Pastor Tim talks about loving our neighbors whom we separate out as “different” than ourselves as we continue our series on the parable of the Good Samaritan.
The following study questions and transcript are AI generated and may contain errors.
The speaker argues that Jesus wants us to be “uncomfortable” about who our neighbors are. What does discomfort have to do with spiritual growth, and when have you felt that kind of productive discomfort in your own faith journey?
How does making the Samaritan the hero challenge the assumptions of Jesus’ original audience—and what modern equivalent would be equally shocking to you today?
Daryl Davis spent decades befriending KKK members, saying he respected them as people even while rejecting what they taught. How do you hold both truth and love together when engaging with people whose beliefs or actions you genuinely oppose?
The sermon reminds us that we all have problems and are all fallen people. How does remembering your own need for God’s grace change the way you think about extending compassion to those in your “enemy box”?
Who is someone in your life—or a category of people—that you’ve mentally placed outside your “neighbor box”? What would it look like to invite them to your table, even if just in conversation, this week?
The following study questions and transcript are AI generated and may contain errors.
Well, good evening and welcome to Steadfast this week. It is so good to be with you again as we continue our series: Who is my neighbor? Last week, we talked about how we have our little boxes of people that we want to be neighbors to, and often even the people that were around most—our neighbors in our neighborhood, our church—that we try to find ways to pull them outside of that box. And that in itself is incredibly challenging. But as we roll on through the passage, Jesus continues to challenge us even more, and He says if you think that this is the box that just needs to be expanded a little bit, then you still haven’t understood what I have to say because I’m going to call you to have a box that won’t fit on this screen. So to wrestle with that is really challenging.
Jesus wants us to be uncomfortable because when we’re comfortable with who our neighbor is, it usually means that we’re not thinking broadly enough about who our neighbor is. So let’s go ahead and pray for God’s guidance, and then we’ll dig in to His word tonight. Let’s pray.
Father, thank you for your word. Thank you for challenging us, for loving us enough to do so. Thank you for giving us your Spirit so that we don’t go and face these things on our own, but we face them through your power, and that we’re encouraged by your love. And so, Lord, would you help us to see where you are challenging us tonight? And through that, would you help us to be better witnesses for you as we go into the world, as we go throughout our lives? We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
We’re going to turn back to Luke chapter 10. We’re going to continue the parable of the Good Samaritan, and just to refresh ourselves, a lawyer, a theological lawyer, has asked Jesus a question: Who is my neighbor? Jesus responds by telling the story, and in the story, we had a priest and a Levite who walked by a man who’d been beaten and left on the side of the road. For various reasons that we discussed, they leave him there; they are more concerned about other things than caring for this neighbor.
In itself, that could be a disturbing story, but Jesus doesn’t stop there. That’s what we see in Luke chapter 10, starting with verse 33. We read these words:
“But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he—that is, the man laying on the side of the road—was, and when he saw him, he had compassion. He went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he set him on his own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him.”
Here we see something that would have surprised the original audience. It doesn’t surprise us because this story is so familiar—so familiar, in fact, that we use the term “Good Samaritan” today to refer to someone who helps a person in distress. But at the time, they didn’t think in terms of good Samaritans. They thought in terms of how bad every Samaritan was because Samaritans were those people who had allowed foreign influence into the Jewish religion, or more broadly, the Israelite religion of the time. They were traitors; they were people who had taken the truth of God and allowed it to be corrupted.
So, for someone in Judea at the time of Jesus, if you referred to a Samaritan and put the word “good” in front of it, they’d ask, “What possibly could be good about a Samaritan?”
Thinking about how shocking this is made me think about one of the most challenging and tragic days in St. Louis history, and that would be November 2nd, 2016. If you’ve been in St. Louis for a while, you probably know exactly what I’m talking about. That was the day that the Chicago Cubs won the World Series. It just felt like such a dark day because of the rivalry between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Cubs over centuries going back to 1885. It had been a century since the Cubs had been able to win the World Series, and it was good that way. Suddenly, the Cubs were the World Series champions, and the Cardinals had been sitting there watching on TV. So it felt like a very dark day for every Cardinals fan, and of course, St. Louis being Cardinals nation, it felt like a dark day for St. Louis.
