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Luke chapter 10 verse 25.
Some of you may have heard this story before.
This is a parable of Jesus.
We often refer to it as the parable of the Good Samaritan.
Luke chapter 10, that's in the New Testament,
close to the front of the New Testament.
Luke chapter 10 verse 25.
Let's pray and then we'll jump in.
Father God, we come to you and we thank you, dear Lord,
for being good to us.
I thank you for the freedom and the privilege that we have
to come into this house this morning, to your house,
dear Lord, to hear your word.
I thank you for the songs that we're saying.
I thank you for each one that's here.
God, I pray that you bless us from being here.
Dear Lord, you know where we are.
You know what's going on in our life.
You know where we need encouragement.
You know where we need correction.
You know what our struggles are.
You know what our joys are, dear Lord.
Wherever we may be today, I pray, God,
that we would find joy in you.
I pray that your Holy Spirit would hide me behind the cross
that I'll be able to preach and teach your word in a way
that brings glory to Jesus Christ.
I pray that your word would impact our lives today,
dear Lord, that it would call us to service, dear Lord,
that we would examine our hearts to see if we are the
neighbors that you call us to be to the world around us.
So I pray that you bless us in these few minutes
and I ask these things in Jesus' name, amen.
Amen.
Luke chapter 10, verse 25.
Just then an expert in the law stood up to test him,
saying, teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?
Now, as Jesus went around preaching and teaching
and doing miracles, there were always people
who were coming to oppose him.
Now, there were certainly many people who come
that really wanted to hear what he had to say,
that were trying to learn from him.
But there were some who were coming against him
and they were trying to test him.
They were trying to find some fault with him.
They were trying to find a gotcha moment.
Aha, gotcha, we gotcha here.
And so Jesus was always far too clever for that
and always had great responses to the questions
that were being asked.
And here, as happens on occasion, somebody comes to Jesus,
here, an expert in the law, that is someone
who would have known what we call the first five books
of the Bible, of the Old Testament, the Torah,
the books of the law, they would have been an expert in that.
They would have been an expert in what God's commands were
to do and not to do and all those laws that God gave,
people who would have been well studied in the scripture.
And this person comes to Jesus and he asks him a question.
Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?
Let's see what Jesus says.
Verse 26, what is written in the law, he asked him.
How do you read it?
He answered, love the Lord your God with all your heart,
with all your soul and with all your strength
and with all your mind and your neighbor as yourself.
You have answered correctly, he told him.
Do this and you will live.
Now this guy was pretty sharp.
He had the right understanding of the law of God.
Now there's a lot of laws in the Old Testament
that God commanded his people,
but they can be summed up in two statements.
Love the Lord your God with all your heart,
love your neighbor as yourself.
We see that repeated in the Old Testament.
That is the right answer and Jesus acknowledged that.
That all the laws that we see in the Old Testament
ultimately had one purpose, that we would focus on God
and love him and that we would love other people.
And if we would get those two things,
our world would be a lot better place.
If we would love God with all of our heart this morning,
if we would love other people this morning,
our world would be a better place.
But these things are hard to do.
It's hard to do sometimes.
It's hard to live by even these two commands.
Now this man understood these two commands.
He got the right answer, but he didn't just stop there.
What did Jesus tell him?
He says, do this and you will live.
Okay, he wanted to inherit eternal life.
He understood what the law meant
and Jesus said, then just live by the law.
Live by this understanding that you have
that is the right understanding
and you will have eternal life.
If you love God and love other people, that's it.
If you love God, it'll be evident
and that you love other people.
Do this and you will live.
But the guy didn't stop there.
He went a little further.
It says in the next verse, verse 29,
but wanting to justify himself,
he asked Jesus, and who is my neighbor?
Wanting to justify himself, he said,
well, who is my neighbor?
Now what it appears the guy's doing here
is he's looking for some kind of definition,
some kind of loophole, some kind of way
to determine who his neighbor is.
That is, maybe there are some people
that he didn't really want to be his neighbor.
Maybe there were some people, some of those Gentiles
that he thought were lesser than,
that he did not want to consider them as his neighbor.
And maybe that's what he was expecting Jesus to say.
