Luke 10:25-42

Ben Linn preaching from Luke 10:25-42. Connect with us here:Website: citychurchdublin.ieFacebook: facebook.com/CityChurchDublin

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:18

The reading today is from Luke chapter ten, verse twenty-five to forty-two. And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life? He said to him, 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, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbour as yourself. And he said to him, You have answered correctly, do this and you will live. But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, And who is my neighbor? 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. Now by chance a priest was going down that road, and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was, and when he saw him he had compassion. He went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring an 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 out two denarii and 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 neighbour to the man who fell among the robbers? He said, The one who showed him mercy. And Jesus said to him, You go and do likewise. Now as they went on their way, Jesus entered a village, and a woman named Martha welcomed him into her house, and she had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord's feet and listened to his teaching. But Martha was distracted with much serving. And she went up to him and said, Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Tell her then to help me. But the Lord answered her, Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things, but one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion which will not be taken away from her. And so reads God's Word.

SPEAKER_02 2:53

Well, good morning. My name's Ben. I'm the executive pastor here at City Church Dublin. Let me add my welcome to Owens, particularly if you're new or visiting. Please make sure that you stick around afterwards. We'd love to get to know you a little bit. There's coffee and pastries, there's Connect Table, there's all of the good stuff there. But just to introduce myself a little bit, so you can get to know me, maybe, I'll tell you a little bit about my first job out of university. It was, admittedly, a good long while ago. It was the uh it was January of 2000. I was very young, and I had never worked a professional job before. All of my work experience up to this point had been doing jobs where you work with your hands. I worked for my dad in his machine shop, for example. And that's a very tangible sort of job. That's the type of job where you know what you've accomplished at the end of the day. But this was my first job that was a professional job. I was going to work for a Fortune 500 company. I was taking a managerial role, and it was very exciting. Now, I'll tell you, when a company brings you on, they want to kind of cram as much knowledge into your head as they can, it feels like. And I remember the first couple of days there, and you know, of course, what that's like. You're just trying to figure out where's the toilet. You know, who's who's who's my coworker? Who can I uh trust in this place? Who's that cranky guy that's that's that's walking around? Oh, that's my boss. Never mind. But the situation there, you know, they're they're trying to show me everything, and I got a bunch of information dumped on me, a lot of it having nothing to do with my role, a lot of it having nothing to do with what I would actually be doing with the company. And I remember as I was going through, as I was, you know, walking from one end of the building to the other, this massive distribution center, it's like, I understand that this is where the flammable aerosols are with this reinforced part of the building. I understand this is where you know the maintenance bay is and you know, trailers, and this is how a bill of lading looks and procedure and flow and all of this stuff. But I remember there was a question that kind of started echoing in my mind, and I was either smart enough or scared enough that I didn't dare say it out loud. But the question was something like, but what do we do? Right? What do I do? What is my role? What is my job here? What do I actually do in this company? Now, maybe you're a Christian here this morning and you've had some of the same questions about living out your faith. What do we do? What are our objectives? How do I know if I'm doing what I'm meant to be doing? Or maybe you're just looking in on the faith. You wouldn't consider yourself a Christian yet, you haven't made that uh decision yet to follow Jesus as Lord. That's great. Glad you're here. But maybe you're looking in on it and trying to figure out what do Christians do? How do they evaluate? You know, how do they look at it and see are they doing what they're meant to be doing? Well, this passage gives us an answer to that question. And you can see it right in front of you. I'm not going to make this some kind of clickbait, you know, make sure you watch till the end. But look at verse 27. It says, 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. That's the answer. That's what we Christians are called to do. It's it's our greatest commandment. And today's passage, which, you know, please have that open in front of you, gives us so much color and texture to help live that out. Now, notice that I said passage and not passages. If you're like me, you have those section headers in your Bible, the parable of the Good Samaritan, and then later on you see Martha and Mary. Those can be really helpful in finding things, but they can also encourage us to read the Bible in a more episodic kind of way, I suppose. Meaning like one section might not have anything to do with the next. Here's this week's section and next week's section, and on and on and on. But really, those divisions weren't in the original text. For that matter, neither were the chapter and verse notations. Luke, the guy who wrote this book under the inspiration and direction of the Holy Spirit, Luke put these two stories together, and if we consider them together, I think we can really see there's a reason for that. There's a flow, there's a contrast that shows us something. In fact, I'd argue we miss something if these are just kind of two separate sections. You can really walk away from one or the other with a less than complete view of the Christian walk. So the first thing we're going to look at today is the fact that Christian love does for others. Put another way, biblical love is active, it takes action. And since we've already seen that the greatest command for the Christian is all about love, we really need to make sure we have a handle on this. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind. Love your neighbor as yourself. This love that we're exploring here is not wishy-washy, it isn't just a feeling. It's not kind of warm fuzzies pointed in the right direction. To love God here isn't just like that old rock song, you know, Jesus is just alright with me. And loving my neighbor as myself isn't just me kind of saying, you know, I'm okay with myself. I'm alright, I think I'm okay. My neighbor, I'm alright with them too. Now, obviously, there's nothing inherently wrong with any of that. It just doesn't really get us to the point that biblical love actually does for others. And we can see this in the interaction between Jesus and the lawyer. It actually seems to them like it's a given. It's understood that the love that's called for in verse 27 is an active love. Jesus tells them in verse 28, You've answered correctly, do this and you will live. You see? Do this and you'll live. He then goes on to describe a very active sort of love in his parable. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. How we get to that is actually pretty interesting. Verse 25 says the lawyer stood up and put Jesus to the test. The lawyer intended to put Jesus on trial, so to speak. But Jesus answers his question with a question of his own. What must I do to inherit eternal life? What do you think? The lawyer putting the teacher to the test gets put to the test himself. Even today there's a stereotype among Jewish people that they answer questions with questions. You know, how are you? Oh, why? What have you heard? Or, you know, how are you? Well, how should I be doing? Or how are you? Compared to who? I bring this up not just to point out cultural observations, but because there might be a lesson for us in it. The lawyer asked a profound question, a pretty broad and open question, and Jesus probably could have answered it any number of ways. But by turning the question around, by putting the lawyer back on the spot, it led to him opening up a bit more about what he was really asking. You know, the question behind the question. I think for a lot of us, someone asks us a question and we answer it. But our answers might not get into the question behind the question. Like, for example, somebody might ask you, you know, how can you believe that God is good when there's so much suffering in the world? And it could be very easy to launch into, you know, our own uh observations from Scripture and, you know, the idea of a broken world that's that's destroyed by sin and a loving God and this and that. And what if instead of giving that answer right away, we tried to get to the root of it? Because I have to think, most of the time that people are asking questions like this, it's not just a philosophical exercise. It's not just a hypothetical. So maybe instead of throwing an answer up quickly, we could try to get to why? Why do you ask that? What have you seen? What have you observed? What have you experienced? And you see how that kind of takes us from being in this almost adversarial, you know, me versus you, I'm asking the question, you have to answer it, to almost a sense of let's walk through this together. Let's see if we can answer the question behind the question together. Now, I always grew up as a kid, you know, my parents would tell me it's it's bad manners to answer a question with a question. Probably because, you know, I was a little kid and they didn't want to have to have a snot-nosed kid uh, you know, putting the adult who's asking the question back on the spot. But I think this uh this uh interaction here really tells us maybe there's a place for it. Maybe if we take a little more time to understand someone else's question, then we can give better answers. So the lawyer puts Jesus to the test. Jesus puts the lawyer to the test, and it would seem that the lawyer passes the test. Yay! But now we're getting to the question behind the question, verse 29. But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, and who is my neighbor? In other words, I get that I'm called to love my neighbor as myself. We are in complete agreement on this matter. But I want to know what are the legal limits of this neighbor definition? Can I justify myself by the list of people I would consider my neighbor? Can I justify myself with the people who are my neighbor and thereby get permission on who to exclude? Now his question doesn't come from nowhere. I mean, apart from the natural human tendency to not necessarily want to be good to everyone out there, he has some potential legal precedent to fall back on. If we look back into the Old Testament book of Leviticus, we can see the verse that that actually came from, the verse in the law where it says you shall love your neighbor as yourself. Right before that it says, You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. So you can understand why maybe this lawyer might have thought the neighbor that I'm supposed to love is limited to my own people. Even though there are plenty of other verses in the law that apply equally to justice for foreigners and all of that. Either way, Jesus is about to challenge this idea that my neighbor is only people who are like me. Starting with verse 