Now imagine on that day if Jesus had been in St. Louis and He said, “Now there was a man laying alongside the road, and the Chicago Cubs came and helped him while the Cardinals just passed on by and didn’t do anything.” That doesn’t even begin to get to the shock of what’s going on. And of course this is all unjust, the rivalry, but it sort of reminds us of how alien it is. This is utterly shocking if you think of the people in your life that you think are the least capable of ever doing anything kind and compassionate, and you put that person or those people in the place of the Samaritan. Then you start to understand what Jesus is talking about.
The others had missed their duty—the priest and the Levite, the heroes, the Cardinals for us St. Louisians—had missed the World Series, and here was the opportunity to do something right. And who gets it? It’s the Cubs. It’s the Samaritan. It’s devastating to the audience that Jesus decides to make a Samaritan, of all people. He could pick anyone—maybe he could have even picked some Gentile—but he has to pick a Samaritan, someone who has so much of the truth and yet has messed it up.
I can imagine the audience just grimacing as Jesus is telling this story because it’s so troubling. We can understand why, if you actually cared about what God had revealed in the Old Testament, it disturbed—you know, it should disturb us when people mess with that.
The problem, though, is that they’ve gone from being disturbed and wanting to see that corrected to dehumanizing the Samaritans. For many of the Jews of Jesus’s day, the idea that a Jewish rabbi like Jesus would be talking about the Samaritans in a positive way would be so mind-boggling because Samaritans are hardly even people. That’s the first step that Jesus calls us to wrestle with as we seek to really understand who our neighbors are. We need to think of our least favorite types of people and imagine them as capable of care, because that’s exactly what we see with the Samaritan.
What do we see in verse 33? We see a man who actually has compassion. Look at it again with me: “But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was—the man broken alongside the road—and when he saw him, he had compassion.”
Now, Jesus could have said, “When he saw him, he decided to do the right thing out of some twisted religious duty in his weird Samaritan religion.” He doesn’t say that. He doesn’t come up with some way that demeans the Samaritan’s act of kindness. Rather, he says the Samaritan looked at this man that had been passed by by the very religious leaders that should have been serving him and concerned about his well-being and didn’t seem to be affected by his plight at all.
The same man is seen by the Samaritan. The Samaritan not only does the right thing, he has compassion for the man—that’s why he does it. He actually cares what’s happening to this man. And this leads directly then into how we understand the way of being a good neighbor ourselves.
The second step is that we care for those who fall into that group of our least favorite sorts of people. So once we imagine that they are capable of care, it makes it so much easier for us then to care as well. And what Jesus is saying here is you need to understand that a Samaritan could very well be your neighbor too. In fact, a Samaritan is also your neighbor.
Look what Jesus says in verse 37: The lawyer said, “The one who showed him mercy is the one who was the neighbor.” And Jesus said to him, “You go and do likewise.”
Imagine how disturbing this would be. This goes against everything in us when those people that we dislike the most are the ones that we’re called to show compassion to.
I was reminded in reflecting on this passage of a really fascinating and encouraging story of a man I ran across a number of years ago named Daryl Davis. Daryl is a musician who plays across all kinds of different genres. I believe his original genre of music is blues, but he’s played country, he’s played rock, he’s played all sorts of different things. And apparently, he’s a great musician. He’s played all sorts of different things and apparently he sounds really quite talented, and apparently he is incredibly talented to the point that many musicians really have appreciated him—famous musicians over the years.
But he was just out of college in the early 80s, and he was playing in a country band in a mostly white bar in a little country town. And that night led to an unlikely project on his part. After he got done playing, a man asked him to talk for a moment, and the man was amazed. He said that this man who was black could play these songs that were played originally by a white musician so well. And Daryl said he was curious; he wanted to know why this man would think that. They sat down and started talking, and as it turned out, the man who had come up to him was a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
And this began Daryl’s unlikely hobby. He started talking to this man and inviting him back to come and hear him play, and then the man would come back. In fact, he started bringing his friends from the Klan with him to hear Daryl play.