Maybe he expected Jesus to say,
well, you love all the Jewish people
and all the godly people.
Those are the ones that your neighbor,
those are the ones that you need to take care of
and have interaction with,
but not the nasty scum of the earth.
Maybe that's what he expected Jesus to say.
And maybe that's what he was hoping for.
But Jesus is pretty clever.
And Jesus tells a parable here.
He tells a story here.
That's probably not what the guy
who asked the question was expecting.
Let's see what the story is in the next verse.
Verse 30.
Jesus took up the question and said,
a man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho
and fell into the hands of robbers.
They stripped him, beat him up,
and fled, leaving him half dead.
Okay, so the story is set for us.
There's a man, we don't know anything about the man.
We just know that he's traveling down the road
and robbers come, they beat him,
they steal everything he's got,
and they leave him for dead.
So this man is in bad shape.
Let's continue on.
Verse 31.
A priest happened to be going down that road.
When he saw him, he passed by on the other side.
In the same way, a Levite, when he arrived at the place
and saw him, passed by on the other side.
But a Samaritan, let's pause there for a moment.
Let's pause there for we continue.
So here we have the three or four characters of our story.
The man who was injured, we have a priest,
we have a Levite, that would be somebody
who worked at the temple, and then we have a Samaritan.
Now, you would expect that of all the people in the world
to stop and help someone who was in need,
that it would be a priest or somebody
that works at the temple.
You would think that they would be the number one candidate,
that they would be the most loving and the most caring,
and that they would be the ones who would stop.
And certainly with this guy who's asking Jesus
this question, being a Jew, then certainly they would have
held the priest and the Levite in high regard.
And so Jesus introduces the story.
There's a man who's half dead, and there's people
walking up and down the road who are passing by him.
And the first one that comes is a priest,
and the next one that comes is a Levite.
And surely they would be the ones who would help this man.
But he also introduces another character.
And there was also a Samaritan.
Now, what did the priest and the Levite do?
They didn't pay the man any attention.
Instead, they walked by on the other side of the road.
They walked by this man, and you can imagine the scene.
Here he is, probably half naked, or maybe all naked.
They may have stripped all of his clothes off.
He's beaten, he's probably bloody.
He's moaning, and he's groaning.
You might not even be sure if he's alive or not.
He may not be making any sound.
He don't look good.
It's not the kind of situation that you necessarily
want to get involved in.
So the priest and the Levite, they see the man
in this condition, and they pass him right on by.
What about you and I in situations like that?
What about you and I when we see people who are in need?
What if we saw somebody who was on the side of the road
who was naked and bleeding?
Would we stop and help him?
Now, the church answer, I'd stop and help him.
Maybe we wouldn't.
After all, it's a pretty scary thing.
We see somebody that's laying on the side of the road.
We come up with a lot of excuses why not to help him.
I don't know what happened to that guy.
I don't know why he didn't stay away from that situation.
Maybe it's a trap.
Maybe somebody wants me to stop and help him.
Maybe they're going to beat me over the head
and steal everything I've got.
We can come up with a variety of excuses
to pass by somebody and not help them.
That's not hard to do, and we know that because we've
made those excuses before.
We've passed by people before that need help,
and they might not even have been nearly in the shape
that this guy was in, but we can come up
with a lot of reasons why we won't stop and help nobody.
Oh, we ain't got time.
Stop and help that person.
I'm on the way to church.
Well, let me tell you, I think.
I don't know.
I shouldn't speak for God, but here's what I think.
I could be wrong, but I think that God would rather
I stop and help somebody and be late for church
than to be at church on time and pass by somebody that has a need.
Oh, I can't stop and do that.
I'm going to be late for this.
I've got to do that.
I've got to do the other.
We can come up with a million excuses
why not to help somebody, but maybe what we need to do
is simply help the person.
Maybe it is scary sometimes.
Maybe we need to say, God, I'm kind of scared
to help this person.
I don't know their situation.
I don't know what's going on.
It looks pretty bad.
God, I don't even really want to stop,
but God, I feel like I need to stop.
So God, help me to be able to stop and help this person.
