Ridgeview Pastor Argues Loving Others Is a Biological Necessity

Steamboat Springs —Wyatt Stockton, pastor of Ridgeview Church of God, wants you to know that loving your neighbor isn’t a suggestion. It’s a biological necessity of the soul, assuming you’ve actually bought into the product.

In a column published by the Craig Daily Press, Stockton argues that you can’t effectively serve others if you haven’t first convinced yourself that God loves you. It’s a simple equation, though he dresses it up in theological heavy lifting. If God is living in you, you ought to love others. If you haven’t encountered that love, you can’t love fully. You certainly can’t love yourself.

He writes, “If you do not love and accept who you are in Christ this will be displayed or inflicted on those around you.”

Translation: You’re either going to be kind, or you’re going to be a problem. There’s no middle ground where you just muddle through.

Stockton isn’t talking about polite small talk. He’s talking about the kind of confidence that gets you through the fire. He points to scriptural heavyweights — Daniel in the lion’s den, Moses parting the sea, Paul in a jail cell. These weren’t people who just thought they were loved. They knew it. That knowledge produced rest. It produced confidence. It produced action.

“The men listed here also had a relationship with the love of God,” Stockton notes. “They understood that they were loved.”

It’s easy to talk about love. It’s harder to believe it. Without real belief, there’s little change. You might go to church. You might donate to the cause. But you won’t walk in the love. You won’t have the rest. You’ll just have anxiety wrapped in a hymn.

There is no fear in love, he says. When you know you’re fully and completely loved and cherished by God, you don’t fear what is or might happen. You’re held in His arms. It’s that simple. Or, as Stockton puts it, it’s that hard.

The column is a call to duty. If He is in us, we must love on His behalf. It’s not optional. It’s the test. The evidence. If you claim to know God but you’re bitter, withdrawn, or indifferent to your neighbors, you’re failing the test. You’re not abiding. You’re just pretending.

“By faith we enter in. Then He enters into and abides in us,” Stockton writes. “We believe and experience the indescribable and immeasurable love of God. Then it produces change.”

Change in a person’s life. Not just in their theology class. In their actual, daily existence.

He closes by circling back to 1 John 4:16. “So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.”

It’s necessary. It’s the only way to be effective. You can’t serve and lay down your life as Christ did if you don’t believe He laid down His life for you. It’s the foundation. Without it, you’re just building on sand.

Stockton is the pastor of Ridgeview Church of God. You can reach him at ridgeviewchurchofg. The contact info is there if you want to ask him how much of this "change" costs, or if it’s free with admission.