Introduction:
Questions to Answer To Love Your Neighbor (Luke 10:25-37):
- Why Should We love our neighbor? (Luke 10:25-28)
- When we love others, we Show Our Love For God . (1 John 4:20-21)
- When we love others, we Are Most Like God . (1 John 4:7-8)
- When we love others, we Live . (Luke 10:28)
- Who is our neighbor? (Luke 10:29-37)
- WHat Do We Need To love our neighbor? (Luke 10:33-37)
- Awareness – See the need. (Luke 10:33a)
- Ccompassion – Feel the need. (Luke 10:33b)
- Tactile Action – Meet the need. (Luke 10:34-37)
Sermon Notes (PDF): BLANK
Hint: Highlight blanks above for answers!
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01:15-01:15
Well, good morning.
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My name is Dan Thompson.
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I am one of the elders here at Harvest.
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And my beautiful wife, Alicia, and I have been married for over 15 years.
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We have three wonderful daughters.
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Picking and choosing which one got which genes from which parents is always interesting.
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But there is a distinct trait about myself that I'm seeing develop maybe in them.
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By school and by trade, I am an engineer.
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And I've preached about the struggles of being an engineer in the past, but I'm an engineer that works at a company of mostly engineers.
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So that's a lot of my mindset.
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And in engineering, especially mechanical engineering, which is what I studied, we had to take a lot of physics classes, right?
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At its core, physics is the study of how and why different objects interact with each other.
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You probably heard of Newton's laws of motion.
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Most people know the third one, which is that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
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Now, if you don't have much love for physics, just hang in there with me.
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But if you ever did take a physics class, you probably remember a lot of time was spent talking about forces.
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You might even remember a force diagram like this one up here.
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Remember those things?
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Yeah, painful.
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But one of the forces on there is gravity, right?
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Gravity is what pulls us down to the earth, but really gravity is objects interacting with each other.
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Everything in the universe is pulling on everything else.
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And early on in physics classes, these problems are simplified, such that they don't reflect reality, but it makes the math easier, so everybody likes it.
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But eventually you need to do real problems.
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You need to operate in reality.
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And one of those annoying realities in physics, and in life, is the constant presence of friction.
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Friction is the rubbing of one object against another.
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Friction is the force that says, "No, I'm not going." Friction is the force that says, "Hey, slow down." Anytime you're solving a physics problem, friction is always there to waste energy.
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And while that's true for physics problems, that is also true in human relationships.
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Friction is always present when two or more people are involved.
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Another definition of the word friction is a conflict between two people, a clash.
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Friction is inevitable in every human relationship.
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So what does that mean?
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Well, it means that in order to have effective communication, in order to keep things moving well, we need to overcome this friction.
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And how do we overcome friction in human relationships?
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We do it through love.
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But remember, the friction is an inevitable force of nature.
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So overcoming the inevitable force of friction requires intentional love.
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This year at Harvest, we have been getting intentional.
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Intentional with missions, intentional faith from the extremely practical book of James, intentional hope from Jesus' teaching on end times in the book of Matthew, and we just studied intentional wisdom in various passages about how to have discernment.
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And now we are gonna spend the next four weeks about intentional love.
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Now you can make a case for the importance of those prior subjects, but when it comes to faith, hope, and love, the Bible says that the greatest of these is love.
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So maybe of all the things we've studied so far, this is the most important.
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And remember, being intentional means doing something on purpose.
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Intentional love is critical because, contrary to Disney movies, love doesn't happen by accident or automatically.
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Love takes work.
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Love isn't the natural way we tend towards one another.
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No, the natural way we tend towards each other is friction.
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So we must be intentional to effectively love others the way that God calls us to do that.
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And it takes even more intentionality to love other people that are difficult to love.
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So before we get into the text, let me pray for us.
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Father God, you love us with a love we can't even really comprehend.
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We praise you, God, for all the ways that you provide.
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You show your love even when we are very difficult to love, Lord.
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And I pray, God, that through this passage that we would see your heart, your character, and then that would inspire us, motivate us to change and to act like our Heavenly Father because, God, you empower us and you command us to love others.
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So I pray that you would speak through this passage, that you'd speak through me, Lord.
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I pray that you would remove distractions, distractions from my speech, distractions from this room, distractions from our heart, Lord, and help us to focus on loving you and loving others.
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In Jesus' name we pray, amen.
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So you can open your Bibles to Luke chapter 10.
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Today we are talking about loving our neighbors and who is my neighbor?
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All right, we'll answer that question in the text.
