Who Is My Neighbour? The True Meaning of “Love Your Neighbour as Yourself”

What the Bible teaches us about love, human dignity, and the people we are called to love.

There is a familiar instruction in the Bible that many of us have heard since childhood:

“Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” — Leviticus 19:18 (KJV)

We hear these words, we understand them in principle, and we may even believe that we live by them. But have we ever stopped to ask ourselves a more fundamental question?

Who, exactly, is my neighbour?

Is my neighbour the person who lives next door? Is it my family, my friends, the people who share my beliefs, or those who treat me with kindness and respect? Is it someone who agrees with me, understands me, and makes me feel good about myself?

And what about the person who has hurt me? The person who has betrayed my trust, judged me unfairly, rejected me, or made my life difficult? What about the stranger whose circumstances are completely different from mine, or the person whose beliefs and values I struggle to understand?

Does the biblical instruction to love my neighbour still apply to them?

To understand the depth of this teaching, we must look beyond our everyday interpretation of love and return to the words of Scripture. Because when we examine what the Bible actually teaches, we discover that the meaning of loving our neighbour is far greater than simply being kind to the people we like.

Love Your Neighbour: Where It All Begins

The instruction to love our neighbour appears in the Old Testament, long before Jesus walked the earth.

In Leviticus 19:18, we read:

“Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: I am the LORD.” — Leviticus 19:18 (KJV)

This command appears in a chapter that addresses how people should live in relationship with one another. It speaks about justice, honesty, respect, compassion, and the responsibility to refrain from harming others.

The instruction is not merely about how we feel towards another person. It is about how we choose to treat them.

We can say that we love people, but our behaviour reveals whether that love is being practised. We can speak about kindness while acting with cruelty. We can speak about forgiveness while holding tightly to resentment. We can speak about fairness while treating certain people differently because of their circumstances, status, beliefs, or the way they make us feel.

The biblical instruction challenges us to examine these contradictions.

Love is not simply something we profess. It is something we practise.

The verse also contains a significant phrase: “as thyself.” It establishes a comparison between the concern we have for our own lives and the concern we are called to extend to the lives of others.

We generally want to be treated with dignity. We want people to listen when we speak, respect our boundaries, recognise our struggles, and give us the opportunity to learn from our mistakes.

The question is whether we are willing to extend that same consideration to others.

Do we allow other people the same humanity we expect for ourselves?

Do we recognise their struggles as readily as we recognise our own?

Do we offer understanding when we want understanding, and patience when we need patience?

This is where the command becomes personal. It asks us to examine not only our feelings but also the principles by which we live.

A Final Thought: Who Is My Neighbour?

Perhaps the most important part of this biblical teaching is not the answer we give when someone asks us who our neighbour is. It is the way we live once we understand the answer.

Our neighbour is not simply the person who lives close to us. The deeper biblical challenge is to recognise the humanity of the person standing before us, even when that person is different from us or difficult for us to love.

Loving our neighbour does not mean agreeing with everyone, accepting harmful behaviour, or abandoning our own dignity. It means refusing to let another person’s differences or shortcomings become an excuse to deny their humanity.

The instruction is an invitation to live with greater awareness, compassion, fairness, and responsibility.

It asks us to consider whether we are giving others the same dignity we expect for ourselves.

And perhaps that is where we should begin: not by asking who deserves our love, but by examining how we are choosing to love.

Because the real question is not only, “Who is my neighbour?”

It is also, “What kind of neighbour am I choosing to be?”