30, Jesus tells a parable. And if you're not familiar with the genre of parables, it's an earthly story that conveys a heavenly truth. Something that the people hearing would have been able to latch on to as familiar, and through that understand some deeper truth. Here we have a man who fell among robbers on the way from Jerusalem to Jericho. Everyone hearing this would have nodded, as that was notoriously dangerous stretch of road. And it was just known for being a place where robbers used to used to hide out. So the parable goes, and he's he's left there half dead, unable to do anything for himself. Along comes a priest, presumably fresh off his time serving in the temple up in Jerusalem, but instead of helping the man, he crosses the road and continues on his way. In the same way, a Levite, this is someone who also works in the temple, he sees him, he avoids him, and he walks on. Now, what is Jesus getting at here? I've heard some people say these two would have had would have had to remain uh ceremonially clean in order to be fit for their temple service, which of course isn't really a thing if they were going down, aka away from Jerusalem. But, you know, there could have been some concern over, you know, being around a dead body, this guy was to die, or, you know, at least, you know, bloodborne pathogens, communicable disease, that sort of thing. Could have been a matter of cleanliness. Another possibility is the priest and the Levite might have been reluctant to help someone they didn't know. Actually, ran across a book of collected wisdom uh from a couple centuries before Christ. This is not scripture, it's not inspired, it's not the Bible, it's not considered to be any of those things, but it's kind of reflective, it's gonna be reflective of the uh prevailing attitudes of the day. This fellow called Sirach, this book of Sirach, um, and he wrote this. He says, When you do good a good deed, make sure you know who's benefiting from it. Then what you do will not be wasted. It then goes on to talk about how you should help good people, you should help religious people, you should help devout people, but not sinners, not anybody who's not devout. And maybe this idea is part of what's informing the lawyer's decision in the first place. You can follow the logic to a point. Why should we why should we go out of our way to help someone we don't even know? Maybe this guy isn't a good guy. Maybe he himself is even a robber who tried to rob somebody himself and got fought off and left for dead. If if we help this guy, would we then be subverting justice? Would we then be undoing justice? But the third possibility, and I think this one hits a little closer to home, maybe it wasn't about ceremonial cleanliness, maybe it wasn't about wisdom that kept them from helping, but maybe just plain old self-interest. You know, I'd love to help, but I'm in a hurry myself. I'd love to help, but what could I honestly do? I'd love to help, but gosh, maybe those robbers are still in the area. They might get me the same way they got him. I'd love to help, but but but Jesus doesn't give a reason, but the reality is neither the priest nor the Levite made any effort to help the man who'd been attacked. Were they acting as a neighbor to him? No. Clearly, they were not. But then we have this Samaritan. Like if Jesus were telling a joke in our day and age, we might expect, you know, a priest and a Levite and a something walk into a pub, something like this, right? What would that other what would that third one be? A local rabbi, maybe? A merchant? Somebody not associated with this or that or the other thing? No, maybe. But not a Samaritan. That just feels so far out of left field. Now, if you don't understand uh about the Jews and the Samaritans, they didn't exactly like each other. At this stage, when Jesus was telling the parable, there was already almost a thousand years of beef between them. Suffice it to say, they were all once one big nation. They're all descendants of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. But they split in two and they kind of existed in this state of cold war for centuries. The Jews would have seen the Samaritans as impure, as unclean, you know, dirty. They, the Samaritans, rebelled against God, and God's punishment for this was to have a foreign power come and conquer them. Never mind that the Jews also rebelled against God, and God's punishment was to have a different foreign power come and conquer them, but let's just leave that aside for now. But to see some of the animosity between Jews and Samaritans, you can read John chapter 4, where Jesus interacts with a Samaritan woman at the well. It rings with just hostility, you know, of the last ten centuries, really. It rings with the prejudice and distrust each group had for the other. It rings with the knowledge Jews wouldn't even enter Samaria if they could help it. They'd go miles out of their way. They'd go through Gentile territory just to avoid these Samaritans. So you can imagine the lawyer and anyone who was listening. Imagine them getting the rhythm and flow of this parable. Man beaten half to death, yep, yep, yep. Priest, yeah. Levite, yeah. Wait, where does a Samaritan come into this? Well, come into this the Samaritan surely does. Not only does he not cross to the other side of the road, but he goes right to him. Jesus said he had compassion for the man. Not only does he look him over, he binds up his wounds, dipping into his own supplies and equipment to do it. Not only does he tend to him there, he lifts him up and transports him from the scene. Not only does he get him off the road, he takes him to an inn where he can recuperate. He looks after him. He leaves money so he'll continue to be looked after. He spends of his own resources, risks his own safety, puts himself even in a position to be extorted. And all of this to an avowed enemy in enemy territory. He doesn't just ask, Have I done enough? He asks, Have I done everything