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But I wanna start with the right frame of mind because in reality, who is your neighbor?
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That really could be anybody.
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That's a very broad category.
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And this series on intentional love, we're talking about loving difficult people.
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So I want you to think of a difficult to love neighbor.
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Right?
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We said friction happens at close quarters.
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Proximity can breed contempt.
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Just being near a person bothers you.
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But you can come up with any number of difficult to love neighbors.
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Like as a purely hypothetical, imagine you were at your parking spot where you're gonna watch the fireworks display and some person pulls up at the last minute and blocks part of your view.
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And they're playing Katy Perry really loud and they can't figure out how to turn their headlights off.
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And they may or may not have a New Jersey license plate.
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Like it's a purely hypothetical person.
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Or maybe it's the person, the man that lives next door with that annoying barking dog that he can't keep it from barking.
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You won't mourn when that dog dies.
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Maybe that kind of difficult to love neighbor.
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Or maybe it's the woman at work who regularly leaves her dirty dishes in the shared kitchenette for all to enjoy.
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Or maybe it's the kid kicking the back of your seat on that red eye flight.
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Or maybe it's the waitress who messed up your order again.
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And just to make sure we've covered all our bases here, it could even be that car driving right on your bumper when you're already at the speed limit.
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Today we are talking about people near you in any aspect of your life, especially those who for any reason you can justify, I don't need to show love to them.
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That's the difficult to love neighbor.
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And if none of those examples landed for you, I'm sure you can think of somebody in your life that is a difficult to love neighbor.
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So with that in mind, let's read Luke chapter 10.
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I'm gonna start in verse 25.
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"And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, "Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?" Jesus said to him, "What is written in the law?
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How do you read it?" And he answered, "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 you shall love your neighbor as yourself." And he said to him, "You have answered correctly.
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Do this and you will live." So let's stop there.
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Here's the scene.
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It's one of those moments where Jesus interacts with the Jewish leaders.
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Friction.
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Most of the time when Jesus interacted with those Jewish leaders, whether it was the Pharisees or the Sadducees, the scribes or here, this guy's referred to as the lawyers, they were against him.
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It was regular friction.
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So in this interaction, is this guy asking a genuine question because he's trying to learn from Jesus or is he just trying to trap him like that happens in other passages?
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Well, it isn't super clear in the text.
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We don't get his motivation, but the Greek word that's used here for put him to the test is only used three other times in the New Testament.
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And every time it's used, it's do not put the Lord your God to the test.
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So I'm gonna say he's got some suspect motives here about what he's asking Jesus.
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But even with those suspect motives, this seems like a pretty typical interaction between a rabbi and a student.
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Student asked the teacher a question and the teacher responds by asking the student a question right back.
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So what's the lawyer's first question?
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He says, "What shall I do to inherit eternal life?" So is this a good question?
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Well, there's some good in it, but putting do and inherit in the same sentence sure doesn't seem to make sense.
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What must you do to inherit your parents' estate?
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Nothing, the inheritor doesn't do anything.
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So he sort of starts off with a flawed question with potentially suspect motives, but it's definitely a good thing to talk to Jesus about eternal life, because he knows a thing or two about that.
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But since Jesus doesn't give the answer for eternal life here, how does Jesus define eternal life?
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Well, in John 17, verse three, Jesus says, "And this is eternal life, that they know you, "the only true God and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent." Knowing Jesus and the Father, that is eternal life.
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But most of the time when we think of eternal life, We ignore this part of life and we think of the next life.
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But based on Jesus's definition, eternal life can start now and last forever.
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When you study what Jesus says about eternal life, he talks more about having eternal life than inheriting eternal life.
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Eternal life is something that we can have right now, but it's only there for those who believe in him, as it says in John 3:16.
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So it's good for us to want eternal life Jesus about it, but no one else needs to die for us to have it.
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Anyway, Jesus answers his question with a question in verse 26.
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He says, what is written in the law?
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How do you read it?
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Jesus, as the perfect teacher, redirects him to the most reliable source of truth, the place where the answer to all of life's most important questions can be found.
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He points him back to God's Word and the lawyer lives up to his name and he uses his knowledge of the law to answer the question correctly, which Jesus says.
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The lawyer answers similarly to how Jesus answered the question when someone asked him, "What's the greatest commandment?" In verse 27, the lawyer says here that eternal life is really about loving God and loving others.
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And so let's dig into that a little bit more as the message for today and true to a rabbi form, Let's look at a few questions on how to answer how to love your neighbor.
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So here's the first question.
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Why should we love our neighbor?
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Why should we love our neighbor?
