In Earth as It Is in Heaven, Part 2

Today on Summit Life with JD Greer. What if the primary person we're supposed to identify with in this story is the guy bleeding on the side of the road? And what if somebody who had every reason to hate us chose to walk down the path that we had put ourselves on and stop to help us? What if the really good Samaritan in this story is Jesus who puts himself into our path and endures the suffering that we had caused ourselves? Welcome back to Summit Life with JD Greer.

As always, I'm your host, Molly Vidovitch. I think it's safe to say that most people are familiar with the parable of the good Samaritan. It's a nice story about loving others and being the bigger person. Isn't it? Well, in today's teaching, Pastor JD shows us that Jesus actually had a much bigger purpose in mind when he told this story.

It's about more than just being the one person to stop in the middle of the road. So let's find out what it is together. If you've been a bit behind on catching this program, remember you can always listen online to Summit Life by visiting jdgreer.com. But for now, let's return to Luke 10. Here's Pastor JD. I want you to see how God intends to use you to bring heaven to those who are around you. Luke 10, verse 25.

Here's how the setup of the story goes. Behold, an expert of the Jewish law stood up to put Jesus to the test. And he said, teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?

Notice a couple of things there. First, the context of the question is the guy's asking how he can know for sure he's going to heaven. That's the most basic of all religious questions, right? How do I know that I'm going to go to heaven?

Second thing you should notice is that it's not entirely a sincere question. He's doing it to try to trap Jesus, to put him to the test. So Jesus says to him in response, well, you tell me what's written in the law. How do you read the law? The Jewish expert in the law answered, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, with all your mind. And you should love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus says, verse 28, you have answered correctly. So verse 29, but he, the law expert desiring to justify himself said to Jesus, and who is my neighbor?

See, he feels the squeeze of that impossible standard. And so Jesus is going to tell a story that is going to subtly shift the question and he's going to turn it on its head. And in the process, he's going to show you what it means to love your neighbor.

And then he's going to show you maybe more importantly, how you can actually do that. So let's go, verse 30, Jesus replied, a man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho. And so as this guy is going down, he falls among robbers who stripped him and beat him and departed, leaving him half dead. Or you could read that leading, leaving him for dead.

They thought it killed him. Not a chance, a priest who is of course the most religious person in society, the religious leader, the best of the best, he's going down that road. And when he saw this beat up Jewish man, he passes by. So likewise, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, he passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, fills compassion, and he binds up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine.

Then he set him on his own animal, which means by the way, that he would have walked the other 17 miles and the other guy would have ridden. And he brought him to an end and he took care of him. So Jesus then turns and he asked this Jewish expert, he says, which of these three do you think proved to be a neighbor, proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among robbers? And so the Jewish expert said, well, of course, the one who showed him mercy.

Notice he can't even say the word Samaritan. He so hates the guy, he's just like, well, the one who showed him mercy. And Jesus said to him, you go and do likewise.

Now here's what we got going on in this story. Jesus shows us what it means to love our neighbors. Then he shows us why we do that, which is the part nobody ever gets. So what we're going to do first is discuss the what, and then we're going to discuss the why. And then at the very end, I want to give you a few practical insights on how we can do that. Let me divide up the what into the who, when, and how much.

So here we go, letter A. Who, the answer is anyone we see in need. The Samaritan and the Jew could not have had less in common.

In order to meet the need, the Samaritan had to cross an incredible social barrier. Jesus here teaches that we are to help those, especially those with whom we have little in common, even those who might have wronged us. It's anybody that is in the midst of need.

That's the answer to the who. The answer to the when. When do we help? That answer whenever you see the need. When you see the need, when you got the ability to meet the need, the opportunity to meet the need, you also have the responsibility to meet the need. So the answer to the when is whenever you see somebody in need.

The third question, how much? How much are you obligated to? The answer is in a way that takes their burden onto yourself. You see, in order to help this beaten up Jew, the Samaritan put himself at great personal risk. This is the great commandment to love people like you love yourself.

