Day 31

December 1: Leviticus 16-21
One of the hardest things about Christianity has to be this, "love your neighbor as yourself," which God directs us to do in Leviticus. Well just how do we go about accomplishing this? I think C.S. Lewis has great perspective of this in Mere Christianity so I'll take a lot of what I say from him.
If we're to love our neighbors as ourselves, we need to know what that means first. Loving our neighbors doesn't mean we need to think they're nice or even that they're good people. We can hate the things our neighbors do but not hate the person. Hate the sin, not the sinner as a lot of people say. It may seem impossible to do this, to distinguish the sin from the sinner, but we do this all the time with ourselves. We hate that sometimes we do such nasty things but we'll go on loving ourselves just fine.
It's easy to love our friends, they're usually people that you'll find easy to get along with. It's not easy though to love your enemies, who are still considered to be our neighbors. We should try to start off small, by forgiving them of smaller things and learning to love them that way first. Once we get into those people that we really hate or the ones that really annoy us though, we need God. We need to see that this is exactly how God loves us. We need to see how God first forgives us even though we're all sinners and do terrible things against him. Whenever we think that we can't forgive someone or that we can't love someone, we should know that Jesus came and did it first for us. He came and set the example and all we need to do is follow him. How can we ask God to forgive us, when we can't forgive others? I pray that God can put more love in my heart, even for those people that really bother and annoy me because God still loves me even for all the sin I commit against him.