I can? So it's a bit of a shocking twist in Jesus' parable, so shocking. The lawyer who was so intent on putting Jesus to the test can't even bring himself to say the word Samaritan. Who showed himself to be a neighbor? Uh the one who showed him mercy. It's a bit of an understatement, isn't it? The one who showed him mercy, how about the one who heaped care on him? How about the one who risked his own comfort, his own safety, his own resources? How about the one who poured out costly grace on behalf of someone he didn't even know? As a parable, the implications to this are huge because Jesus turns around and says in verse 37, You go and do likewise. It's a tall order, this version of loving your neighbor as yourself. So how can we apply it in our own lives? Well, remember, the point here is Christian love does for others. So let's be people who do. Now, you might want me to be more specific, but I'm not going to do that. After all, I don't think the example of the Samaritan is here's somebody who is going out specifically looking for half-dead Jews upon whom to lavish care. Let's be real, honestly, if if we took up that ministry in our day and age, all you need is a mobile phone and you know, ring up the ambulance. The example here is not about that, it's about how he responded. And I think we can take on three elements of his response for our own lives. Take a look at verses 33 and 34. When the Samaritan came across the beaten man, he first saw him, then he had compassion for him, then he went to him. He saw him, he had compassion, and he went to him. And I think we can see a lot by thinking through what keeps us from each of these three things. Think about it in your own life. When someone is hurting, when someone is in need, I can't see someone's need, first of all, if I'm absorbed just in myself, if I'm blind to those around me. I don't just mean take out your earphones and get off your phone once in a while. I mean let's notice the people around us. Let's catch it when conversations point to someone's need. Second, I can't be moved to compassion if I'm cynical or if I'm annoyed by people around me, if I'm more consumed by my own agenda than by ways God may have for me to serve, if I just want to end the conversation and get back to what I was doing. And third, I can't take action if I, you know, don't want to get involved. If I think the other person probably just, you know, needs some space. If I think we're not that close, it would be weird to step in here. Or, you know, it's not my place. It's not my job to help. Sum it up, I can't take action if I'm too busy finding excuses. Now, what if, and this is homework for all of us, myself included. What if we spent time in prayer asking God, give me the eyes to see outside of myself? Give me a heart of compassion. Give me hands and feet that will take action. And let's remember this idea of costly grace is best exemplified in the person and work of Jesus. We are all of us that guy stripped and half dead on the side of the road. Jesus comes along and pours out grace upon grace for us out of his great love. The Christian walk is to become more and more like Jesus. So let's be those who do for others. Now, if we walk away from that parable and that's all we talk about today, there's definitely challenge, room for growth, stuff we can learn, application. But remember, I said there's value in looking at these two seemingly unrelated stories together. So let's get into our second point. Christian love rests in Christ. Verse 38 sets this scene. Now, as they went on their way, Jesus entered a village, and a woman named Martha welcomed him into her house. Nothing terribly dramatic here. We've just gone from a true crime podcast to an average domestic moment. Mary and Martha hosting Jesus in their home. We know from other gospels that Mary and Martha lived with their brother, brother Lazarus in a town called Bethany. Maybe there was a standing invitation. Whenever you and your disciples are in Bethany, you know, come around the house for a meal. Feels very ordinary. We see from the text Mary sat and listened to Jesus while Martha was distracted, seemingly with the work of hospitality. You know, imagine a dozen or more people turn up at your house unexpected. Not like they texted when they were a mile away, not like they, you know, not like she could pull some stuff out of the fridge and just heat it up. You know, obviously she's in the thick of it. And in a moment of frustration, she tells Jesus to send Mary in to help her. Sure, she can get back to her busy schedule of doing nothing when the food is done. That's actually not in the text. But uh Jesus turns her around. Take it from verse 41. He says, Martha, Martha, you're anxious and troubled about many things, but one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her. Now, just as a personal aside here, I feel like I'm getting it from both sides with this passage. The first part called me out for my my lack of compassion, my inability or unwillingness to see needs in people and take action. Now am I getting called out for doing too much, for serving practically? I mean, what can we get here? What is what did Martha get wrong and Mary get right? Because I'll tell you, I'm I'm very much a practical service kind of guy. Is Jesus now saying I should stop showing kindness through my actions and just, I don't know, sit? Well, we could certainly interpret that way, and I'm not the only one who's done that. But Jesus isn't calling Martha out for serving. In fact, one of the parallels between the two sections in this passage is that they both have someone seeking to justify themselves. How do we know? Well, it's right in the text. Verse 40, Martha was distracted. We see that she's distressed. She says, Lord, do you not care? And she's demanding, tell her to help me. Distracted, distressed, demanding, and the Lord himself called her anxious, troubled. Now we don't know what this means in practical terms, is