And the people who should have been the ones to stop,
the men of God, were the ones who passed this guy by.
Isn't that something?
But there's another character that Jesus mentioned,
a Samaritan.
Now, we have to understand.
When we read this story and we hear about the Good Samaritan,
we say, oh, the Good Samaritan, it brings up good feelings.
We need to be good Samaritans.
We need to understand what Jesus was saying here.
What he did was he took the highest people, as far
as those who were serving God, the priest and the Levites,
and then he contrasted that with the lowest
come of the earth, at least in the eyes of the Jewish people.
You see, the Jewish people did not
like these Samaritans at all.
They were scum to them.
They did not care about the Samaritans.
The Samaritans were a mixed breed of people
that they disgusted.
And this has been going on for hundreds of years.
Because when the 10 northern tribes of Israel
were overtaken by Assyria some 700 years before,
what happened was is that those people began
to intermarry with the Assyrians.
And pretty much the Jewish people just kind of became
part of the other people.
They weren't really any different than the Assyrians.
And Samaria, at that time when the northern kingdom was there,
was the capital of the northern kingdoms.
And so when we read about the Samaritans,
we're reading about people who were once
part of God's tribes of Israel and intermarried
with the Assyrians and were living in that area
and were not liked by the southern tribes of Judah.
They were not liked by the Jews at all.
They considered them to be less than.
So this guy that Jesus is focusing on here,
this Samaritan, is to get their attention.
He's doing this to make a point.
OK, these men of God refuse to do
what would have been the right thing to do.
But this Samaritan, this no-count Samaritan,
is the one who's going to step up and be
the hero in this story.
Now, the Jews did not like Samaritans.
They even called Jesus a Samaritan.
In John chapter 8, Jesus had been getting on them,
and he had just told them that they were
of their father, the devil.
And when he got through telling them all that, they said,
well, aren't you a Samaritan?
And don't you have a demon?
They did not like Jesus.
And as a result of that, they called him a dirty word,
a bad name, a Samaritan.
And so it's not by accident that Jesus
chooses this Samaritan to be the hero of the story.
So the man's laying there half dead.
The priest had passed him by, the priest that came by.
The Levite passed him by.
But a Samaritan, it says, but a Samaritan, in verse 33,
on his journey came up to him, and when he saw the man,
he had compassion.
What about you and I?
Which one of those do we do?
Do we see people who are in need and pass them by,
or do we see people who are in need and have compassion?
We need to pray that God would help us to have compassion.
It probably doesn't come natural to us.
It's something that I think we really, as we grow in the Lord
and we begin to seek him, I think
we begin to have compassion like him,
but we really have to grow in the Lord
and seek him to be able to have that kind of compassion.
Because it's a lot easier for us to judge other people
and see somebody laying on the side of the road
and said, well, they should have made better choices
in their life, and maybe they wouldn't be there.
It's a lot easier for us to pass judgment
and to decide why somebody is where they are
and how it's their fault and how we shouldn't help them.
It's a lot harder for us to have compassion,
but we need to see again and again in the scripture
that when Jesus sees people, it often
says that Jesus saw the people and he had compassion.
The people that everybody else would have passed by,
even Jesus' own disciples would have passed them by.
But Jesus didn't pass them by.
All those thousands came to hear Jesus
and when they got through hearing Jesus,
Jesus tells the disciples, give them something to eat
and the disciples says, just send them on their way,
they can get something else.
And Jesus says, no, you feed them.
And they said, Jesus, what are we gonna feed them with?
We don't have anything but two fish and five loaves.
And Jesus said, look, I'll take care of this.
Oftentimes the disciples, they didn't even have compassion,
but Jesus did.
When Jesus saw people were sick, he had compassion.
When he saw people were hungry, he had compassion.
And we need to pray that God would help us
to be those men and women who would have compassion
on those that we encounter.
There's people we see all the time probably that have a need.
We need to ask God to help us see what those needs are
and to be compassionate to those needs.
So the Samaritan's passing by on his journey,
he sees this man who is laying half dead in the road
and he has compassion on him.
Now, what is compassion?
What does compassion look like?
Well, the scripture is about to tell us that.
