October 3, 2024 Daily Devotion

Love Thy Neighbor

For thus says the Lord God: I myself will look after and tend my sheep.

Ezekiel 1:11

Elie Wiesel, the famed activist and Holocaust survivor, once said, “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.” Wiesel witnessed this indifference every day during his captivity as Nazi soldiers treated their prisoners as numbers and not humans. To hate someone implies having feelings for that person, however negative.

Just as Wiesel devoted himself to awakening the world to injustice and suffering, so Ezekiel called the “shepherds of Israel”–the kings and rulers to account for their injustices (Ezekiel 34:2). Their sin was not just plundering the people, it was their indifference to the people God had called them to care for—the poor, lost, and sick.

We are all called as a shepherd, a disciple of Jesus Christ, to love our neighbor as ourselves.