Jesus saying, You're prepping a seven course meal when a tray of sandwiches would have been enough? We don't know if he's saying, you know, your timing is wrong, there'll be plenty of time to cook afterwards. Is it something else? We don't know. But the takeaway for us, her heart is wrong. Her intentions are wrong. She's focused on the wrong part. And if she's choosing the wrong portion, what is Mary doing to choose the right portion? Well, she's spending time with Jesus. All the serving in the world, the costly grace, the compassion-soaked action for those in need, that can't come at the expense of our relationship with the Lord. What does he call us to? To rest in him. Just as a story, I got an email from someone a few years ago. She said she was looking to join the music team. Great. I said, I don't know if we've actually met, but please come find me on Sunday morning and we can chat about it. But her response to that said, she didn't actually come to City Church yet. She was deciding which church she wanted to join, seemingly based on which one would let her be up front and sing the first week. Now, I don't know the state of this woman's heart. She may have had all the right intentions. I don't know her story, but it certainly raised questions. It at least suggested that she might have had questionable motives for wanting to serve in church. We may never know, presumably she didn't like my response and wound up going somewhere else. But can you see why I bring that up? All of us elders, all of us leaders in the church, we all want to see people serving in the church. But we don't want to see people serving in the church for the wrong reasons, in the wrong ways. It's a part of it's why you know some of the service teams are only open to church members. That way we've had a chance to get to know you before we're putting you on a rota. It's also why we discourage people from serving on too many teams or serving too many weeks out of the month. You don't have to be on duty every time the doors are open. Even the staff, we don't want every staff member or every elder serving every single week. It's important to show up and just be part of the family sometimes, to let other people serve, to take ourselves out of the equation. We don't want you serving because you think it'll make God like you better. Or we don't want you serving because it improves your reputation or how people see you. We don't want you serving because serving in a certain capacity or on a certain team has become part of your identity. We certainly don't want you serving because it's a great way to avoid awkward conversation making on a Sunday morning. Now, I'm talking to you as a pastor who took three full months off on sabbatical not that long ago. It's important for me not to serve in the wrong way. Important not to think that it's all about me and my efforts. Important that I not be trying to justify myself by the way I serve. So that's why I'm taking another sabbatical starting tomorrow. Just kidding. But you understand what I'm saying. Serving is good. Diligence, hard work, concern for others, all of these are great virtues for the Christian. But idolatry can sometimes mean taking a good thing, making it an absolute, making it more important in some ways than the Lord and his grace, and that turns it into a bad thing. Let's not do that. Christian love rests in Christ. So if we take these two sections and read them together, we get a much fuller answer to the question I posted at the beginning. What do we do? What is our job? If I only read the parable of the Good Samaritan, I might come away with the idea that pleasing God is an exercise in working and serving and doing and helping, and that's all it is. And my friends, there are loads of organizations in the world that devote themselves to helping practical needs. But if we're just about addressing the pragmatic, we can easily slip into a righteousness that rests not on the finished work of Jesus, but on how much I've done. Look what I've done. How much have you done? Now, should the church be a force for good in the world? Absolutely. But there are deeper needs than poverty and violence and war and famine. If you remember back chapter five, we looked at this the first week of February, I think it was. There was the story of a paralyzed man who was brought to Jesus to be healed. Jesus healed him all right, but not before he forgave his sins. And why was that? Well, that's because as miraculous as it is to go from being paralyzed to walking, there's a deeper need. It's better to go through life paralyzed but right with God, than to be someone who's walking and running and jumping and dancing, but is utterly lost. On the other hand, if I only read the section about Mary and Martha, I might come away with the idea that pleasing God means to withdraw from the world and devote myself only to prayer and the word. My friends, I don't see anywhere in Scripture where I'm called to live the monastic life. I don't see anything calling me to hide away from the world and just spend time with Jesus. We're called to both serving others in costly ways and resting in the finished work of the Lord Jesus. It's not a question of one is right and one is wrong. It's a matter for the posture of your heart. Are you seeking to justify yourself, either by the way you serve or by the way you avoid it? Neither one of those is going to do the job. If I serve, let it be out of a sense of being loved and accepted by God, not about trying to do enough to earn his favor. If I rest, let it be out of a sense that he has set me free and doesn't need me in order to achieve his purposes. Not because I'm unwilling or unable to care for the people around me. Let's be those who do for others and who rest in Christ, not because we're carefully walking a tightrope between the two, but because our hearts are facing the right direction, his direction.

SPEAKER_01 36:52

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