Verse 34, he went over to him and bandaged his wounds,
pouring on olive oil and wine.
Then he put him on his own animal,
brought him to an inn and took care of him.
The next day he took out two denarii,
gave them to the innkeeper and said,
take care of him.
When I come back, I'll reimburse you
for whatever extra you spend.
All right, so if you say, okay, I wanna be compassionate.
How do I be compassionate?
What does compassion look like?
Well, here's a good example of what compassion looks like.
Now, there's seven things that I count here.
You might count more or less,
but there's seven things that I think we see this guy do.
Number one, he went over to him.
That's the first step.
That's the first thing we need to do
when we see somebody who has a need is to go over to them.
Sometimes we don't wanna go over to them.
Sometimes we say, oh, don't make eye contact.
As long as I don't look,
as long as I don't make eye contact,
as long as I turn away,
I'll just pretend like I don't see them.
Knowing good and well, we do see them.
The first thing we need to do is when we see somebody
that has a need, somebody that's in trouble,
is we need to go to them.
That's the first step.
That's what he did.
He went over to them.
Next thing he did, he bandaged his wounds.
Okay, that's the least he could do, give him a bandaid.
That's the least we could possibly do
is to go over to somebody and say, are you okay?
That doesn't require too much effort.
And he did that.
He went over to him to check on him.
He gave him a bandaid.
He bandaged him up, but he didn't leave there.
He didn't stop there.
He didn't just go say, are you okay?
And go on his way.
He didn't just say, oh, I'm sorry this happened to you.
Here's some bandages.
I hope you're okay.
Nope, he didn't stop there.
He continues to have compassion on this man.
What else does he do?
It says that he poured on olive oil and wine.
These would have been things
that would have been of some value
and probably even of some need to the man who did it.
The man sacrificed what he had to help someone else,
something that was of value to him.
What about you and I?
Are we willing to sacrifice what God has blessed us with
to help others?
Well, we should be,
but that's a good question for us to ask ourselves today.
Are we being a good steward with the monies
that God has given us?
Maybe you are.
Maybe you're not.
You see, what's pretty easy is for us
to take what God blesses us with
and use it for ourselves.
After all, we deserve it.
We do work pretty hard for it.
It's okay for us to have nice things
or whatever other excuses we use to justify
us spending God's blessings on ourselves.
All the while, we miss the opportunities to bless others.
But this guy took what he had.
He took what was his.
He took what God had blessed him with.
And he didn't say, man, I need this oil.
I need these things.
Golly, I just bought these things
with the last little bit of money I had.
I can't give them to this guy.
Instead, he walks up to the guy.
He bandaged him up.
He took what was his,
and he began to take care of this guy.
What about us?
Are we willing to take what God has given us
and use it to help those in need?
That's what God wants us to do.
That's certainly what God calls us to do
time and time again in Scripture,
to take care of the widows and the orphans
and the poor and the needy.
And that requires something from us.
It requires our money.
It requires our time.
The first two guys passed by the need.
It didn't pay any attention to it.
They didn't give it any of their time or their money.
But the Samaritan, here's our example, by the way.
If you're wondering which of these examples
we're supposed to follow, it's the Samaritan.
The Samaritan stopped,
and he began to take care of the guy.
Let's see what he did next.
Then he put him on his own animal.
Okay, that's pretty intense.
So he's done pretty good right now.
If the story would have stopped right there,
we still would probably say,
that Samaritan's a pretty good guy.
He stopped, he checked on the guy,
he bandaged him up, he put medicine on him,
and he went on his way.
If the story would have stopped there,
we'd say that's a pretty nice thing to do.
But he didn't stop there.
He put him on his donkey, or in modern terms,
he put him up in his car.
This nasty, naked, bloody man,
he got him and put him in his car.
Would we do that?
No, we ain't gonna do that, right?
I just got a new truck a while back.
You know, it's got, in the seats,
they're ventilated, it blows air
through these little holes in the seats.
You know, if you put somebody in there
that was bloody and blood got in those little holes,
you'd never get it out.
I can't pick that guy up.
What if he gets blood all over my,
I'll never get the blood out of those holes.
We can find a lot of excuses while we don't need
to help people.
