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Introduction
Have people turn to Luke 10:25-37
Granger Missionary Church exists to glorify God by making disciples through gospel-centered worship, community, service, and multipliation.
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This the the process by which people come to know Jesus, find healing for the broken places in their lives, and are equipped to walk alongside others to take that next step in a Jesus-first life.
ILLUST - Did you ever have a song pop into your head and you have know idea how it got there?
Me too - Who Are the People in Your Neighborhood?
I had forgotten it was a part of Sesame Street - the educationally - brainwashing show that tricked you into learning with puppets and cookies.
ME LIKE COOKIES!
Elmo likes cookies!
Today, we’re going to look at a passage that, at first glance, looks like the beginning of a bad lawyer joke.
But it actually turns out to be one of the most memorable and powerful parables Jesus ever taught.
It’s a story you’re probably familiar with even if you don’t have much of a background in church.
For those of us who did grow up in church, we’ve seen every flannelgraph image of the wounded man on the side of the road and the Good Samaritan you can imagine.
Even if you’ve not had church as a part of your background, you know the concept of “being a Good Samaritan.”
The term has come to be used for hospitals, laws protecting those who try to help others, and even the name of an insurance company (although that would probably fit better with the robber).
The idea is, we probably all have a concept of what it means to be a “Good Samaritan.”
If you can, lay aside your conceptions, your flannelgraph images for a momment and let’s take a look at the passage again with some fresh eyes.
What we’ll see is:
The question is not, "Who do you serve?"
The question is, "How do you serve?"
Luke 10.25-
Background to the story:
Here we have a lawyer - someone well versed and knowledgeable in the Old Testament, specifically, the first five books of the OT - what we call the Pentateuch.
These lawyers were well-respected and seen as religious authorities.
Jesus has a love-hate relationship with the religious leaders of his day - He loves everyone as the Son of God, but they hate him - Jesus isn’t part of the ‘establishment’ - he’s breaking their status quo.
The passage tells us the lawyer “stood up” which would imply that had been previously sitting - This, and the fact that he calls Jesus, “Teacher” implies that Jesus had just been teaching.
Because of this background we can relatiely safely assume the lawyer’s question was not a genuine heart cry - it’s a potential intellectual trap.
ILLUST - That kid when your teaching that always tries to outsmart the teacher.
The lawyer asks Jesus how to inheret eternal life.
Jesus volleys back with another question - deferring to the lawyer a question about the law.
The lawyer give Jesus an answer and it’s a pretty good one - “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.”
Jesus agrees with him and tells him to “do this and you’ll live.”
The plot will thicken here in a minute, but I want to pause here an point out something I think is important even before the parable.
And I want to let you in on what I think is really happening here.
The lawyer’s answer is a really good answer because the lawyer’s answer was Jesus’ answer.
Matt 22:
The lawyer’s had already tried to trap Jesus before - trying to get him to pit God’s laws against each other.
Jesus essentially summed up all of the OT laws by saying, “Love God with every ounce of your being and then let it flow out into loving others.”
I think what the lawyer might be doing in our passage is using Jesus’ own words to try to trip him up one level down.
ILLUST - Ever have your kids quote you back to you?
This is important because the lawyer’s insincerity here just explodes Jesus’ point in the parable.
Before we look at the parable, we need to see some very important truth in what the lawyer (and Jesus said).
If I can boil it down it would be this:
Saved people serve people.
(25-28)
I borrowed this phrase from NewSpring Church in SC.
This is actually one of their core values.
Jesus is saying to the lawyer through the Great Commandment that eternal life could be found if one could keep God’s Law perfectly, but we know that has not been the case for anybody.
One of the purposes of the Law was to show us that we fall short of what it means to love God with all of our being.
We are saved by God’s grace.
Interestingly, the lawyer is asking the question of eternal life from the very One who holds it.
Unfortunately, there are many people like this today.
The questions they ask are not legitimate questions, they’re justifying questions.
It says the lawyer “put him to the test,” and “desiring to justify himself.”
The lawyer wasn’t asking Jesus a legitimate question, he only wanted Jesus to legitimize his actions.
Hear me, please.
Stop looking Jesus in the face and asking him questions you don’t really want him to answer.
Jesus always has a way of smoking out your heart’s intentions.
The lawyer had the right answer for salvation in his head but his heart missed it by a mile.
We are not saved by right answers, and we know we can’t be saved by our own actions; instead we are saved by putting our faith in Jesus alone.
Notice, though, how Paul links our faith and our service.
We are not saved by our serving, or by our works, but we are saved FOR serving, because saved people serve people.
We are saved for good works.
Our own actions cannot fulfill the righteousness that completes the first half of that Great Commandment - to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind.
With the righteousness that Jesus gives us and with the Holy Spirit we can begin to achieve it.
This means that we can also achieve loving our neighbor as ourselves.
{If you were not saved by good works (If God’s love was not started by your good works), then God’s love for you is not maintained by your good works.}
{If you were not saved by good works (If God’s love was not started by your good works), then God’s love for you is not maintained by your good works.}
We don’t serve just to feel better about ourselves.
The
We can’t be ok with the first part of the statement and not the second.
We can’t be ok with God and not our neighbor.
ILLUST - we can’t wear the Jesus-face shirt and jack someone up because the crossed our path wrong, we can’t stick the Jesus-fish on our car and cuss out the driver next to us - or pass by the homeless man on the road.
We don’t serve just to feel better about ourselves.
We “Love the Lord our God with all that we are and love our neighbor as ourself” to reflect back to God.
We serve because we’ve been served so that we can be saved, and we serve so that those who are served might one day be saved.
“Saved people serve people so that served people might become saved people.”
It is inconsistent to say you love God with all that you are and not tangibly love the people he loves.
The lawyer knows this, so instead of trying to get out of serving his neighbor, he just tries to lower the standard by asking for a definition of “neighbor.”
ILLUST - It would be like me asking Christine - what is the bare minimum I need to do so that you’ll believe that I love you.
Luke 10:29-
The lawyer is trying to squirm out from under the Law.
He tries to make it easy by asking, “Who is my neighbor?”
Who is your neighbor?
For the Jew it was another Jew, not Samaritans or Gentiles.
A neighbor is someone with whom you have something in common - usually physical space.
ILLUST - I’ve always seemed to have good neighbors, but I’m not so sure I’ve always been a good neighbor.
Here Jesus gives the parable:
A man was traveling North but down from the (physically) high Jerusalem along a long and deserted road.
He was attacked by robbers who took everything - almost his life.
Two men walked right by the man leaving him to die, but the third stopped and served the man - the Good Samaritan.
He shows us:
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People who serve have compassion and care at a cost.
(29-35)
Compassion (Do you see?)
Two saddest sentences in the story: 31-32 - a priest (the religious elite - if anyone should be close to God’s heart it should be the priest) sees him and passes on the other side of the road.
Maybe the priest saw the condition of the man and wasn’t sure if he was dead.
priests were not allowd
Priests were not allowed to touch a dead body or it would make them ceremonially unclean.
So maybe the priest was worried that if he went over to see if the man was alive, he might need to touch the body to find out and if he were dead, the priest would then be unclean.
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