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Well, there are plenty of motivations for loving our neighbor out there, but let me offer three reasons for why we should love our neighbor.
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Letter A, when we love others, we show our love for God.
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1 John 4 20, as Pastor Taylor read some of that section, "If anyone says I love God and hates his brother, "he's a liar.
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"For he who does not love his brother whom he has seen "cannot love God whom he has not seen." The Apostle John in his old age was a straight shooter.
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He says that if you don't love God, you hate your brother.
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Meaning, I'm sorry, he says that if you claim to love God but you hate your brother, meaning you hate somebody that you're supposed to love, then the Bible calls you a liar.
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And he lays it out pretty clear.
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It's not about talking about hypothetical loving God.
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It's about, can you live it out in practicality by loving the people that are right in front of you?
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So do you love God?
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Well, do that, show that, and impart at least by loving your neighbor.
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The second motivation, letter B, When we love others, we are most like God.
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A few verses earlier in that same letter by 1 John, he says, "Beloved, let us love one another, "for love is from God.
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"Whoever loves has been born of God and knows God.
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"Anyone who does not love God does not know God "because God is love." The apostle John makes another very clear distinction about love.
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God doesn't just know how to love.
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He is the definition and manifestation of what love is.
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If not for God, we would have no concept of love at all.
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And as amazing as it is of how God has shown his love to us, he extends an invite and a command to us to be just like he is.
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When we love people, we are acting most like God.
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Think about this with me for a minute.
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There's a lot of things that we need to do as Christians.
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We need to die to ourselves.
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We need to confess our sins.
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We need to repent.
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We need to ask for forgiveness.
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We need to hope for the future.
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We need to have faith.
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But God doesn't need to do any of those things.
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None of those things apply to God.
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As important as all of those things are to the Christian walk, God doesn't do any of them.
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But one thing that he definitely does do is he loves.
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In fact, this verse says that he is love.
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So when we love, we are doing something so like God, so consistent with his nature, don't you want to be more like your heavenly father?
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We should want to be like him.
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And this is actually the reason that we were made.
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When God made Adam and Eve, he said he made them in his image.
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And part of the image of God is this capacity for love to be like God.
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The band Switchfoot has a song called "Native Tongue," and it gives a vivid picture of love being part of the image of God.
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The song encourages people to speak their native tongue.
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No, not English and not some pre-Babel one world thing that everybody spoke.
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He's talking about love.
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Our true native tongue is the one that God taught Adam and Eve in the garden.
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And from that point forward, love is the language.
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Love is our native tongue.
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So why should we love our neighbor?
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Well, we should do it to be like God in all the right reasons of being like God.
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not the ones that got us in trouble in the first place.
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We need to operate in line with the way that we are created and be like our creator.
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And one last motivation here, when we love others, we live.
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So the lawyer gets the answer correct, Jesus says that.
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And then afterwards, Jesus says, do this and you will live.
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He adds further motivation, you will live.
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Jesus has a way of simplicity that is extremely compelling.
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Jesus knew that this passage of, "You shall love the Lord your God and you shall love your neighbor," comes from Deuteronomy and from Leviticus.
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And when Moses gave those commands that came from God, he offered the people a choice.
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Love God and love others and do it God's way and live, or don't, do it your own way and don't love people and die.
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He offered them a blessing or a curse.
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So the implication here that Jesus says is, if you don't love God and love people, you will die.
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So that escalated pretty quickly.
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But with such a strong response from Jesus, what should the lawyer's response be?
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What should our response be?
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Maybe a confession of guilt.
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The fact that we don't love God perfectly and we don't love other people perfectly.
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Potentially some sign of repentance, Like I want to change and be different.
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Or maybe he could have asked another question like, well, can I still inherit eternal life if I mess this up inevitably?
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I already have.
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By the man's own answer, he sets the bar for eternal life so high that no one can possibly achieve it except for Jesus.
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But does the man absorb it that way?
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No, no, like lawyers of our day, he looks for a loophole.
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Which brings us to the next question.
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Who is our neighbor?
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Let me read verse 29.
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But desiring to justify himself, he said to Jesus, "And who is my neighbor?" So the text does tell us something here about this man's motives.
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He tells us something that only God can see.
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The lawyer's next question was spoken because he was trying to justify himself.
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What does it mean to justify yourself?
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Well, this man thought he was doing pretty well.
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And so he was going to show and demonstrate why he was doing so well.
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He's building the case for his own righteousness as we so often do.
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There is a self-righteousness that each one of us are susceptible to.
