Loving Our Neighbors

Love for our neighbors...like love for ourselves, involves something vastly more significant than the meeting of individual needs.  It involves God's reaching out in us and through us to build a kingdom, a sphere of rulership, in which his will is done in the fallen world as it is in the sinless heavens; in which cruelty and disorder and the distortion caused by sin are supplanted by love, order and righteousness.  Loving obedience to God produces much more than individual goodness, respectability and the alleviation of suffering.  It builds the kingdom of heaven.

Richard F. Lovelace in Renewal as a Way of Life, p. 40.