Luke chapter 10 verses 25 through 37, 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? He answered, You shall love the Lord or 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. And he said to him, you have answered correctly, do this and you will live. But he desired 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 journey, came to where he was and when he saw him, he had compassion. He went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he sent him on his own aim and brought him to an end and took care of him. And the next day he took out two denari 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 neighbor who fell among the robbers? He said, the one who showed him mercy and Jesus said to him, you go and do likewise the word of the Lord. This morning, we have the great privilege of having Chad Scruggs, the RUF Campus Minister at SMU, come to share with us this passage preaching from it, expounding the richness of this incredible text. Chad and his wife, Jada, moved to Dallas in January of 2007 responding to the call to go and serve as a Campus Minister at SMU. It's a ministry that this church has been supporting for a long, long time which has seen tremendous fruit. In the last few years particularly, lost men and lost women, college students coming to saving faith, understanding the depth of their sin and the deep need for a savior. It's been a very powerful ministry on that campus. Chad and Jada have three boys, a four and a half, two and a half, and almost 11 month old. They have been blessed by God in so many ways to continue to pour their lives into these college students and do it in a way that's so significant. RUF is a ministry that this church is passionate about because it points people to their greatest need and that need only being met in the person of Jesus Christ. I encourage you this morning to lean in and think deeply of this passage and what it means for each of us in response to the grace that God has given us. Chad, thank you brother for being with us this morning. Come and share it from God's holy word.
I think before we begin I should offer you some assurance that they did check my driver's license before I got here this morning and it turns out I'm barely old enough to be up here this morning. I can't tell you the number of people that came to me afterwards and said, you look so young and so I think that's a compliment. I'll take it as a compliment. I'll take it. Well I just want to say it really is a privilege to be with you this morning. I just want to begin by saying that thank you. You may or may not know this but you're actually the ones that send me to do my job every day. You sent us to campus with the gospel of Jesus Christ and we couldn't be there without you. And so it is an honor to represent you. I don't know that you feel that way about me but it's an honor to represent you. My college friends were fond of reminding me when I was dating my wife Jada that I'd outkicked my coverage every time that our relationship came up. Which just means that I got the better into the deal than she did. And I certainly feel that that might be true in our relationship as well. So thank you very much for being there for us, for loving us in all the ways that you have. If you could have one question answered about your future, what would you ask? Let's say that a well-dressed leprechaun approaches you if you leave worship this morning, normal Sunday morning, and gives you basically allows you to ask one question that he says he can answer about your future. What would you ask in that scenario? I often ask that very question or pose that question to college students over the years plus or minus the leprechaun part. And I do that because college really is a time for asking questions. It's a time for dreaming about the future. And for college students at least, I don't know if this is fair, but they at least feel that in some ways college is the beginning of the rest of their story. That something significant is going on and they feel more responsible for their consequences now, that they're making decisions at this moment that will affect the rest of their lives. And so I know that college students often come across as very light-hearted, I think, probably on purpose. But in reality, they're actually burdened. They're burdened with trying to figure out what the future looks like for them, to the burden of an uncertain future. They're burdened with an identity at this point lost in transition a little bit. And one of the privileges of my job is actually to get to help them in theory to bring those burdens and not just bring them but to begin to entrust those burdens to Jesus Christ. And so I'll often ask the question. If you had one question about your future, what would you ask? And you know, they think about it a little bit and then often what they settle on is a who question? Who will I marry? Who will I work for? Now I realize that's bad grammar for who will I work? Who will my children be? Who will I grow up to be? The who question? Now think if you think about it, it's a little bit unsurprising. The who questions and all of their variety are incredibly important questions for all of us. Not just college students. Why is that? Well, think it's because we intuitively recognize that the people that we actually move through life with, the people that we meet, the people that we entrust ourselves to define who we are more than anything else even our circumstances. Who you marry? Who you