But I done stopped, I checked on him,
I gave him some bandages and some medicines.
Surely God don't want me to put this bloody mess
in my truck, on my seat.
But what did this guy do?
He threw him right up on his donkey.
Said, come on.
Whoa, what an example of compassion.
It was a compassion that didn't just stop with a little,
but see, sometimes what we do, or maybe just me,
I'll just say this about me,
sometimes what I do is I do that first little bit
and then I pat myself on the back.
I say, oh, that's pretty good.
Nobody else stop and help this guy.
Nobody else even stopped to see if he is alive.
I did give him a band-aid.
I gave him a little pouch of Neosporin
and I had my first aid kit.
And I pat myself on the back.
But maybe we stop short of doing the things
that God really calls us to because it's scary.
Even if we say, I'm not worried about getting my car dirty.
Well, it's still pretty scary.
You're putting a guy in your truck.
You don't know much about this guy.
What if he's got some kind of disease?
He's bloody.
What if he gets on my hands?
We can come up with all these excuses,
but maybe we need to say, okay, God,
here's this opportunity that you've put before me.
Here's a person that everybody else has passed over.
Here's a person that if I don't help them,
who's to say that anybody will help them?
Think about that next time you pass somebody by.
Next time you see somebody that says they need some food.
But a lot of people have passed them by before you did.
What if you pass them by?
Yeah, maybe the next person will give them a hamburger.
We ever do that?
We pass by somebody that needs food
and we say, God, I pray that you give that person some food.
Hello?
Maybe we just need to turn around
and go get that person some food.
Maybe that's what we need to do.
Maybe God put us there.
Maybe God put that thought on our mind and in our heart
because God says, hey, I'll put you on this street
at this time to pass this person to meet this need
and you've got the money, go get them some food.
How many times are we missing opportunities?
And we're stopping short of what God calls us to do.
So this guy took this man, he put him on his donkey.
He didn't stop there though.
He brought him to an end and took care of him.
Now, it would have been one thing
if he'd have just took him into town and dropped him off.
Again, we said, pretty good guy.
He took him into town.
He took him somewhere where he could get help.
Nope, he stayed with him.
We couldn't do that, could we?
We got too much to do.
We got places to be, we got things to do.
I can't stay here with this guy.
I can't spend the night with this guy
and take care of him all day.
I can't do that.
What did Samaritan do?
He didn't stop.
He saw there was a need and he was all in.
He said, this guy is in need and I am going to help him.
So he took him into town, he put him in the end
and he took care of him.
Here's this guy nursing the guy.
He don't have a clue who he is,
don't know nothing about him
and now he's spending his time and his money
to take care of him.
But it didn't stop there.
Verse 35, the next day he took out two denarii,
gave them to the innkeeper and said,
take care of him.
When I come back, I'll reimburse you
for whatever extra you spend.
Holy smokes.
So this guy does all he could do
and even when he has to leave,
he doesn't just say to the guy,
man, I hope you get better.
I'm nice to meet you.
I'm sorry you had to go through this.
I hope you get better, I'm gone.
He could have left and went on his way
and again when he said, man, I was a good guy.
But he didn't stop there.
He told the innkeeper, look, this guy's in bad shape.
He can't really travel.
He needs to stay here for a little while to recover.
So here's a couple of denarii, which isn't much,
wouldn't be maybe $6 in our day to day in modern times.
It wasn't much, but it was enough to cover the bill
that the guy was gonna need for the short term at least.
And then the guy went the extra mile.
He didn't just say, look, here's a couple of dollars,
keep him for a few days and when the time runs out
for the money I gave you, send him on his way.
Maybe he'll be well.
No, he says, look, here's money to cover his stay
and if that's not long enough,
if he needs more care or needs to stay longer,
I will come back and cover his bill
next time I come through town.
Now that is some kind of example
for us to follow right there.
How many times do we follow the example
of helping those in need to that extent?
You know, I'm ashamed to say that I don't,
I don't know that I can think of many times,
if any time, that I have ever helped somebody like that
and shame on me.
Maybe there are opportunities that God has given us
that we need to see where there is need
and we need to help meet that need
and we don't need to turn a blind eye to it.