Let me say something to us in particular. Believers in churches like this one face a particular temptation that Jesus is taking direct aim at. Like this priest and this Levite, we're all into religious duties. Right where we're talking about reading the Bible and tithing and volunteering and small group. But when you look at our lives, there is very little giving away of ourselves.

We're talking to a group of people that we are in a privileged part of the most privileged part, one of the most privileged parts of the world. And we're very conservative, just like the priest and the Levi, they would have fit that profile. And Jesus said, you got a danger and that is you perfect the marginal and you ignore the essential. The weightiest part of the law, the weightiest part of the law is to love your neighbors yourself. Which means if you want to evaluate your walk with Jesus, don't ask how many Bible verses you know, don't have to know how often you come to church. The question is what amount of your resources and time are being poured out for others like Jesus poured his out for you. Believers in churches like ours can tend to studiously emphasize the marginal while neglecting the essential, which is loving people. That's what it means to love our neighbor.

Now, more importantly, number two, why we love our neighbors, why we love our neighbors. This is where Jesus turns the religious man's question on its head. If you remember the question started with the law expert asking what he needed to do to get to heaven. And I explained to you, the whole point of Jesus' life was that you couldn't do anything. That's why he came. He came to save you, which is why Jesus puts an interesting twist into the story.

Are you ready? You have to think with me. Why, why have a Samaritan be the hero? Why not tell the story where just another Jew comes along and is the hero? He didn't need it to be a Samaritan to make his point. Why not say, for example, why not say, so the man's there, he's bleeding and the Jew came by, the priest came by and then the Levite came by and then just a really good old regular Jew who had love in his heart and he held the man.

Go be like that guy. Why not let that be the point of the story? Why did Jesus choose a man who would have represented the total opposite of the man that he's telling the story to? Why choose a character that this man has nothing in common with?

Here's why. What if the person that we are most supposed to identify with in the story and that this law you're supposed to identify with, what if the person we're most supposed to identify with is not the priest, it's not the Levite, it's not the good Samaritan, what if the primary person we're supposed to identify with in this story is the guy bleeding on the side of the road? And what if somebody who had every reason to hate us and every reason to consider himself our enemy and who was very unlike us chose to walk down the path that we had put ourselves on and take upon himself our pain and stop to help us? What if the really good Samaritan in the story is Jesus who puts himself into our path, takes upon himself our flesh and endures the suffering that we had caused ourselves? Jesus is asking the man, what if you were bleeding to death on the side of the road and your only hope was an act of free grace from an enemy who did not owe you anything? After you had been rescued like that, what would your life look like?

I think your life would be different. You see, Jesus is not giving the lawyer a new rule as much as he is making him aware of a new reality. You see, if we understand Jesus's life, we are the ones that have been saved by radical grace by a God who had every right to regard himself as our enemy. And see, when we embrace that, we will become givers of radical grace, which is why the word that Jesus used when he talks about the Samaritan seeing the man did not first relate to an action, it related to an emotion.

He saw him and he felt compassion. And I have to explain this, compassion in Greek is my favorite Greek word by far. It is, in Greek, it is the word splagma, which is onomatopoeia in Greek.

Did I say that right, English teachers? Onomatopoeia, where the word sounds like what it is, like splash, splagma. Splagma refers to this gut level emotion, that pity that just kind of like consumes your beef. In fact, you want to say it, it's kind of fun.

Everybody touch your belly right here, put your fingers right here. And then now you got to say it, say it with me, right, splagma. If you don't gurgle, you're not saying it right, splagma. All right, you got to sound like you're vomiting, splagma.

It's not, it's not splagma from up here, it's splagma. It's this emotion that you feel when somebody you love is in pain. It's like when you see when your kids hurt, it's just you can't control it. Jesus is talking less about an action you choose and more about an emotion you can't control. Because God is not and has never been primarily after people who follow the rules. He's after people who love like he loves, who respond like he responds, who think like he thinks.