work for? Who works for you? Who you move through life with? Who rejects you? Who you reject? These are the questions that determine much of who we are and much of who we find ourselves becoming. So it's no surprise I think in the passage that we've read together this morning that Jesus teaches us that the who question is the most fundamental question in the Christian faith. Even more important than what or when or how even more important than why is the who question? Who am I supposed to love? And who is it ultimately that loves me? I want us to look at the passage together now and it's a passage that may be familiar to many of you. Just notice that the setup of the parable, a lawyer comes to Jesus with a question. The question is really simple. What do I have to do to inherit eternal life? It's the fundamental religious question, right? What do I have to do to know at the end of the day that when I die, God will be pleased with me. What does that look like? In Jesus' replies, it's all in the law. Team Commandments, law of Moses, live according to the law, you'll be just fine. The lawyer begins to show off a little bit, doesn't he? Because he is a lawyer. I don't mean that light. I don't mean to insult lawyers. But the law here is in his wheelhouse, right? So he begins to show off a little bit. And he says, the law tells me to love God first, my neighbor's second. In other words, he says, and he's right, the law answers the who question. Jesus says, that's good, you've done it. Got it. And I just think you ought to notice this in the gospels that whenever Jesus ends the conversation, you should just let the conversation be over. Because what gets people in trouble in the gospels is when they're not through with the conversation and they're trying to show off a little bit and this is what happens here. He goes, so exactly who is my neighbor is what he asks. And that is the question that sets the stage for the most well-known parable in all of scripture. Who must I love? Who must I love? Show me in order for God to be pleased with me at the end of the day. Here's what I want you just to see at the outset. I just think it's important to point this out that the lawyer is a legalist at heart, not God. The lawyer is the one that is obsessed with the explanation of the law. Now, you know, I find this all the time for us as well. And what do I mean by legalists? Let me explain that we use that word a lot. The lawyer is trying to narrow down the law, right? He's trying to narrow it down in order to make it manageable so that he can figure out what he has to do to get by. Just enough to get by. We do the same thing. Let me give an example from campus life. I don't know if this example won't hit too close to home. Take sexuality, for example. You know, that's an issue that comes up a lot in my context. You can imagine. And really, God's teaching on sexuality is fairly simple in essence. It's that we're to reserve our sexuality for the person that we've entrusted to ourselves to in marriage. It belongs to them. That's it, right? But here's what I find. Instead of embracing the virtue of chastity, what I, what my students want to know is how, what does it actually mean? So I get the question all the time, how far is too far? Right? What kind of pictures can I look at? It's the lawyer's question. Where does God really draw the line? How much of my money do I have to give away? How much time do I have to spend in prayer every morning? Right? How many times do I have to forgive the friend who has offended me over and over and over again? You can hear Peter's voice echoing in that last question. I just want you to see that up front. It actually turns out that we're the legalists, not God. And this parable is actually a response to the lawyer's legalism. It's a parable that is teaching us to be virtuous when it comes to love and to leave our legalism behind. And it applies to how we think about all of our relationships. So I want us to look at the parable now pretty quickly. And I want us to do so by answering these two simple questions. They're very straightforward. Who in the parable is wrong? And who in the parable is actually right? You'll notice there are two character types who are wrong in the story. The first ones that we come across are the robbers. Here were the robbers. Well, the robbers are who they sound like they are. They rob the man, right? They beat him. They take everything from him. They leave him on the side of the road for dead. They rob him not just of his belongings, but they actually, at the same moment, take away his human dignity. And this is actually a recurring pattern in Scripture for us. Anything that deprives someone of their dignity in Scripture is considered a violation. A violent act. An act of violence against someone else. I just want to see if you give an example of this. I'm going to read a list of bad sins from Romans once. These are like that. You don't want to be found guilty of these, okay? So Paul has this list of sins. This is basically the things that define those who have rejected God. And this is what he writes. I want you to see if you can sort of listen for the one that sort of stands out a little bit. It doesn't seem to fit. He says this. They are full of envy, okay? They are full of murder. They are full of strife to see in maliciousness. We're okay with all that. Then listen to what he says in the same breath. They are gossips and slanderers and haters of God. Did you hear that? So wedged in