The Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37)

Hello, friends.

This is Pastor Creighton.

Thank you for tuning in to Newsong Church's Sermon Podcast.

At Newsung Church, we want to see Jesus lifted high in Port Perry, Ontario, as we worship, grow, and serve.

You can learn more about us and find contact info at newsongportperry.ca.

The holy gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ according to Luke.

And behold, a lawyer stood up to put Jesus to the test, saying, Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?

He said to him, What is written in the law?

How do you read it?

And he answered, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all of your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor is yourself.

And he said to him, You have answered correctly.

Do this, and you will live.

But he is learning to justify himself said to Jesus.

And who is my neighbor?

Jesus replied.

And then was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho.

And he fell among Rumber.

He tripped him and beat him and departed, leaving him half dead.

Now by chance, the police was going down to the truth.

And when he saw him, he passed money on the other side.

So the life was the leafline.

But if the medicine as his journey came to where he was, and when he saw him, he had compassion.

He went to him and bound up his wound, pouring on oil and wine.

Then he set him on his own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him.

And the next day, he took him to the memory and gave them, gave them to the innkeeper, saying, Take care of him, and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.

Which of these three do you think proved to be a neighbor to the men who fell among the robbers?

He said, the one who showed him mercy.

And Jesus said to him, You go and do likewise.

The Gospel of the Lord.

In a pre-recorded sermon this morning, we're privileged to have speaking on the Reverend Colton Carrick, a former colleague of Pastor Creighton's from St.

Peter and St.

Paul in Ottawa.

Colton was ordained a deacon in January 2020 and is now the mission curate at the Church of the Good Samaritan in St.

John's, Newfoundland, the Reverend Colton Carrick.

Good morning, brothers and sisters.

It's good to be with you this morning.

My text for this morning is from the Gospel of Luke, chapter 10, verses 25 to 37, the famous parable of the Good Samaritan.

Luke 10:25–37

But before we come to God's word, let's come before God in prayer.

Father in heaven, we thank you for the great and precious gift of your word.

We pray that as we attend to it, you would help us by the power of your Holy Spirit to understand it.

And we pray that it would resonate deeply within our hearts.

We pray these things in the name of your Son, Jesus Christ.

Amen.

I would like to begin by suggesting to you that a Christian is not only someone who has a deep and profound love for God, but also someone who has a deep and profound love for humanity.

I'll say that again just to make sure that we're all on the same page.

A Christian is not only someone who has a deep and profound love for God, but also someone who has a deep and profound love for humanity.

The Christian position has always been that human beings are remarkable and wonderful.

Indeed, the Christian position has always been that human beings are of exceedingly great value and worth.

We as Christians believe that all human beings are created in the image of God.

As Christians, we believe that human beings have a special and unique place within the heart of God.

We believe that He cherishes human beings more than anything else in all of creation.

One can say that we Christians and our Jewish forefathers were the original humanists.

Now, when I say humanist, I do not mean an atheist, of course, but rather I use the term in its older sense.

I mean someone who believes in the fundamental dignity, value, and God-given abilities of human beings.

You can say that Christians are, or at least ought to be, great humanitarians or great anthrophiles, which is to say lovers of humanity.

As we come to our text for this morning, the fundamental question being asked can be found in verse 29.

An unnamed lawyer asks the question, and who is my neighbor?

The lawyer asks the question after Jesus has just affirmed the lawyer's answer to a previous question.

The lawyer had been trying to trap or challenge Jesus, but in the course of trying to do so had rightly suggested that the duty of man is to love God and to love one's neighbor.

You see, this lawyer was actually fairly sharp.

However, the lawyer was dissatisfied with the way that the conversation had gone.

Our text says that the lawyer wanted to justify himself.

The lawyer wanted to show that he was asking a serious question of great theological import.

As such, the lawyer asks the question, and who is my neighbor?

You see, the lawyer had rightly said that to love his neighbor was the duty of anyone who wanted to be godly.

But he wanted to understand the extent or the scope of this commandment.

When the lawyer asks the question, And who is my neighbor?

He is also asking, Who is it that I have to love?

Who is it that I have to serve?

Who is it that I have to honor?

Which people do I need to pay attention to, and which people can I simply disregard?

To whom should I offer my kindness, my tongue, my hospitality, my aid, and my affection?

You see, in Jesus' day, the common belief amongst the Jewish people was that to love one's neighbor simply meant loving other Jews, loving other members of the nation of Israel.

And so when the Jewish lawyer asks the question, and who is my neighbor, we can safely assume that he had the common Jewish answer in the back of his mind.

Well, in response to the lawyer's question, and who is my neighbor?

Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan.

It is a well-known parable, but this morning I want us to see how the parable answers the lawyer's question.

I want us to find Jesus' answer to the question, and who is my neighbor?

First of all, we see that our enemies are to be counted as our neighbors.

Indeed, our neighbors are not only friendly old ladies down the street, but also our sworn enemies.

Jesus builds up to this point in verses thirty to thirty thirty to thirty-three of our text.

There is a badly beaten man in need of help by the side of the street, and both a priest and a Levite pass him by without offering him any help.

Now, a priest and a Levite probably would have been considered pretty respectable neighbors back in Jesus' day.

But in this parable, they both fail to do the neighborly thing, they both fail to love their neighbor.

But finally, a Samaritan walks by and begins to compassionately care for the helpless man.

Now I want us all to understand that this part of the parable would have been quite shocking to the original listeners.

You see, the Samaritans were the sworn enemies of the Jews.

To put it mildly, they simply did not get along.

A deep animosity existed between the Samaritans and the Jewish communities, and it was an animosity not easily overcome.

