10. Don't hide in your house. Get outside, especially as Spring is coming, and meet your neighbors. Think it through, how many of them do you really know, by name? How many do you know well enough to pray for specifically?
9. Offer to help a neighbor with a project in the yard or the house.
8. Invite your neighbors to the concert you're going to, or the comedy club. If your family is going out, bring their family with you.
7. Have a cookout/game night. Gather friends from church and friends from the 'hood in the same place. Allow the Spirit to work in and through the variety of gifts and personalities.
6. Maintain a good testimony at your kids sports games. Don't be one of "those guys" trying to live vicariously through their sons athletic achievements. Speak encouragement, be a calming presence, be an influencer.
5. Get involved in your neighborhood's HOA or Civic Association. Getting involved in the wellbeing of your community can send a powerful message that you don't just care about "getting someone saved" but you genuinely care about them.
4. Maintain your house and your property like it's the Garden of Eden. A care for God's creation and a love of beauty and order can speak volumes and open many doors. At the very least it won't close a door by being "that house".
3. Go deeper. "Hey, how are you? Good, you?" is fine and dandy, but life happens beyond the surface. Let your neighbors know you care. Ask them what you can pray for them about, ask how you can help. Invest in their lives through conversation.
2. Invite a neighbor and their family over for dinner. Opening your home is a great way to engage people with the gospel, as you invite them into what is usually a guarded and protected area. This allows them to feel comfortable and open as well.
1. Pray for your neighbors. By Name. Specifically. With their wellbeing at heart. Seek to bring them before God, and ask that He would work. Ask that they would be given eyes to see, ears to hear, and a heart to understand the goodness and greatness of Jesus.
Remember this. We often pray that our neighbors would hear God's message. But in John 17:20, Jesus prays that they will hear our message. The message we have about God has done in our own life, is much more powerful then some general, theological dissertation on how Paul lays out the gospel in the book of Romans.
Share your message, Jesus is already praying for you and for them. Join Him in His prayer, that they would hear and believe, and have their own story to share.
You may be the only gospel they ever see or hear. You may be the voice they hear God through, and the life they see His handiwork in.
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