That we need to begin to love people.
Continuing on.
Verse 36, which of these three do you think proved
to be a neighbor to the man who fell
into the hands of the robbers?
So Jesus gives this parable and he asked a simple question.
The man who had asked the question said,
and who is my neighbor?
And Jesus gives this beautiful parable
about this lousy priest and this lousy Levite
that passed him by, but if this Samaritan
who was the hero of the story,
who took care of this guy in need,
and Jesus says of these three,
which one do you think was the neighbor to the man?
He answered correctly in the next verse.
The one who showed mercy to him, he said, who was that?
That was the Samaritan.
What is Jesus telling us in this parable?
Who is Jesus telling us our neighbor is?
Who are we supposed to help?
We are supposed to help those who are in need, period.
Now we wanna put some qualifiers on there sometimes.
We wanna help those who are in need who are good.
We wanna help those who are in need
who are of this or of that or whatever.
We come to help those who are in need
who are of this or of that or whatever.
We come up with all these things,
how we can separate who needs our help
and who doesn't need our help.
And in a sense, what we're trying to do
is justify ourselves like this man in the story,
and we wanna help some people.
We want some people to be our neighbor,
but we don't want other people to be our neighbor.
We want the good people to be our neighbor.
It's easy to help the good neighbors.
The good neighbor knock on your door and said,
hey man, I need to buy some sugar.
You say, come on in here, man.
How much you need?
Because here, I got a whole extra sack, take it.
It's easy to be good to the good neighbors.
What about our bad neighbor on the other side of the fence?
Them yards always a mess.
They making a bunch of noise, a bunch of racket, it's all.
It's just a whole bunch of junk.
They steal your packages off your porch when they come.
What about your bad neighbor?
When they come knock on your door,
you go hide and you looking, I don't let them see you.
It's some people we don't want to be our neighbors.
It's some people we say, I helped this guy
because they're pretty good, but I ain't helping this rag
tag bunch of losers.
They ain't worth anything.
Who are you passing by on the street?
Who are you passing that kind of judgment on?
It's easy for us to do it.
You see homeless people.
You see people who are struggling.
It's easy to say they should have done better.
I'm not helping them.
Let me ask you this question.
If you saw me on the street begging for food,
would you help me?
What if you saw your son on the street?
Maybe you hadn't seen him in a few years.
You go to town, you're walking down the street,
you see your son, there he is with a sign, begging for help.
Would you help your son, your daughter?
If you were walking down the street and you saw your parent
begging for food, would you help them?
Would you pass them by?
Well, you know those people that we see on the street?
That's somebody's son, and that's somebody's daughter,
and that's somebody's mother, and that's somebody's father.
And I just bet you that for most of us in here,
if it was our family, regardless of the decisions
that they had made, if we saw that need,
we'd probably meet that need.
What if it was Jesus on the street?
What if Jesus looked like everybody else on the street?
Would you help him?
Maybe not.
But we should, because whatever we do to the least of these,
we do it to Jesus Christ.
So what kind of opportunities do we have?
Who are we passing by?
We don't know everybody's story.
Is there some rough folks out there
that's taking advantage of people?
Are there some folks out there that
take what you give them to help them and use it for evil?
There are.
We don't judge that.
We don't know that.
God will deal with that.
But what God calls us to do is help.
We'll let God take care of the rest.
If we get taken advantage of by 99 people
we meet on the street, but we're able to help one,
lead them to Christ, praise the Lord.
Praise the Lord.
Isn't all the money or effort that we gave to the others,
isn't it worth it to be able to weed out the one?
So Jesus gives us this beautiful parable.
Jesus gives us a call to action here.
What does he say at the end of this parable?
Then Jesus told him, go and do the same.
He says, here's your example.
You've seen the Samaritan.
You see what compassion is.
I've just shown you an example of compassion.
And you got it.
You acknowledged it.
You see it.
You made the connection.
Now you go and do the same.
And that's the command for us today.
That when we see the Word of God,
when we see the compassion of Jesus,
when we see that he calls us to be compassionate,
when we see what Jesus has done for us
by giving his life on a cross so that we could be forgiven,
when Jesus says, I've given all for you.