And that kind of change cannot be produced by the law. That kind of love in your heart cannot be compelled by law. The only way that kind of love can be produced in you is through a radical experience of grace. We love, we love not because he told us to, we love because he first loved us. And it was when I experienced the radical grace of the good Samaritan toward me, that's when I became a loving person toward others.

Because how can you experience that kind of grace and not become graceful? So Jesus taught things like the golden rule, right? Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

If I could be so bold, I think I'm within bounds on this. I actually think Jesus one upped himself at another point, like in a story like this one, where he upgraded it to the platinum rule. So we've got the golden rule, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The platinum rule is do unto others as Jesus has done to you. So Paul would say Ephesians 4 32, be kind, tender hearted, forgive one another, just like God in Christ forgave you.

You want to know how to forgive somebody else? You want to know the standard to use? Use the standard that God used when he forgave you.

That's a big old standard, right? You want to know what your generosity ought to look like? 2 Corinthians 8 9. Why don't you remember the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ? Though he was rich for your sake, he became poor so that you through his poverty might become rich.

Now why don't you think about your needs and your talents in light of what Jesus has done for you? You see those who experienced the gospel developed this uncontrollable impulse to be generous. They developed almost an insane ability to forgive. I was reminded of that this week, again, watching the latest saga in the Dylan Roof tragedy. Dylan Roof, the guy who went in and murdered those African-American believers in cold blood in the middle of that worship service on a Wednesday. And what it reminded me of was, do you remember right after the tragedy happened when the families of these African-American believers show up on TV and they say things like, man, we're praying for you and we love you and we forgive you and we're praying for your family.

And even the cynical journalists are like, we're not really sure what's happening here. Why would they do, why would their response be to somebody who just murdered part of their family? We love you and we pray for you and we're forgiving you. It's not because they feel like they got to do that to go to heaven. It's because the center of their faith is somebody who took upon himself their pain and their suffering and died in their place. They do it not in our faith. They do it not in order to be saved.

They do it because they have been saved. We don't do these things. We don't love our neighbors.

I don't like the lawyer. We're not loving our neighbors in order to earn heaven. We're doing it because heaven was given to us as a gift and we can't help but become to others what Jesus has come to us. Thanks for tuning in today to Summit Life with Pastor JD Greer.

Okay, be honest. Can you feel it? That festive cheer in the air that's just starting to spread? I sure can and I love the Christmas season. The music, the lights, the gift giving, the family time.

There is so much to be excited about. And for all of you who are looking to spread the joy of Christmas in a tangible way, we have a special featured resource this month. An exclusive set of 20 Christmas cards for our Summit Life community. And these aren't just any cards. They point to the true meaning of the season with a beautifully crafted gospel centered message on each card.

Plus there's plenty of room to include a personalized handwritten note to your friend or loved one. Give the power of a thoughtful personal message along with the gospel itself this Christmas season. You can get your set today with your gift of $35 or more to this ministry. To give, just call 866-335-5220 or visit jdgreer.com. Now let's dive back into today's teaching.

Once again, here's Pastor JD right here on Summit Life. We love because we have been loved. That's why we love our neighbors. So that leads me to number three.

Let me show you a few practical considerations for how we do it. How we love our neighbors. There's two things that this story shows us that we need. There's two things the story shows us we need. I'll give them to you as an A and a B. A is courage.

It's like I've showed you. Fear was one of the primary deterrents to the priests and the Levite engaging. To stop and to help would have put them at risk. I would suggest to you that fear is one of the primary factors keeping us from loving our neighbors too. We ask questions like, well, what will be the effect on my family?

If I engage here, I mean, what's going to be the effect on my kids? If we open up our lives and our home to people with problems, I'm not sure that's safe for our family. You probably know people who have this really tight circle of friends and then they're really, really careful about who they let into that circle. It's got to be people that are safe, people that are good for their kids, people that benefit their family because that's kind of their thing.