And what happened is really amazing, and I’m going to go ahead and let Daryl share a little bit of his story right now:
“We need to stop talking about each other. We need to stop talking at each other and we need to start talking with each other. Invite your adversaries to the table so you can understand them and they can understand you. That’s how things get accomplished—not by living in an echo chamber where everything you say is reflected back to you by everybody who agrees. That’s called preaching to the choir. You don’t accomplish anything that way. You accomplish things by bringing in someone from the outside and having a conversation with them.”
I love how he says that we need to quit talking at people and against people, and start talking with them, bring them to the table. And in a sense, that’s what Jesus is inviting this lawyer to start doing with those that he’s put outside his neighbor box.
And Daryl has done this for decades now. The stories are so incredible. One Klan leader he befriended ended up in prison, and the family—even the kids—were part of the Klan. So he started driving across Illinois taking the family to go see the dad in prison, and lives have been transformed.
Take a look, for example, at this picture. It’s so jarring, but time after time, Daryl has befriended Klan leaders. He went to their rallies. He talked to them, and what he said is he didn’t respect what they taught, but he respected them as people. It’s mind-boggling, it’s not what we do.
But what happened? He noticed when he would show respect, when he actually would listen to people—even people in, say, the Klan—they started to ask him questions. And over time, they began to respect him, and further, over time, they left the Klan entirely. And over 200 Klan members today point back to Daryl’s kindness and compassion as why they left.
And I think that’s such a great reminder of what Jesus is challenging us to do here. I’m sure the last thing that Daryl wanted to do was befriend Klan members in his youth, but as he did it, God used that to turn people out of that darkness, and he likes to say that he’s not the one who converted the people; he says it’s a change in them, and he talks about Jesus as being the one who shows the light. He doesn’t see himself as enlightening people, but rather that Jesus does.
And I think it should challenge each of us. We may not be dealing with people as extreme as that, but what people have we dehumanized that we can simply show care and compassion to people that are unlovable and unlikable? When we take a moment to show care, God uses that to bring about transformation.
So often today, when we engage with people—and so often back in Jesus’ time when they would engage with people—the problem was they would assume the worst possible motives out of people, and they’d see people as having absolutely nothing in common with them. We see that as well, and here’s what Daryl Davis says in reflecting about his unlikely relationships:
He said, “If you spend five minutes with your arch-enemy, you’ll find you have something in common with him.” He goes on to say, “If you spend 10 minutes, you’ll find more in common.” And so he’s done that time and again, finding something in common with people who say they hate him and slowly building relationships where they come to see him as a dear friend.
Each of us is challenged to do that because whatever we might see in the people that we would put in that enemy box instead of the neighbor box, each and every person is made in the image of God. And so we start with that—that God has created that person—we already have a step in the right direction. We already see something we share in common with that person. And if we understand that, then we can start to be the ones to show care and compassion to those around us, even those that are so hard to show compassion to.
Now, we might say, “But I just can’t love these people; I’ve been hurt by these people.” The lawyer was probably wanting to say that to Jesus: “These Samaritans, they’ve been unkind to me perhaps. They’ve certainly been unkind to God’s word. How could I ever show them love?”
And do the Samaritans have problems? Yes, absolutely unequivocally, yes. They had rejected large swaths of the Scripture. They were worshiping in a way that God had told them not to do. There were reasons that the lawyer should have felt uncomfortable with them, just as Daryl should have felt uncomfortable around Klan members.
But as we look at the problems of those that we struggle to love, and we see all those problems, that giant pile, and it seems like that pile is actually sitting there between our little neighbor box and that enemy box, we see this pile and we say, “Well, there’s no way to overcome it.”
We need to recognize this: Do they have problems? Yes. But do we have problems? Yes.
When we start with the realization that we are the ones who should be God’s enemies, and yet God has called us His friends and He has invited us into His family, it gives us the ability to look at those that we would call our enemies and say, “If God can call me a member of His family, if He can call us sons and daughters that are invited to His table, why can’t I take my enemy and invite him or her to my table and talk?”