between haters of God and murderers are gossips. And we think, wow, that seems a little bit harsh. Because I don't know about you, but a lot of my circles, gossips is actually social currency. That's how we move away around through life. For Paul, it's a subtle way that we actually go about violating one another's dignity. I want you to listen to how James talks about the tongue. This is a little harsh again. He goes so far as to say that our tongues are set on hell by fire. Our set on fire by hell. And if they are full of deadly poison, and the rationale for his criticism is this, with the same tongue that you lifted up in song this morning, with the same tongue that we used to bless God this morning, we used that same tongue to curse our brothers who were made in a very image of God. And James says, that ain't right. That's not right. What's the point? You don't have to steal from your office. Or steal your kids Halloween candy to be considered a robber. You don't have to break out a crowbar to beat someone. You could find yourself slamming a girl unmercifully, and the privacy of a friendly conversation for her choice of wardrobe, or the way she chose to decorate her house. And you would be identifying with the robbers in her passage. You see that? The old song about sticks and stones. They may break my bones, but it's a lie. It is a lie. Words violate people. And over and over, what we find in scripture is that God holds us responsible for the way that we actually use words even in subtle ways, even in private ways. It's the first way that we fell to love our neighbors. We violate them. We participate in acts of violence and get them that destroy their dignity, that rob them of something that is theirs by virtue of being created in the image of God. The second way that we fell to love is through neglect, and we see this by how the religious characters in our story respond. Now just be brief about this. You notice the two guys that walk by. We don't like them, do we? We read the story. The religious leaders. They wouldn't stop to help the man who's dying on the side of the road and the religious leaders. Why would they do that? What cost would it be to them? Well, it turns out it actually would be a little bit of a cost. They were to help a dead man, probably end up making them ceremony unclean, which would cost them at least a week's worth of wages to get clean again. So it would come at a basic inconvenience for them. It might cost them a paycheck. And still they walk on by anyway, and it sounds as spicable to us. Someone could do this. Why would I share with you actually this morning a contemporary parallel? You might remember the story. Last year a man named Hugo Tellyax was a homeless man from Queens, New York, and he died in April after saving a woman who he didn't know from an assailant arm with a knife. The woman got away and Tellyax was stabbed and he was left to bleed basically on the sidewalks of New York. And I think that's bad enough, right? But we're used to hearing that happen in major cities. We're not used to seeing happen or hearing about happen. Is the fact that there was actually video footage of the crime. And probably the most despicable part wasn't the crime itself. It was the fact that the video footage captured not one, not two, not five, not ten, but 25 people walking by. As Tellyax bled to death. One man stopped and took a picture of the cell phone. Another man actually lifted up his head and saw how badly he was bleeding. And so then he ran away. Emergency personnel arrived about an hour and a half later and it turns out it was too late he had died. Blood to death basically from his wounds. And look, I know this morning that you were on that footage. And I wasn't in that footage. But how often have we been guilty of neglect? How often have we allowed those that we know that God has given us in relationship to slowly sort of bleed away in their sin, to bleed away in their immaturity, to bleed away in their loneliness and their shame? And I don't know about you, but I know how my work conscious justifies itself. I'll just give you a little autobiographical information this morning. Here's what I think about it. I say things like this. Now is just not a good time for me. Really? Is it ever a good time for me to be inconvenienced? Or this one? I have problems with my own right now. They're never going away. This is probably the worst one. It's his fault, really, if you think about it. It's his fault that he's in the situation in the first place. I don't know if you find yourself doing this, but I do this a lot. I actually often measure my choices in economic terms. You get that? Is this person worth the cost of my time and energy? Is he or she a good investment? And I think even if we wouldn't say that out loud, we say it to ourselves, we think it to ourselves. The religious leaders here, this is the problem. They look at this dying man. And they said, no, he's not worth it. And the good Samaritan looks at the dying man and he says, he is worth every penny that I have on me. And what Jesus wants you to know this morning is that that is exactly how love thinks. What God wants you and I to know about love is in flesh. It is embodied in this Samaritan. I just want to make three quick observations for you this morning about love. The first is this. Love, the way that it comes across to us in the parable, love is not primarily something you feel. It is primarily something that you do. We often think about love