This is all to say that the Lord Jesus was up to something when he made a Samaritan the main character and the main hero of his story.

Jesus is trying to show his listeners that the neighborly that the neighborly love commanded by God is a love meant to reach over ethnic and religious divisions.

The command to love one's neighbor is not a command to love only those people who look like us, believe like us, speak like us, think like us, vote like us, and live like us.

But rather the command to love one's neighbor is a command to love all sorts of different people.

The Roman Emperor Julian once remarked atheism, and by atheism he meant Christianity, has been specially advanced through the loving service rendered to strangers, and through their care for the burial of the dead.

It is a scandal that there is not a single Jew who is a beggar, and that the godless Galileans care not only for their own poor, but for ours as well, while those who belong to us look in vain for the help that we should render them.

You see, the church, since her earliest days, the Church of Jesus Christ, has been characterized by her willingness to love not only herself, but everyone else as well.

Second, we see in this parable that our neighbors include those people who are unable to pay us back.

The command to love our neighbors means that we are called to love people who will not or cannot love us back.

I want you to notice in this parable that the man who is beaten and left on the road is completely passive throughout the whole thing.

We are given no indication that the man ever thanked or paid back the Good Samaritan.

The Good Samaritan nursed this man back to health.

The Good Samaritan allowed the man to ride his beast and therefore walked a great distance for this man.

And the Good Samaritan offered a good chunk of change to make sure that the man had time to recover within the comfort of an inn.

The Good Samaritan did all of this, not because he had a sense that he would be paid back, not because he thought he was going to get some, you know, good karma, but simply because he was compassionate and merciful himself.

You see, the intention behind the command to love one's neighbor is not that people would succeed in completing some charitable checklist, but rather that people would come to be characterized by a sincere and beautiful love for others.

Well, the Good Samaritan does reveal who he is.

The Good Samaritan is someone who is characterized by a kindly and generous disposition towards the people he comes across, regardless of who they are or what they need.

The Good Samaritan loves people not because it is easy or convenient, but because he is a great lover of humanity.

He wants to treat his fellow man with compassion and mercy.

Third and finally, I want us to see that the command to love one's neighbor is in one sense a command to love those around us.

Reading through Jesus' parable, it seems to be the case that the Good Samaritan simply happened across this near-dead man.

The Good Samaritan did not seek out the man but simply found him along the way.

The Good Samaritan's actions were a loving response to a difficult situation.

This means that our neighbors are, in one sense, simply those people who are around us.

Our neighbors are our colleagues, those people we ride the bus with, those people we see at the grocery store all the time, the other kids at school, and so on.

Our neighbors are those who live in proximity to us.

When we read through the biblical gospels, one of the things that is quite striking is that Jesus' ministry was remarkably local.

Jesus carried out his whole earthly ministry within a fairly small geographical space.

In one sense, Jesus' whole earthly ministry was a beautiful picture of what it truly means to love one's neighbor.

He loved people by healing, feeding, counseling, teaching, protecting, and spending time with the people who lived around him, who lived closest to him.

Many of the people that Jesus interacted with in his ministry were people who happened to be on the road or in the town that Jesus was walking through.

By his life and by his par by this parable, Jesus shows us that loving our neighbors often means simply loving those who are right in front of us at any given time.

And so, in summary, Jesus' parable of the Good Samaritan shows us that loving our neighbors means loving our enemies, loving those people who are inconvenient to love, and loving those who are closest to us.

Jesus' parable of the Good Samaritan shows us that loving our neighbors is not an easy or an abstract thing, but often a difficult and a highly practical thing.

To use an example from Scripture, if we look at the Gospel of John chapter 13, we see that loving one's neighbor can look like washing the feet of one's traitor.

John 13 · chapter mention

Indeed, in John chapter 13, Jesus washes the feet of Judas, the betrayer.

John 13 · chapter mention

As we consider our neighbors, we must always remember to consider Jesus.

No one exemplified the virtue of neighborly love better than he.

He was willing to serve and die for people who made themselves his enemies, who refused to love him back in any way, and who were close enough to him to betray him, forsake him, and murder him.

Jesus shows us most profoundly what it means to be a great lover of humanity, someone who, through thick and thin, commits himself to the flourishing and thriving of his fellow human beings.

As we consider the parable of the Good Samaritan, my prayer is that we would come that we would become more and more like our Lord Jesus.

My prayers that our hearts are filled with the love of God, that we would find ourselves overflowing with a deep desire to share that love and to spend that love on others.

As Christians, we are the great beneficiaries of God's love.

As Christians, we rejoice in the fact that our God has committed Himself to our flourishing and thriving.

We rejoice in the fact that God has looked upon us with compassion and mercy, nursed us back to spiritual health, and given us a future.

May we, like our God, look upon others in love and work diligently for their flourishing, thriving, and well-being.

Not as a way of earning anything, but simply as a way of expressing our deep and profound love for God and humanity.

May I finish by suggesting to you that at one point you were like the man beaten and left at the side of the road.

At one point you were helpless and dying, but in a spiritual sense.

But then with great compassion and mercy, Jesus, the good Samaritan, came to you and made you well.

He brought you back from the brink of death and gave you a new life.

So now, being thus loved and thus enlivened, might not we, with hearts filled with gratitude, try and do something similar for others.

Amen.

Thank you for listening today.

We worship a generous God who calls us to follow Him in giving willfully, cheerfully, and sacrificially.

Newsong Church's mission and ministry is one hundred percent funded by the generous gifts of those worshiping and journeying with us.

If you'd like to offer a gift towards Newsong's ministry, please visit Newsongportperry.ca slash giving for more information on how to do that.

May God bless you and keep you today and every day.