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And it's that self-righteousness that wants us to define the question of who is my neighbor as narrowly as humanly possible.
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Because if my neighbor is only the people that are easy to love and I can ignore those other people that I don't really wanna love anyway, then maybe I'm not doing so bad at loving my neighbor.
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If I only have to love certain people, maybe I'm on the right track.
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And when the lawyer asked this question, he assumed that the only people that this command applied to were good Jews.
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The Jewish scholars at that time taught that love was only due to righteous neighbors.
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So love had to be earned.
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In fact, unrighteous people like sinners, tax collectors, and certainly Samaritans, they had earned hatred, not love.
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To the Jews of Jesus's day and to any self-righteous of any day, part of that self-righteousness includes hating the unrighteous.
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But that's not God.
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God's not like that.
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Even though God chose Israel for himself, it is clear that his love extends to all of his creation.
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And even though he commands each of us to be righteous, his love persistently extends to us and to others, even when we are unrighteous.
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So this passage here, we know this famously as the parable of the Good Samaritan, right?
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But ironically, the text never says that it's a parable, so it could even be true.
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And the Samaritans never even called good in this passage.
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In fact, a few chapters later in Luke, a rich young ruler is gonna ask Jesus almost the exact same question about inheriting eternal life.
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And when the rich young ruler, he says, "Good teacher, "what must I do to inherit eternal life?" And Jesus says, "Oh, you call me good.
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"There's nobody good but God." So let's look at the potential parable of the Samaritan who's not as good as God.
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Jesus tells this story to answer the question of who is my neighbor.
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And he uses the unexpected events to shatter their expectations of who we are commanded to love.
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'Cause the shortest and simplest answer to who is my neighbor is anyone.
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You don't have any excuse for excluding love to give to somebody else.
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There's nobody you could say doesn't deserve it, doesn't get it.
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Again, though, for today, let's focus our mindset on the difficult people that come across our paths.
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We are called to love them with intentionality.
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So let me read the rest of the passage and then we'll break it down.
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Starting in verse 30, Jesus replied, "A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, "and he fell among robbers who stripped him "and beat him and departed, leaving him half dead.
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"Now by chance, a priest was going down that road, "and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side.
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"So likewise, a Levite, when he came to the place "and saw him, passed by on the other side.
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"But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was, "And when he saw him, he had compassion.
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"And he went to him, bound up his wounds, "pouring oil and wine, and then set him on his own animal, "brought him to an inn and took care of him.
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"And the next day he took out two denarii "and gave it to the innkeeper saying, "Take care of him and whatever more you spend, "I will repay you when I come back." So which of these three do you think proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?
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He said, "The one who showed him mercy." And Jesus said to him, "You go and do likewise." So because we don't live in first century Judea, let me give you some context to the story going on here.
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The road from Jerusalem to Jericho was about 17 miles, and those traveling in that time, and especially traveling on that route, knew that it was very dangerous.
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So someone getting attacked by robbers is not very unexpected.
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Presumably this man was Jewish, but it doesn't actually tell us that.
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But he's traveling on a dangerous road by himself, which is not a wise decision.
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I mean, we could even say that what happened to him was his own fault.
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And Jesus does say though, that they left him half dead, meaning that he wasn't dead, but left to himself, he would be dead.
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In fact, you might even say he's as good as dead, and that'll come up in a minute.
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After the robbers interact with him, there are three other people that come across his path.
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The first one is the priest.
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These are the descendants of Aaron.
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They were set aside to do the sacrificial work of God in the temple.
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And you can kind of think of priests as our modern day pastors.
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Priests were the religious leaders who were expected to show mercy, maybe more than anyone.
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In addition to all the religious duties of the temple, priests also had many medical related duties to treat and cleanse God's people.
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So more than anyone, The priest had both an obligation medically and religiously to come and help this guy.
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The second guy that passes is the Levite.
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These are the descendants of Levi, who was an entire tribe of Israel that was dedicated to God for the work of God, supporting all the work that the priest did in the temple and tabernacle.
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Like the priests, the Levites had to stay clean by following the requirements of the law, but they were assigned different religious duties.
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And they were more hands-on, moving, construction, cleaning, serving with their hands.
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You can think of the Levites as the church deacons, the ministry leaders.
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These are the religious workers who should always be ready to do the work of God.
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In both cases, they were going down from Jerusalem, which presumably means they really didn't have religious work going on that they could claim was their excuse for why they didn't help them.
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They were going away from the temple.
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The third person that comes across is the Samaritan.
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He's the hero of the story, but he would not have been the hero to the hearers.
