Join us tonight as Pastor Tim begins a series on the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37), thinking about how we love the people God places into our lives.
The following study questions and transcript are AI generated and may contain errors.
The following study questions and transcript are AI generated and may contain errors.
Well, good evening and welcome to Steadfast tonight. I’m so glad you are joining us. We’re beginning a brand new series, and I think it’s a really important series for us to dig into together. We’re going to be looking at the parable of the Good Samaritan in this series, Who is My Neighbor? It’s a very familiar parable, but one of the reasons that we come back to it so often is how challenging and important it is as we wrestle with how to live loving our neighbors, as God has called us to do.
As we go into it tonight, let’s go ahead and open in prayer. Let’s pray.
Father, thank you for this evening. Thank you for your word. Thank you for your Spirit that applies the truth of your word to our heart and enables us to do the things you’ve called us to do. Lord, we know we can only do it through your strength and your power. We pray that tonight as we dig into this parable and we begin this new series, that you would speak to us and help us to live the lives you’ve called us to live as Christians. We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
As I said, we’re going into Luke chapter 10, the parable of the Good Samaritan. You can turn there with me if you’d like. As we open up in Luke chapter 10, verses 25 and following, we find that there is a setting where Jesus is teaching, and a theological lawyer—someone who studied the law of the Old Testament throughout his life and is an expert on it—stands up to ask Jesus a question. That is where we turn: Luke 10, starting with verse 25.
And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, Jesus, “What is written in the law? How do you read it?” And he, the lawyer, answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” And Jesus said to him, “You have answered correctly. Do this, and you will live.”
Well, that started off, it seems like, pretty well. We have Jesus teaching, and someone who’s an expert in the law stands up and asks Jesus a question. Jesus, in his normal fashion, doesn’t just give him the answer. He wants the man to wrestle with the question himself. So he says, “You tell me, what do you think is most important about the law? What is required to have eternal life?” The lawyer answers by saying the very same thing Jesus has summarized the law with in various settings: to love God and to love your neighbor.
Now, there’s lots of questions we could ask him why this lawyer asked that. He obviously knew the law very well, and perhaps it was a sincere question, although it appears probably that he was asking because he desired to justify himself. He wanted to ask Jesus and either feel really good about how he could spout off the right answer, or he wanted to see how bad of an answer Jesus gave and then use that to discount Jesus. But that’s not how it goes, is it? He answers in a way that is true, and Jesus says, “Great, now go do this. Do this and you will have eternal life.”
It seems like that should be the end of the story. The parable doesn’t even seem to need to happen, does it? Jesus has a question, it’s answered; everything’s good. Except that the lawyer understood that that answer wasn’t actually so simple. To say do these things and live is really challenging. Now, I tend to think this lawyer believed as far as the part about loving God with all his heart, soul, mind, and strength, he was thinking, “Yes, amen, Jesus, I have this down. I can tell you this because I have spent my life studying God’s word. I love God; I don’t need any help on that. So I’m already halfway there.”
But on this loving your neighbor as yourself thing, I want to work on this a little bit more because I want to be clear that I’m achieving enough to have eternal life. The lawyer realizes when Jesus says, “Do this,” even if he feels like he’s already accomplished the one—and of course that would be a deception, we fall so far short of loving God because He is so holy and we are not—yet even setting that aside, just thinking about neighbors, maybe he has in the back of his mind someone who even that morning, maybe his next-door neighbor was loud early in the morning and woke him up, or maybe someone was grumpy to him on the way to the synagogue. We don’t know for sure, but there may have very well been someone he was thinking of even in that moment. And he wants to know, “Can I cut that person out, Jesus?”
He said, and he desiring to justify himself said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” So, okay, I need to love neighbors, but let’s narrow it down, Jesus. Let’s make sure we don’t have to love anyone more than I really have to. He wants to justify himself because if you think about that initial question, he’s starting from a flawed assumption, which is that he is going to earn eternal life for himself. And since he’s working from that standpoint that if he just does enough good things that he can have eternal life, he has to make sure that he can achieve everything required to do it. And so he wants to seek limits to this law.