as a feeling, right? Love stories? It's like a ditch. It's something that you fall into or passive in it. You can't help it. I just want you to think about this. The verdict of human feeling in this story is not the standard of love. In other words, the Samaritan doesn't love the guy because they happen to connect on some deep magical level. This isn't a romantic comedy. In fact, all indications are that the Samaritan actually loves this man despite the fact that they have no connection at all or if they do have a connection, it's a hostile one. Jesus is telling this story to a group of Jews, right? The Jews hated the Samaritans and before you feel sorry for the Samaritans, remember the Samaritans returned the favor? There is no love lost in this parable. There are no warm, cuddly feelings. Love requires us to extend ourselves to people as a church and as individuals that we don't feel connected to. The second is this. Notice in the passage that love seeks restoration. I think one of the things as you read the passage you find is that the good Samaritan loves the man by undoing all the things that the robbers took away from him. You see that? He undoes the curse. The robbers steal from him. He pays him back. The robbers leave him for dead. Jesus takes it to the end. The robbers aren't coming back for the man. Jesus promises to return. The aim of friendship, the aim of love is restoration. Love seeks to give back all that the curse of sin is lost. I think this is true of me. In my friendship, what I'm looking for is someone who can restore me, someone who can pay me back. I'm going to tell you this, you should have friends like that, but you should also have friends that have absolutely nothing to offer you except that they need you. And they're going to continue needing you over and over and over again. Love seeks restoration. I don't think we learn about love. At least by way of summary is this that love is costly. What did love cost the Samaritan? What cost them money? Pay for the man? It cost him whatever his plans were, that day totally interrupted his life? The cost him is comfort. He didn't get to ride the donkey. You notice that? The man gets to ride. He has to walk all of a sudden. The cost of his life in the future, he has to rearrange his future plans so that he returns to the man to pay back everything that he still owes. And this is I think what Jesus is teaching us. That when he calls us to love as a church and as individuals, it means that nothing that we have is off limits. Nothing we have. It's all in play when it comes to what love would cost us. It's pretty intense, huh? Yeah. Would you to breathe for a second? I don't know about you, but every time I read the pair of love, I feel like I love thinking about compassion. I love the idea of compassion. But when it's put in these terms, I don't like it as much anymore, and I feel beat up by it. And if that's not enough, here's the reality. We still haven't answered the who question in the parable. Think about it. Who is the man on the side of the road? Who's the dying man? What do we know about him? What do we know about him? Absolutely nothing. We don't know his name. He has no specific title, no specific ethnicity, no specific class, no specific race. He is in nobody, which is Jesus' way of telling you this morning that he is in everybody. He represents everyone. I want you to come and be just for a second. I want you to turn to your neighbor and I want you to introduce yourself. Just for a second. Just humor me with this, okay? Turn to your neighbor and introduce yourself. There we go. Good job. Meet someone new. Congratulations. You actually just met the man on the road. Just now you just met someone whom Jesus is calling you to love as you walk on your way through life. And I think that's why the parable is so challenging because what we want Jesus to do is we want him to make life manageable for us. We want him to narrow down the scope of love and instead he extends it to include everyone that you come across in your daily life. Notice how he rearranges the questions in the parable. The lawyer starts the parable by asking this question. Who is my neighbor? And Jesus ends the parable by saying this. Who can you be a neighbor too? You see the difference? The lawyer wants to know who am I called to love and Jesus says you are called to love everyone that you have an opportunity to love. It is the who question. There's another fundamental who question the parable as well. You know when you looked at your neighbor a second ago and you saw the dying person on the road. I don't know if you thought about this but it's true that your neighbor actually looked at you and saw a dying person as well. And that doesn't fare well for any of us. And I think here's the reality that Jesus wants us to see. Is it before you ever go or come to rescue someone else? You actually first need someone to come and to rescue you. You need someone to come for you. And who will that be? Who will save you? Who will rescue you in your woundedness? Who will come for you in your anxiety? Who will deliver you from your helplessness, your frustration, your lostness, your confusion, from all the beatings and all the sores and all the death that you have experienced just this week alone? Who will come for you? Is that question that calls the early church to identify the Samaritan and the parable as Jesus himself? You see the parable of the good Samaritan is really the parable of the good savior. Think