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Nobody in that day would have wanted to have been associated with this Samaritan.
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It's easy for us 'cause we know him as the good Samaritan.
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He's clearly the hero, but it's hard to fully comprehend just how much total hatred there was between the Jews and the Samaritans.
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The infighting among the tribes of Israel went back as far as when it was just Jacob and his sons, almost 2000 years before Jesus.
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The Samaritans didn't really form a nation until after the kingdom was divided after the reign of Solomon, which is about 1000 years before Christ.
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That Northern kingdom had its capital in Samaria, which is why they're referred to as Samaritans.
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And after 200 years of wicked kings and ignored prophets, God gave that kingdom over into pagan captivity.
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And as a result of that captivity, foreigners moved into the land.
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The people of the Samaritan people intermingled with and intermarried with those foreigners and intermingled their religion.
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So now they're this half breed cross that just was at odds with Judaism for about 500 years.
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So the Jews and the Samaritans had no love for each other.
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In fact, they had good reasons to hate each other.
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Josephus records a time when the Samaritans snuck into the Jewish temple and decorated it with corpses.
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Not very kosher, I don't think.
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But to be fair, the Jews had already destroyed the Samaritan temple by that point in time, so you know, maybe it was even.
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So there's centuries of racial, political, geographical, and religious hatred on both sides.
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This is a level of animosity that we're talking about here.
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This is deep seated hatred, obnoxious neighbor feuding at full force.
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So when Jesus introduces the Samaritan as the hero, this was totally unacceptable.
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In fact, the Samaritans were so repulsive that the lawyer doesn't even say Samaritan when he answers which one was the neighbor to the man.
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He just mutters out the one who showed him mercy.
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In his use of the Samaritan as the hero, Jesus is not condoning the Samaritan way of life or their religion.
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He's just trying to shatter the expectations and reorient us with a completely unexpected person doing the work that God has called us all to do.
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In order to overcome the friction that naturally occurs between neighbors, we need God's help, because we don't have this capacity naturally within ourselves.
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So this brings us to the last question, and our application for today.
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What do we need to love our neighbor?
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What do we need to love our neighbor?
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So not only does Jesus answer the question of who is our neighbor with this story, but the Samaritan provides a great example of how we should love our neighbors.
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Here's three things that we need that God can provide for us to effectively love our neighbors.
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First one is A, awareness.
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See the need.
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Awareness is the ability to have conscious knowledge of something.
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As a society, we talk a lot about awareness.
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We have medical research movements for cancer awareness.
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Pop psychology makes a big deal about self-awareness and social awareness.
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Nonprofit organizations are always launching some awareness campaign for whatever their cause is.
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In all of those things though, there's one common fact.
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If you don't know about the problem, you can't and you won't do anything to help.
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And you can't love someone if you aren't making an intentional effort of being aware of what's going on in their life.
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Loving someone means looking out for their needs.
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But even as aware of awareness we are as a people, we live in an age where we aren't connected or in community.
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As social media and other avenues may give us lots of surface level facts about people, we're missing their true needs.
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And why is that?
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Why aren't we seeing the needs of other people?
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Well, here's a few reasons why we're not seeing the needs.
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First of all, we're too busy.
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Our plate is too full.
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We have somewhere I need to be.
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Life is a constant rush from one thing to the next.
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And as soon as free time is known, it's used.
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And this is where I live.
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I'm probably living in the busiest season of my life.
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At least that's what it feels like.
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I'm sure there's people with more wisdom that will tell me, yeah, you'll feel like that later too.
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But I'm too busy to see other people's needs.
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Or maybe we're too self-focused.
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I'm dealing with my own issues here, right?
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I'll be able to look around once I finished getting through all my phone notifications.
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I got a bunch of backlog.
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Even when I'm walking around, maybe my thoughts are someplace else.
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I'm thinking of what's the next thing to do.
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I'm completely distracted and not in the present.
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So we won't see other people's needs.
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If we're too busy, if we're too self-focused, or maybe we're just unwilling to look.
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Like I don't really wanna get involved, right?
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If I ask you how you're doing, can you just say fine and let's move on?
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Like don't actually give a real answer, please.
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It's really awkward and messy getting involved in other people's issues or getting into big issues.
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In the past, I've preached against the evils of abortion.
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And for many Christians, this is just too horrible of an issue to even look at.
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I just can't even look at it, I just need to move on.
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But if we're unwilling to look at how evil it is, what actually happens, and who has destroyed the babies, the women and the men by this industry, how are we possibly gonna act to see the needs that it leaves behind?