I want to think who do I let into my life that can benefit us? Not only does that mentality cut you off for the mission of God, it ultimately destroys you. Last fall, our staff team read a book called next door as it is in heaven.

And throughout the book, the author talks about how fear keeps most Christians out of really engaging in the mission of God. He said, hey, this is what I was. I was a typical American. And I grew up thinking that my home was my castle. My home was my castle. He said, so as an adult, as a Christian, our home was always open to people. It was all people were always coming in and out, but always people that we chose, always people that we liked, people that brought a benefit to our family.

And it was always at our convenience. He said, then I realized that my assumption in life was that the greatest thing as a father, I could provide for my family. The greatest thing I was supposed to provide was safety. Then I said, I began to read the gospels and realize the greatest thing I could supply for my family was to teach them to love like Jesus loves, which meant opening yourself up to relationships that might actually expose you to danger. He talks specifically in this book about the call of God on his family's life to foster.

Now I'm not saying this is for everybody, obviously. He said, but what kept us from fostering was us always talking about what's the effect of fostering going to be on our family. And listen, there are some legitimate questions you've got to ask.

I'm not trying to be foolish with that. He says, but now after having fostered for several years, he said, I will tell you, there's a couple of benefits from fostering. He said, the benefit, the obvious one is, man, you're really taking care of a kid during a time of need. You're also blessing the family, which is usually a single mom through doing this. You get to know them and you can begin to speak healing into their lives. He said, but the unexpected blessing, in fact, let me read this to you. He said, providing care for these children is the single best thing we've ever done for our own kids. We have learned how God uses hospitality to shape and form us.

That is a fascinating aspect of kingdom living. As you bestow a blessing for the benefit of others, you realize that you too become a recipient of God's grace. Jesus has not called you, some at church, to pursue safety. He's called you to pursue mission. And mission is sometimes costly. And relationship is sometimes dangerous. And if you cut that out of your life, you're going to cut off yourself from the blessing of the presence of God. So this guy asked the question in the book, he said, the real question for me is not how dangerous is that stranger.

The real question is how dangerous will I become if I am not more open? But that's the first thing that we identify in this story is fear. Here's the second one. This one might be a little harder for you to see, or it might be as obvious, but when I explain it to you, I think you'll see it. Write down margin.

Margin just refers to that part of your budget or that part of your calendar that is not as filled up, that there's room in there to respond to a person who is genuinely in need. This guy says, he says, read the parable of the good Samaritan from the perspective of margin. It's very likely that the priest and the Levite had the desire to stop. They just didn't have the ability to stop. They had so much important stuff they had to do. They didn't have space for the things that God was putting in their lives that they needed to do.

This right here, this calendar is so filled up with things that there simply is no way to respond either financially or with your time when God puts somebody in your life that he wants you to minister to. Let me tell you, I love this. This is a wonderful teaching. I'd never heard this before. I learned this recently and I don't, you might have heard this either. Leviticus 19 is where God gives the command to love your neighbor as yourself. Leviticus 19. How many of you have that passage memorized?

Okay, not me either. Well, right after he gives that command, Leviticus 19, he gives the most random law that seems to just like go off a different direction, but it totally is how you're supposed to love your neighbor. Watch this, and you'll see how it applies to the good Samaritan.

Right after he gives the command to love God or love your neighbor as yourself, he says, now you farmers, when you glean the harvest from your farm, when you glean the harvest from your farm, I want you to leave the corners of your field ung leaned. That's rule number one. And rule number two is whatever you drop while you're cleaning, you can't pick it up, which means if you're an apple, you know, you got apple trees, you can pull the apples off all the trees, except for the ones in the corner. You can't touch them. And if you drop an apple while you're picking one up, you can't, you just, you got to leave it on the ground.

Now, why would you do that? Because when the poor come along, the poor are going to be the ones who get the apples off the corner of the tree, and they're the ones who pick up the apples off the ground. You know what that's called? Margin.