And we do this all the time. I was thinking about something that I think many of us have been doing over the last few months as we’ve spent more time at home, and that’s cleaning and organizing and maybe even boxing up stuff and packaging it up and organizing it, maybe taking some of it down in the basement. I’ve certainly been doing that. And as you do that, maybe you’re cleaning a room and you start boxing, and you think, “Well, this is good. I’ll put this stuff in this box and this stuff in this box, and I can just take a big old stack and at the end of the day I’ll carry them downstairs.” And you go throughout the day, and you’re organizing, and the stack keeps growing larger and you look at it and think, “Wow, that’s getting to be a big stack.”
And finally, when you’re ready to carry them all downstairs, you think, “I think I need to limit what I carry a little bit. I don’t think I want to carry that giant stack. I really just want to carry maybe boxes that are this big or smaller.” Or, “Oh, I guess I don’t need to carry any boxes today.” Because we want a way out when we realize we can’t fulfill something. And at the end of the day, we’re sore and we’re tired from working, and the last thing we want to do is carry all those boxes downstairs. And so we get our little box.
That’s what the lawyer was trying to do. He was trying to get a little box of neighbors he needed to love and say, “Okay, Jesus, if I need to love my neighbor to have eternal life, let me get a manageable size box of neighbors to deal with. I need to know that that’s all I need to do.” And I think there were two reasons he wanted to do this. The first is simply he presumably asked the question from the very get-go so that he could feel good about himself. And he’s looking and he’s thinking about the neighbors that are outside of his little neighbor box. And he knows they’re there and he wants to make sure that he can feel good about himself even if he doesn’t love them. And then the other issue is that he simply doesn’t want to have to love those neighbors. And so he wants to feel good about those whom he is loving, and he wants a good reason not to love those he doesn’t want to love. And so he asked Jesus for that box.
I think his flawed initial assumption shows us the first danger that comes up this passage highlights, and that’s that we can’t fulfill the command to love God or the command to love our neighbor on our own power. And if we’re trying to justify ourselves and earn eternal life for ourselves by doing these things, we’re going to fail miserably at it. We’re going to have our little box and not be able to go past that and really love all the people God’s called us to, much less love God as He deserves to be loved. So this lawyer goes one dangerous route on that, which is to try to start chipping away at the law and explain it away. He needs to justify himself, it says here. He needs to come up with a reason he can fall short and still deserve the eternal life that he wants.
But that’s not where Jesus is calling him, and it’s not where Jesus is calling us. He’s not calling us to have a little box of neighbors we love. He’s calling us to truly engage with those people around us, far and near, including the ones that we’d really like to remove from that box. And so he tells a story. He’s not going to just answer directly because if he says, “Okay, you’re thinking too narrowly here. Let me expand your reach a little. Let me describe neighbors a bit.” The lawyer would still be circling around trying to find some way out of loving certain people. He’s thinking in that legal mindset, “What must I do at bare minimum?” So Jesus tells a story to make him truly wrestle with it and to help us to wrestle with it, too. We see that starting in verse 29.
Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers who stripped him and beat him and departed him, leaving him half dead.”
Let’s stop there for a second. We have a scene of a traveler going from Jerusalem to Jericho. And if you’re like me and you’ve never been to Jerusalem, you may not know exactly what is involved in that journey. But if you look at pictures or you talk to people who’ve traveled it, it’s a hard journey. It’s a rough terrain and it’s a perfect journey for bandits to hide in between the rocks and in desolate areas and wait for travelers, ideally travelers who are traveling alone, and to ambush them when they least expect it. And that’s exactly what happens here. They not only ambush him; they leave him half dead. He’s just crumpled on the side of the road there with really no hope other than maybe the mercy of someone who will come along.
We don’t know what the man was in Jerusalem for, perhaps though we could even imagine he was actually there offering a sacrifice at the temple. And that’s what makes these next verses so interesting. This man’s leaving; he’s traveling; he’s attacked. And then what do you know? Now by chance a priest was going down that road and he saw him on the other side. He saw him and he passed by on the other side. Likewise, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side.
So we’re going to stop there for this week. We’re not going to go into the Good Samaritan himself. More than likely, you’ve probably heard this story before and so you’re anticipating it. We’re just going to let him sit there for a moment. He’s really important. But this week we’re going to stop at these two men because they represent what we might in modern terms call the church.