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Or maybe as a lesser extreme example, how can I know what my neighbor's needs are if I never see them or spend any time with them?
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What kind of love can I offer if I don't know them at all?
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If all we're doing is waving and saying hi and talking about the weather, what kind of intentionality is that?
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We live in a pretty quiet, semi-rural, rectangular loop of a neighborhood of about 30 homes.
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And we lived there for about six years now.
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And sadly, and I have all kinds of excuses for why, I really don't know the first thing about most of my neighbors.
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You know, I might recognize which car is theirs, and I probably know their mowing patterns, but I don't really have an awareness of their needs.
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And so putting this message together, I had a heavy conviction that I am a pathetic, lame neighbor in just the most vanilla American sense, not even holding it up to the standard of God.
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So as a first step toward building community and awareness, I wrote a short letter and delivered it to my neighbors, in some cases, introducing myself for the first time, apologizing for failing as a neighbor and providing them my cell phone and an open invitation to say, "If you ever need anything, reach out." It was awkward for sure, but I can already see how God can and will use this for good and that was really only a first step.
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So we'll see where it goes from there.
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But how can we increase our awareness?
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How can we better see the need?
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First, start with prayer.
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We have to ask God to help us love like him and to see people like he sees them.
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We cannot love the way that God loves without the Holy Spirit daily filling us to love like he does.
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We need God's wisdom to discern what people's needs actually are and how we can best help.
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Second, we need to open our eyes.
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How many of us have seen the person walking around like this?
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Yeah, I'll help you, yeah, yeah.
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How often have you been that person?
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We're too distracted by other things.
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We have to take intentional action to open our eyes and look around us, seeing where the needs are, 'cause it's not that hard.
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If you see a person walking with a bunch of things approaching a door, what do they need?
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At least somebody to open the door, maybe someone to help them carry the stuff.
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Or maybe if you see somebody that looks like they've been crying, they look like they've been upset.
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You might say, "Well, maybe they just need personal space." That's an excuse.
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They probably just need somebody to come up and ask them if they're okay.
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We must look for needs.
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They are all around us.
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And lastly, we pray, we open our eyes, and we gotta slow down.
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We live in a very busy world where busyness is the badge of honor of society.
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How busy are you?
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Oh, I'm busier than you.
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But it's powerfully convicting to see that with everything that Jesus did, he never hurried.
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He was never in a hurry anywhere that he was going.
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And we need to follow his example, fighting against the societal norm of busyness and leaving room to see the needs and help others.
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But in our story here, Jesus said that both the priest and the Levites saw the need, but they did nothing to help.
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So how can this be?
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They saw the need but they didn't feel the need enough to do anything about it.
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So that's the second thing we need to love our neighbor. We need compassion.
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We need to feel the need.
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Anybody in here have one of those robot vacuums, Roomba?
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I love those things. Fantastic. In 15 years of marriage, the robot has done more vacuuming than either of us. It is awesome.
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We have a wise robot. But let me ask you, as helpful as those things are, do they care if your floor is clean?
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No, they don't. In fact, do they care if they're running through a pile of cat puke?
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Dragging it all over the room. No, they do not. In fact, they've done that Do they even care about you as the owner their provider the one that is the source of electricity for them No, they don't care. They don't even care about themselves They don't have the capacity to do that But as we talked about earlier, we do have that capacity to love and to care for people because God Created us in his image and he gave us that capacity So when we serve and love other people, we are not supposed to be like the Roomba helping but not caring That's not how God loves And we're hearing a lot about Artificial intelligence these days right AI is gonna bring huge improvements to our lives In fact, the drawing of the three people that I chat GPT did that for me So we're gonna have chat GPT Alexa Siri Gemini. I think Amazon's named Rufus for some reason Those things are gonna keep coming Coming and being helpful, but never caring about you Thankfully God does not help like that and neither are we supposed to do that God loves with compassion What is compassion? Well, compassion is feeling a need so deeply that we must take action Compassion is not a hard concept to understand. I promise you that everyone in this room Understands compassion. We all know how to feel a need deep within us that compels us to take action When we were in Thailand Teaching the evangelists there I taught about this concept of compassion using it using an example that they were all very familiar with tamarind tea a Tamarind is a tropical fruit that has many nutrients that are antioxidant antifungal antibacterial antiviral But probably the first thing you'll notice if you have a tamarind or tea made from it is it is that it is it is an extremely powerful laxative drink tamarind tea, it won't be long before you feel a need that compels you to take action.
