Author Mark Labberton calls readers to get their hearts right in order to actively respond to the question, "Who is my neighbor?" in The Dangerous Act of Loving Your Neighbor: Seeing Others Through the Eyes of Jesus (978-0-830-83840-0, $20, hardcover), releasing this month from IVP Books/InterVarsity Press.

Following his 2007 The Dangerous Act of Worship: Living God's Call to Justice, Labberton's most recent "dangerous" installment challenges readers to reflect on why the heart can become complacent about the world and its needs. 

Labberton—formerly a Presbyterian minister and now a senior fellow of the International Justice Mission, Lloyd John Ogilvie chair for preaching and director of the Lloyd John Ogilvie Institute for Preaching at Fuller Theological Seminary—encourages readers to first see rightly, the beginning of how our hearts are changed.

"Though we cannot readily or finally change ourselves, we can make choices, opening ourselves to the changed heart God wants us to experience," Labberton said. "The inner, personal work of the grace of Jesus Christ is meant to show itself in the public lives of those who are Christ's disciples."

As one who daily makes an effort to improve himself, Labberton recognizes he has a long way to go. "The happy world of me is just beginning to awaken to the empathy and compassion, justice and love for which I have been made," he said. "I am not where I want to be. But I am also not where I was."

The book's content is "dangerous to our selfish absorption," Labberton said. "I know—I write this book because I must face this danger to gain more of the heart of Jesus."

Our hearts can be disconnected from those in need, thwarting God's purposes in the world, he asserts. 

"The One who made us for a loving and just relationship with God, with ourselves, and with one another also gave us the freedom not to love," Labberton  writes. "Many of us think we are simply choosing to live in between the two options, passively letting the pieces fall where they will. But the net result when good people do nothing is that injustice thrives." 

The Dangerous Act of Loving Your Neighbor aims to help believers  consider the condition of their hearts.

"I hope this book reaches deeply into our interior lives, not primarily for our sake, but for the public and personal welfare of others around us and throughout the world," he writes. "It provides a chance to reflect on why our ordinary hearts can be such a seedbed for injustice, why we can know about injustice but be so complacent about it, and how this can change."