These are men who have a lot in common with the man who’s been attacked. He was presumably a Jewish man as well. He, like I said, could very well have been in Jerusalem offering a sacrifice. This priest very well could have been the one who offered the sacrifice for him. And so there’s so much reason that you’d imagine as you’re listening to Jesus tell the story for the first time, that you’re anticipating that this priest is going to rush over and help this man. Or this Levite at least. Okay, the priest was busy and he’s a priest, but this Levite is going to rush over and save him. But it doesn’t happen.
Now, before we go too far, these men weren’t just cold-hearted, ruthless men who said, “Oh, someone’s dying over there. Who cares?” There was a little bit more nuance to it than that. You see, the priests and Levites had to be particularly concerned with ceremonial cleanliness. It was a system described in the Old Testament of how one purified oneself. And every Jewish person was called to do this in preparation for offering sacrifices at the temple.
But the priest in particular had to work extra hard and achieve a certain level of holiness so that he could go before God and offer these sacrifices. The whole system is described, and one of the things that would take you from being at that holy state where you could offer sacrifices to an unclean state that required a whole process to return to it was touching a dead body. And so we can imagine this priest looks over and he thinks, “Is that man breathing over there? No, I don’t think so. And if I touch him and he’s not breathing, I am going to be richly unclean and I have things I need to do for God. It’s really important. You know, he’s going to die; or he’s already dead—who cares? Or maybe not who cares, but I just can’t deal with it.”
Likewise, the Levite presumably had the same motivation as they’re thinking about this. They have some justification. How much of it is that they’re thinking, “I can’t wait to serve God,” and how much of it is that’s a convenient excuse? We don’t know. But in any case, they take this and they think, “This is too complicated. I have important things for God that I need to do.” And so I have to leave this man on the side of the road.
And so they were following the ceremonial law, but they were violating the law of the love of neighbor. They were dealing with all this advanced stuff, but they were missing out on something absolutely basic and intrinsic to being the people of God, which is simply loving the people around us. That’s what we’re called to do.
This reminds me of years ago when I was homeschooled. Back when I was being homeschooled, it hadn’t yet really become completely culturally acceptable. It was one of those things where people kind of looked at you suspiciously like, “What’s really going on there?” And so I think it was a couple of years or so into it, my parents decided to send me to take this special standardized test to see how things were progressing.
I don’t remember the full rationale, but in any case, it was a test that was actually for a higher grade level than I was in. It was supposed to see how much was being achieved through homeschooling. I started that test and I got out my book and I started going through it. If you’ve taken a standardized test, you know that experience. But I got into it and I had the horrifying realization that much of what was in it, I didn’t know. It was for a higher grade. I hadn’t studied these things yet.
If you know me, you know I’m a bit of a perfectionist, and it just drove me nuts. There were questions I simply couldn’t answer. I couldn’t even give a good educated guess because I’d never studied the things I was being tested on. I remember during one of the breaks of the test, I went out to the window and looked outside and thought, “How much longer before I can get out of here?” Because I was tackling all this—well, actually, I was being tackled by all this advanced stuff that I didn’t know; I hadn’t studied; I wasn’t ready for.
As we think about how we love our neighbor, a lot of times we seem to want to go right after that advanced stuff and say, “I’m going to go find someone who’s totally different than me, someone who is so challenging, I’m going to go find my modern-day Samaritan, whomever that is, and I’m going to go love that person.” And the problem is, we haven’t yet gone through the process of preparing the foundation. God’s still working in us, preparing us just to love the people around us. It’s like taking that standardized test and not being ready for it.
At first, we might think, “Well, this is actually not so bad because we’re seeing this stuff and it sort of makes sense and it doesn’t have all the data behind it, all the things we’ve studied, and we’re kind of going through it.” We think, “Well, this person’s really much easier to love than the people around me, because the people around me—if you knew them, Tim—they’re so hard to love.” But I can go meet somebody new whom I’m going out of my comfort zone to meet, and I can love that person, and I can follow God’s command and it’s so much easier.