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This is just like compassion. We must feel the need to the point where we have no choice but to take action. And this is actually literally what the Greek word means. It means to yearn in your bowels, because that's where the Greeks thought love came from. But I promise you, you deep that it forces you to take action. And when you look at the Gospels and look specifically at Jesus's life, the Bible says something almost every time right before Jesus does a miracle. It says he had compassion. When he saw the people suffering with diseases and demons coming to him, he felt their need and he acted. When the blind men cried out to him to have mercy, he felt their need and acted. After teaching the 5,000 and the 4,000 people for hours, he felt their need for food, and he acted by miraculously feeding them.
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He also told us stories about how to have compassion, like this one about the Samaritan, and in a different story about the prodigal son, at the end when the father sees his son returning from home, he has compassion on him, and that's what compels him to run to his son and hug him.
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The Samaritan has compassion here.
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He feels the need so much that he has to act.
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So like the Levite or the priest, how come we don't feel the need even when we see it?
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I think most of the time, it's just 'cause we have a cold heart for people.
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Whether we've been burned by others in the past or jaded by the suffering of, there's always gonna be people suffering in the world or overwhelmed by our own troubles.
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We just don't care enough about other people's needs.
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It is a very sad state of the world, and it's an indicator of how far we are from God.
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So we have a cold heart.
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Or maybe it just seems too hopeless, right?
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This guy was half dead.
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What could these guys possibly do?
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There was probably nothing that they could do to save him, they thought.
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The problems are just too big for any one person to do anything about.
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He's too far gone.
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We can't save him.
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Well, when Charles Spurgeon preached on this passage, He said, "I never knew a man refused to help the poor who failed to give at least one admirable excuse." That's what we're all good at doing, coming up with admirable excuses for not helping.
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Or maybe we just rationalize that this was his own fault.
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He brought this trouble upon himself.
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Who is this guy to go on a dangerous road by himself?
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Is he stupid?
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I mean, isn't this exactly what he should have expected was going to happen?
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So why should I go out of my way to help over-correct his foolishness?
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Or maybe, I mean, sure, my neighbors are elderly, but don't they have their own children that can come and help them?
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I, yeah, I see her struggling with her kids over there, but she's really been gossiping about everybody.
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So it's kind of like getting what she deserves.
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When we're talking about our difficult to love neighbors, we don't want to feel their needs.
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We shut ourself off from it.
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We don't want to care.
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We don't want to get our hands dirty, and we can do this individually, or we can do it collectively as the holy huddle, where we're gonna help our people within, but anybody out, forget it.
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It is a dangerous world when the church behaves like the Levite or the priest, where we walk on the other side of the road and refuse to get our hands dirty.
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See, God's people failed this man.
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So where are the areas today where God's people are walking on the other side of the road, refusing to get involved?
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Is it the dirtiness of politics?
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I don't like any of those guys.
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Is it social controversies?
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Well, that's too touchy.
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I don't wanna talk about that with people.
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Is it the hurting of broken families?
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That's just too messy.
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I don't wanna get involved.
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Look, if we want to love God, we need to want to see the needs of others and help them.
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In order to do that, we need to have compassion like this.
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compassion that drives us to feel the need and then take action, which is the final point for today.
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Tactile action.
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Meet the need.
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So you might say, "Tactile? Really? What are you doing?" Full disclosure, I wanted the sermon application to be summarized by the acrostic of "act," A-C-T.
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So that is the simplest thing I could encourage you to do, is each one of us to be a neighbor. We need to act.
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Jesus says it in verse 37 go and do likewise. It's pretty simple go and do We don't spend enough of our time intentionally loving others by going and doing So to get act I needed a T here But even more than that, I really like the word tactile and let me explain to you why it fits very well here So there's different learning styles, right? And most of us have heard the difference between auditory learners and visual learners, right?
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Are you, do you absorb information more by sound or by sight?
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Who are my visual learners?
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Any visual learners in here?
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Just a few of you.
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How about auditory?
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Who's more auditory?
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Right?
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Well, there's another main category called tactile learners.
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That's what I am.
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It's an engineer in me.
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Tactile learners learn by touching, putting their hands on it, doing it.
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They have to put their hands on it to figure out the solution.
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So, when it comes to being tactile, you're touching things to feel.
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When it comes to loving others, we need to be tactile by getting our hands dirty.
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We have to be tactile in taking action towards the needs of others.
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It's not just enough to say, "Man, I really feel bad for that guy." It's not enough to say, "I'll pray for him.
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Do something about it." And this is what the Samaritan does.