You've experienced my grace and love and my compassion.
Now take that compassion and show my grace and love
and meet the needs of those that you encounter.
When we see that in scripture, Jesus says, go and do the same.
Now what about you this morning?
Are you going to go and do the same?
Are you going to be like the Samaritan when you leave?
Or are you going to be like the priest in the Levi?
And they didn't do much.
But the Samaritan gave us the example.
We have opportunities all around us to serve.
You know, we're going to New Orleans on October the 5th
to hand out sleeping bags to the homeless.
Just saying.
God's given us lots of opportunities to serve.
Whether it's an opportunity like that
or whether it's an opportunity nearby,
there are people that we pass by every day.
And maybe we miss them.
Sometimes we just don't see them.
We need to pray that God would help us to see them.
Wherever they may be, wherever we may run into them,
that God would help us to see those people who are in need
and that God would help us to have the compassion
to meet that need.
And why do we do it?
We do it all for the glory of God.
We don't do it so we can come back in here next Sunday and say,
let me tell you, I saw this person
and I helped him in this way.
We don't do it for that.
We don't do it for a pound on the back.
We don't do it so we can post it on our Facebook page.
We don't do it so people can say,
oh, those people at Enterprise Baptist Church,
they are so good at helping people.
We don't do it for those reasons.
We do it for the glory of God so that when people say,
why are you helping me like this?
We can say, because Jesus loves you.
Because this is what Jesus called me to do.
And we can tell them who Jesus is.
That's why we do it.
And if it's not why we do it, then we need to repent and say,
God, I need you to change my heart.
We do it for the glory of God.
So let us look at this story this morning.
And as we leave today, let us go and do the same.
Let's pray.
Father God, we come to you today.
We thank you for these good words.
I pray, dear Lord, that you would help us to be better
neighbors, that we don't look for a select group,
that we want to help and single them out and leave others
to fight for themselves, dear Lord.
But I pray that we would love all, dear Lord,
the good and the bad God, those that are lovable
and those that are unlovable.
I pray that you help us to see the needs around us.
God, sometimes we just miss them.
We just don't even recognize that they're there.
We're so busy in our lives.
We don't look for them.
Maybe we need to look for them.
God, sometimes it may be even worse.
We see that opportunity and we turn the other way.
We pass by on the other side of the road, dear Lord.
We don't want to admit it today.
But the truth is, God, is that sometimes we are no better
than that priest and that Levite.
But, dear Lord, I pray that you would help us to have
an abundance of compassion, God.
Not just a little compassion to make our guilty conscious
feel better, but, dear Lord, that we seek you when we help
people to see how can we help them, how much can we help them,
where do we start and when do we stop, God.
And maybe there are times that you call us to do way more
than we are comfortable with.
But, God, the Samaritan here gives us a beautiful example
of what an abundance of compassion looks like.
And so I pray, God, that you would help us.
Maybe our hearts are not quite where he is today,
but they need to be.
So help transform our hearts and help us to be men and women
who have compassion like that, that we love selflessly,
dear Lord, that we are faithful with what you bless us with,
that we don't just use it on ourselves, dear Lord,
but that we use it to help others, that we use it to build
your kingdom.
And I pray, dear Lord, that when we leave here today,
that you would help us to remember the words of this story
and to remember the actions of this Samaritan,
that we would go and do the same in our lives.
Give us the strength, dear Lord.
Give us the grace.
Give us the ability to do the things that you put before our path.
God, maybe there are some here today and they do not know
Jesus Christ.
Maybe they've never known his compassion.
I pray, dear Lord, that today that they would know that Jesus
has died on the cross for them, that that's the ultimate example
of compassion, dear Lord.
That's the ultimate example of sacrifice and one taking care
of another, dear Lord.
There is no greater love than this, that one would lay down
his life for someone else.
And that's exactly what Jesus has done for us today.
God, I pray that if there are some that don't know Jesus
today, that they would feel his compassion today,
that they would repent of their sins.
And for those of us who are yours, dear Lord, I pray that
you would help us to seek you, to grow in you.
And I ask these things in Jesus' name, Amen.