Jesus calls us simply to take the path that He has taken. He calls us to love those that we don’t want to love. We see that in Matthew chapter 5, verses 46 and 47. Jesus says this: “For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same?”
What Jesus is saying is that yes, of course, it’s easy to love those that love us. It’s easy to want to be friends with those that can make us feel good or important. But what happens when we go to those people that hate us? What happens when we go to those people who dislike us? What happens when we go to those people that simply rub us the wrong way and make us uncomfortable, that don’t believe like we do, that don’t think like we do, that don’t spend their time like we do? What happens when we engage with those people and show them love, show them respect as image-bearers of God?
What happens? We see transformation. We see God using our lives as a testimony of what He does for each and every one of us because no matter how much we might view someone as belonging in our enemy box, what do we know in our lives? We’ve done far more to be an enemy of God than anyone could ever do to be an enemy of ours.
You know, what did Jesus do for us? He died for us. And after He took on death for us, what does He do? He invites us to His table. He calls us there so that we can dine with Him, that we can be nourished by Him.
And so when we think about going and loving others, whether they might be Cubs fans or whether they might be someone who’s actually done something genuinely painful and harmful to us, it would do well to follow the example of someone like Daryl Davis, who invites them to his table, invites them over to his house. And I’m sure if you got to know Daryl enough, he has problems too. We all do; we’re all fallen people. But look at that story and think about what God is calling us to do. He’s calling us to be that story to the people around us because as people see that and say, “Well, why are you doing that?” you can say, “It’s because of Jesus who does that for me.”
What’s that? Let’s make that our prayer this week—that we would reflect on those people that we desperately do not want to invite to our table, that we don’t want to invite into conversation, that we don’t want to show any kind of respect to simply as people. Those people that we dislike what they believe, and so we just dismiss them entirely as people. We dislike what they do, and we dismiss them entirely as people and allow God’s Spirit to challenge us.
It doesn’t mean that we’re always going to accept what they do. In fact, at times we shouldn’t. But we are called to love them as people that God loves, and as we do that, to allow the Spirit to use us as an instrument so that Jesus would light the way.
Let’s pray.
Father, thank you for your word. Thank you for challenging us to love those who we find hard to love because we know that we are far more hard to love than they are. To You, because we come before You as a holy God, how can we come before You while we hold on to enemies? Lord, would You help us to not have enemies but to love those who are our enemies, to show them compassion?
Lord, this is a hard, hard thing, and it was hard when it was said by Jesus, and it’s hard for us today because we can say generally, “Yeah, that’s a great principle,” and yet it’s so hard in application. So Lord, would You help us with application? So Lord, would You help us this week that You might soften our hearts in those places where it’s hard, and would You use us, whether we receive love in return or not, to show love that people might ask why and they might learn about Your love for us? We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Well, next week we will continue this series at 7 p.m. on Monday night at Steadfast, and we’re going to wrestle with the last part of this parable. We sort of went to the end, but we skipped over some of the details of what the Samaritan does. I think it’s really important that we stop and reflect on that because we’ve thought about, “Okay, how do I love people near to me? How do I love people who are harder for me to love?” but then we need to think about what Jesus sees as what we do to show love. What does He call us to be? How does He call us to show love to those around Him? We’ll dig into that next week. I hope you’ll join us for that.
Also, we have men’s Bible study on Thursday at 7 p.m. I hope you’ll join us for that as well as we continue in the book of Isaiah, going into Isaiah 56 and 57.
If there’s any way this week I can be praying for you, I would love to have the opportunity. You can shoot me an email at the address on screen or leave it in the comments. If you email me, let me know if I have permission to go ahead and share it with the rest of the Little Hills team as well. We’d all love to be praying for you this week.
And finally, would you please like us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter? As you do that and as you share some of the things that we post, including perhaps if you’ve been encouraged tonight, share this video. When you share those things, you help us to get the message of God’s good news out. We can be partners through an electronic medium to do amazing things. You never know how God’s going to use that; someone might just be scrolling through your timeline and see something that encourages them. That’s certainly our prayer.
I hope you have a wonderful and blessed week, and I hope to see you again next week. Thank you for joining.