about it. We have a foreigner who comes from a strange land. He comes for us. He rearranges his life for you. He pays all that he has on the cross for you but not before he first promises to return for you. Think about that for a second. Let that sink in. Jesus as the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity had a pretty cushy life before you came along. He was pretty comfortable. He had an enclave, a perfected fellowship and love that we call the Trinity. In one of this trinitarian God do, when he saw you and I dying on the road, the answer was this. He traded it in. He exchanged it. All of his comfort, all of his insulation, all of this community for a Roman cross and a divine rejection so that he could actually bring you into the health and the love and the restoration of his community and his friendship. Who will come for you? This is the good news this morning church. You never have to ask that question again because Jesus has already answered it on your behalf. And it is why the who question is the most fundamental question in Christianity. What Christianity offers you as a dying person is not a system of doctrine primarily. It is not a new set of regulations and rules or a new moral code or even a new way of thinking about love. What Christianity offers you more than anything else is a hero. It gives you a hero. One of my favorite sports stories in the last couple of years is about a girl named Sarah Tchaoski. Probably wouldn't have heard of her. She's a college softball player unless you followed college softball pretty hard. She was playing her senior year at Central Washington. Sarah had never had a home run in her entire life. This is their senior year. They were playing against one of their biggest rivals which was Central Washington. Sarah comes to the plate with two men, two women excuse me on base. One strike on her. Next pitch comes. Sarah hits it. Swings are bad as well as she knows how to and hits it right in the sweet spot. The ball goes over the fence for Sarah's first and only ever career home run. And the crowd goes nuts. The bench is sort of clear. Everybody's jumping up and down. And the two girls on base do what you would expect them to do. They go around and they cross home playing and they turn around waiting for Sarah to come and look around but no Sarah. Their eyes retrace the steps that Sarah should have taken and when they get to first base there they see Sarah. She is riding in pain in the dirt. See what happened was an all over excitement. Sarah was so excited she had her home run. And when she turned around to go back and touch the bag, boom. Her ACL tour. Her knee blew out and she couldn't move. And the rules of college softball are fairly interesting at this moment. They said to this that if anyone were to come and actually touch Sarah as she's making her way around the basis should immediately be called out in her home run nullified. So Pam Knox, Sarah's coach was about to do the only thing that she could do, which was to send in a substitute runner for Sarah, which would also nullify the home run and give her a ground rule, ground rule, double instead. And so that's what she's about to do and all of a sudden a voice cries out. Could we pick Sarah up and carry her around the basis? It was the voice of Mallory Holtman. Holtman was a senior on the opposing team. Coincidentally, she was also the career home run leader for Central Washington. The arms conferred and they said, yeah, that would work. So Central Washington players with Mallory Holtman at their head picked up Sarah's broken body and they carried her around and she touched every base. And that is the way that her career actually came to an end. They went four to two. Sarah was the hero. All because of the mercy and grace of someone who was supposed to be her enemy, in order for Sarah to be a hero, she first needed a hero. And in order for you to love heroically, church, you first need to come to grips with and be captured by the fact that you and I have been loved heroically. That's exactly what God has done for us in the gospel. Listen to me. God doesn't love you because you're healthy. He doesn't love you because he looks out at you and says, you know what, you're pretty well put together this morning. He doesn't even love you because at the end of the day, he could look at you and think you might be useful for him. He loves you in order to make you healthy. He loves you in order to put you back together again. He loves you so that he might use you for the sake of his kingdom. And that is the good news. If this morning your God has come for you to repay, to restore all that sin and shame has robbed you. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for your kindness. We thank you that you had every reason to leave us alone. You had no good reason for coming to us in the incarnation, for wearing our flesh and our weakness and our pain in your life, for suffering rejection. Not just our rejection, but the rejection of the Father on the cross for descending into hell for three days. God for us so that you might restore us. Oh Lord, would you please have mercy on us as sinners and would you make your word rooted in our hearts and at the same time bear fruit in our lives as we walk along the way. We pray that you would do this, not because we deserve it. We pray that you would do this for your own sake. And if you do this, we will give you the praise. Name the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.