But at some point, we’re going to come up just like in that test, and we’re going to hit material that we don’t know. And in loving our neighbor, part of the challenge is we’re still going to get to the bare, basic fact that we’re loving another fallen, sinful human being, and once we get to know those people, they’re going to be just as hard to love as those right around us.
And so that’s why we need to pause here and why Jesus doesn’t immediately jump to the Samaritan doing good things. He talks about this priest and Levite because he wants to say first, “Okay, before you go and do really advanced loving your neighbor 401, you need to do loving your neighbor 101. You need to know the basics. You need to achieve them.” That’s what he’s calling us to do as a church.
Just as that man was trying to justify himself in his own life, in his own love of neighbor, so too is a church. As the church, we justify ourselves way too often. We start to accumulate things just like the priest and Levite do: traditions or institutions, just our organizational structures as churches. And we want to protect those. They’re often derived from scripture. They often seem like good wisdom in so many ways, and so we have to protect them at all costs.
As we’re doing that, we’re not following the command to love our neighbor. That’s danger number two that we run into: the church can’t fulfill loving our neighbors any better on our own than we can as individuals, because it’s made up of individuals. And when we start building all these structures and thinking that somehow that’s going to help us to love our neighbor, and we start to defend those rather than worrying about our neighbor, we once again fail.
Here’s what we need to do. We need to ask when we’re feeling like we’re being pulled in multiple directions, “Am I fulfilling a biblical principle, or am I fulfilling human wisdom?” We see Jesus addressing that in Luke chapter 6, verse 9. It says there, Jesus said to them, “I ask you, is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to destroy it?”
Again, in Matthew chapter 23, verse 23, he says to the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you tithe mint and dill and cumin and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done without neglecting the others.”
So often in the church, we get so wrapped up at being an entity, we forget to actually love our neighbors, the people that come in the doors. We justify things. Just as the lawyer was trying to justify which neighbors he loved and which ones he didn’t, so too we find reasons to put people inside and outside our little box of love. And so we forget justice, we forget love, we forget mercy—these things that are central to loving God and loving our neighbor. And we use the excuse, much like the priest and the Levite do, that, “Well, we have something important we’re doing and so we need to protect it. We need to be able to get there; we need to go there.”
The problem with the priest and the Levite is that they could have helped the man and still fulfilled their calling. It would have slowed them down, it would have been inconvenient, they would have had to go through ritual cleansing, but they could have done it. And so often as a church, we do the same thing. We’re so busy defending things that we forget what God’s actually called us to do, and we’re defending things several levels removed from what God’s called us to do.
Maybe that’s why you’re watching tonight. Maybe you’ve been in the church in the past, or you’ve watched people in the church, and you say, “It seems like they just hurt each other.” Or maybe you’ve been hurt by the church. You say, “I don’t see that love of neighbor there. I didn’t see a love of mercy. I didn’t see any kind of kindness directed towards me. I felt anger.”
If you’ve experienced something like that, if you’ve been hurt by the church and are watching because you’re not really sure whether you should be attached to the church anymore or not, or even for the first time, first off, I just want to say I’m sorry. This shouldn’t happen. We’re called to be the people of God. We should be loving our neighbors. It’s the very foundational stuff that we should be doing before we get to all that advanced stuff on the test. We should just be good at loving God and loving our neighbor, and yet we get so wrapped up so often in doing other things that we fail the basics.
So I’m sorry. But I’d also like to encourage you not to give up. Because here’s what happens when the church is really the church: We recognize our failings, but we allow ourselves to correct each other, to guide each other, to help each other. And you know what? That helps, because all of us are going to fall on both sides of this coin. There are going to be times where we’re good at loving our neighbors, but there are going to be times where we’re terrible at it. And we can help each other as the church.
I’d like to say, if once we launch in person, you could come and join Little Hills Church; nothing bad would ever happen to you. We’d always be loving to you. But we’re human beings, and I know that we’ll mess up too. The key thing is that we have grace for each other, and we actually allow each other to speak into each other’s lives.
That priest and that Levite needed someone just to be walking alongside them on that journey and say, “Hey, wait a second here. You can always go through ritual cleansing. It would be fine. We need to go help that man.” And that’s what we can do when we’re being the church properly. We help each other to stop when there’s a person crumpled on the side of the road, and we go and help them.