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He goes to the man, he binds his wounds, he gives him medicine, and he takes him where he can get further help.
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The Samaritan does all of this at his own expense.
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But there's also an implied sense of urgency here.
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We need to take hands-on action right away.
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Proverbs 3, 27 and 28 says, "Do not withhold good from those to whom it is due, "when it is in your power to do it.
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"Do not say to your neighbor, "go and come again tomorrow, I will give it, when you have it with you now.
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We should not wait to help others.
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And the Samaritan didn't wait for the man to ask him for help.
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So where are you seeing needs in your life that you could help with?
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What tactile action to love your neighbor is waiting to be done in your life?
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Pastor Jeff taught last week that we need to have discernment to be able to know how to best help needs.
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Not every problem is a hammer solution, right?
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But in each of those situations, there's some sort of hands-on action.
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admonishing the idle, encouraging the faint-hearted, helping the weak, jumping in and taking action.
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How we should act is the question, but not whether or not we should act.
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Tactile action is assumed.
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We must always seek to find the best way to love our neighbor.
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Yes, but the need for discernment cannot be an excuse to do nothing.
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The concept of love as an action verb is all throughout the Bible, but one of the clearest displays on what love looks like is in 1 Corinthians 13, the love chapter, read and often ignored at weddings all around the world.
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1 Corinthians 13, 4 through 8 says, "Love is patient and kind. Love does not envy or boast.
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It is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way. It is not irritable or resentful.
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It does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails. Now don't think of this as some theological definition, some theoretical concept of love. This is the description of the perfect picture of what God did for us by sending his son Jesus. And this comes across really powerfully when you replace each use of love here with Jesus's name. Instead, Jesus is patient and kind.
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Jesus does not boast or envy. Jesus is not arrogant or rude. He does not insist on his own way. Jesus is not irritable or resentful. Jesus does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Jesus bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Jesus never fails. And as powerfully true and amazing as that concept is, it's highlighted in even more contrast when you substitute your own name instead. And I'll spare you that by putting my own name, but it works just as well with yours. Dan is patient and kind. Dan does not boast or envy.
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Dan is not arrogant or rude. He does not insist on his own way. Dan is not irritable or resentful.
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Dan does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Dan bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
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Dan never fails.
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This is painfully false with my name in there and it would be with yours as well.
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But thanks be to God that it is perfectly true with his son's name.
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Over the next part of this month, we are going to talk about some extremely difficult people to love, people far more difficult to love than just your obnoxious neighbor.
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But we live in a world that wants to divide us against each other.
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We live in a world of inevitable friction.
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Look, I don't know the story between you and your difficult to love neighbor, but the truth is is that I don't have to know it.
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Because I know the greatest story, the story of where the love of God overcomes the difficulty of loving us.
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And it is the same love that God has given to us that will overcome any amount of friction you experience in your life towards others.
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God demonstrated perfect love towards us by offering his son in our place, and through his Holy Spirit, he empowers us to love exactly the way he does to other people.
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Eternal life starts now if we know God and know his love.
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And as an outpouring of God's love in our life, we must love our neighbor.
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In our universe, powerful forces are always at work.
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Within the laws of physics, everything without exception operates with friction as an inevitable force between two things, abrasively rubbing against each other.
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But it is the creator of physics and our universe that has overcome inevitable friction with his intentional love.
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So love God with all your soul by loving like he does.
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Be aware of the needs of your neighbor, show compassion and feel compelled by their needs.
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Take tactile action to meet their needs with your hands and at your own expense.
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go and do likewise.
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Let's pray.
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God, I thank you for your example of love.
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God, your goodness that is on display through your son, through the cross, Lord, and through a perfect life that was given for us.
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Lord, we are so unlovable, God.
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We are difficult to love even in our best days, Lord.
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And that thanks be to God that you still love us, You still show us mercy and love, and you invite us to be like you and to show love to others, God.
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I pray that you would provoke in us a sense of awareness, a sense of compassion, and the opportunity to take some real action to help other people, Lord.
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I thank you for this passage, Lord, that you have preserved through all of time for this day.
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And I pray, God, that these ideas that we have absorbed and understood, Lord, that we would not just keep them in our heads, but that we would live them out outside of this room.
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In Jesus' name we pray, amen.
Small Group Discussion
Read Luke 10:25-37
What was your big take-away from this passage / message?
What motivation is most compelling for you to do a better job of loving your neighbor?
Which of your neighbors do you need to show love to?
Which of the ACT steps are you missing? Awareness? Compassion? Tactile action? Make a plan to do something different.
Breakout
Pray for one another.