor Ray's earlier teaching from Romans 13:8-10 reached the same ground from a different angle: the debt to love one another is a debt that never gets paid off, and the neighbor language in both Paul and the parable of the Good Samaritan keeps the circle from closing too tight around only the people who are easy to love.
Taught from Luke 10:25-37 · Ephesians 2:8-10 · Romans 13:8 · 1 Corinthians 13 · Matthew 16:24
The passage taught · 1 John 4 (implied)
1 Beloved, don’t believe every spirit, but test the spirits, whether they are of God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.
2 By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit who confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God,
3 and every spirit who doesn’t confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not of God, and this is the spirit of the Antichrist, of whom you have heard that it comes. Now it is in the world already.
4 You are of God, little children, and have overcome them; because greater is he who is in you than he who is in the world.
World English Bible
The messages that teach on it
- March 9, 2025 There Are No Ordinary People Brad explores what it means to love your neighbor, from sacrificial agape love for strangers to the honest, burden-sharing relationships God calls us to inside the church.
- March 9, 2025 There Are No Ordinary People Brad walks through the parable of the Good Samaritan to explore what it truly means to love your neighbor, from strangers on the street to brothers and sisters in Christ.
- October 23, 2016 Don't Be Owing Nothing to Nobody Romans 13 shows love fulfills the law. Pastor Ray McDaniel walks through scripture, the Good Samaritan, and what it means to love everyone, not just our own.
- October 23, 2016 Owe Nothing to Nobody But Love Romans 13:8 shows love is a debt that never gets paid off. Pastor Ray McDaniel explains why loving others fulfills the whole law.
Mentioned along the way
- September 8, 2024 Love People Into a Relationship With Christ A former stockbroker shares how God sent him to a Kenya dump site, where loving outcasts and preaching the Bible daily is changing lives one neighbor at a time.