The key starting point to doing all this stuff, these foundational things, is that we need to realize, just like that lawyer needs to realize, that we aren’t able to justify ourselves. And when we quit looking to ourselves for justification and instead rest in the One, the only One who can justify us, then we’re freed up to do the things He’s called us to do.
Because when we’re busy trying to pile on good works on ourselves, you know what we end up doing? We pick out certain things that seem important to us and we emphasize them so much that we forget some of the basics, like loving our neighbor. And we become blind to it.
Because we’re so intensely wrapped up in trying to justify ourselves. But when we let Jesus do the justification, because He’s the only One who can actually achieve it, then we can say, “Okay, I do mess up. And I’m going to mess up a lot of things. But through God’s Spirit working in me, I can seek to better love God and love my neighbor.” It’s in God’s grace that we can be pushed by His Spirit to show that fruit to each other.
And once we start to do that in the church, then we can love others. If we can’t love each other in the church, we won’t love those outside of the church either. But when we love each other and we show those that God’s placed in closest proximity to us love, that’s step one to moving into those uncomfortable places that we’re going to be called to next.
And so this week, let us just pray that God would help us to see those places, even right in front of us, that we’re missing the opportunity to love. And those places where we’ve accumulated our little boxes, where we have our box of neighbors that we’re going to love, and all the others we’re discarding.
I pray that God would help us through His grace not to be trying to justify ourselves, but to turn to Him who justifies us and show His love to us. Let’s pray.
Father, thank You for Your love. Thank You for sending Your Son to live, to suffer, to die, and to triumph over death for us, that we might rest in the justification that He and He alone provides. We cannot justify ourselves. And yet, Lord, it’s so tempting. I know that I do desire to, and I think we all wrestle with that. But would You direct our hearts to look to the One who justifies, and through that to be better equipped and enabled to show Your love to those around us? Lord, would You help us to be the Church? Would You help us to love one another that people might look at the Church and say, “See how they love one another?” And through that training ground of being the Body of Christ, would You enable us to love others that they might desire Your love? We pray in Jesus’ name, Amen.
Well, we will be back next week at 7 p.m. on Steadfast, and we will be digging into the second half of the parable of the Good Samaritan, looking at the Good Samaritan himself. And if we think about how we’ve been talking about how do I expand my box of neighbors I love just to the Body of Christ, now we’re going to think about when Jesus expands it even further to those outside of our Church, outside of our comfort zone, as He does with the Good Samaritan.
So I hope you’ll join me, and I hope that you’ll invite others to join as well. In addition, we have men’s Bible study once again this week. We have men from multiple different states gathering together and studying God’s Word. We’re in Isaiah 55 this week, and I would love to have you as a part of it. It’ll be even better with you there.
It’s such a wonderful opportunity because we get to encourage each other and pray for each other. We’ve gone through some difficult times together already this spring, and it would be so great to have you take part with us. So please make plans at 7 p.m. on Thursday.
Once again, I am so glad you’ve been with us tonight. And if I could, I’d encourage you to like us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. And consider sharing posts that we post, including this video tonight. If this was an encouragement to you, if this was challenging to you in a helpful way as we wrestle together and encourage each other together to love our neighbors, then I’d encourage you, would you please share it? Because as you spread it, we can spread the hope we have in the Gospel and the encouragement we find there. And I’d be grateful to you for that.
Also, if you have any questions or comments, any place that you’d like to engage further, feel free to leave them in the comments section of this video, or you can email them to me at the email address on screen. And while you’re emailing me, you are more than welcome. I would love to hear from you if you have a prayer request. I’d love to pray for you this week. And if you give me permission, I’ll go ahead and share it with our Little Hills team as well, so we can all be praying for you.
It’s one of the great ways we get to love our neighbors, by praying for them through whatever they’re facing, the joys and the struggles. And so I hope to have that opportunity and blessing to do so for you this week.
Well, thank you once again for joining me. It’s been a joy to be with you. I hope this was encouraging to you, and I hope you have a wonderful and blessed week. I’ll see you next week.