That's what that's called. Because a good businessman says, every last apple, I am going to take and purpose for the business. And God says, nope, not in my kingdom. In my kingdom, you're going to leave margin so that when I bring a poor person into your life, you got something to give to them. What that means and how we apply it to this is that we need to ruthlessly think about the schedule and the budget that we have set up and ask if we have left the corners ungleaned. And if we've left sitting on the ground, what we have dropped, because for many of us, the problem is not a problem of desire. The problem is a problem of we simply have no room in our budget or our schedule to respond to the opportunities that God puts into our lives, which means this is what you got to do. Some of you, we need to audit our lives.

We're going to give you a tool here called a margin auditing tool. And it's just going to ask you some honest questions so that you can look at your life and figure out how you're spending your life. And if you've got the margin to be able to be involved in the things that God has for you, that are the most important. We're going to teach you a phrase, simplify and invest. Simplifying means that you're going to need to cut out some things in your life. And then the ones you choose to keep, you're going to invest more deeply in them because that's a much better way to live.

Simplify and invest. The reason I'm impressed with this is because you're never going to live the life that God intends until you intend to. It's not nodding your head in the sermon.

It's actually looking at your schedule and your budget saying, have I got it set up the way that I need to have it set up? You'll never live the life that God intends for you until you intend to. And then the flip side of that is after you audit, you're going to learn how to say no. You're going to have to learn how to say no. You'll never be able to say yes to mission till you say no to some good things to make room for the essential things.

The authors of this book I'm referring to apply it to one area. Hear me out on this one. Don't throw start throwing things at me yet. They said for us, we chose, you ready for this? Never to have any of our kids playing different sports at the same time. There was a season of life where I was going one direction with one kid.

My wife was going the opposite direction with another. We decided right then that each child needed to pick one sport for the year or that the sports had to be in the same geographical location. If we are serious about creating margin, you see, there will be times that something good will need to be cut off.

Now I'm not saying that's a rule for all of you. I know that for some of you, the way that you get to know your neighbors is by playing sports, and I encourage that. But the point is I see a lot of parents who have no ability to be engaged in the mission of God or the church or hardly even be a family because of how much they're involved in. Families who come here about every six weeks, and they call this their church, but the other five weeks they're not here because of soccer trips and dance and recitals and beach house and trips to Disney World because you don't want your kids to be deprived of any essential childhood experience. And then when your kid grows up and goes to college and walks away from the faith, you're like, well what did we do wrong?

We gave them all the experiences. You taught them that the wrong things in their lives were essential, and you so filled up their lives with the marginal that you eliminated any space for the essential. You've got to learn to say no to good things so you can say yes to the essential things. That starts with an honest audit of your life and then some intentional decisions about how you're going to live and what you're going to make room for. Are you making room for the essentials in your life?

Do you even know what the essential things are for you? Challenging questions from Pastor J.D. Greer on Summit Life. We're in a teaching series called In Earth As It Is in Heaven, and if you've fallen behind in following this teaching, you can always access sermon transcripts and other resources for free at jdgreer.com.

Just recently I caught up with Pastor J.D. about our brand new featured resource this month, a set of gorgeous gospel-centered Christmas cards. That's right, Thanksgiving may be next week, but it's already time to start thinking about that Christmas card list. We are talking about Christmas now so that we have time to get our Summit Life Christmas card set to anybody who wants it. You know, sending a Christmas card is not a simple act. It's a cherished tradition, at least it's that way in my family and I suspect for yours too. That's why we have put together a special collection of 20 exquisite holiday cards.

They're great. They're crafted just for you and our listeners here at Summit Life. These cards carry messages that reflect the heart of Christmas. Wonderful counselor, mighty God, everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. So as we celebrate the birth of our Savior, Jesus Christ, let's remember the power of connection. Let's honor the beauty of tradition and let's give the Holy Spirit a chance at the impact that a heartfelt message can make.

Let's celebrate the Prince of Peace and share His love with the world. Take a look right now at jdgrier.com. You can receive your set of these Christmas cards as our way to say thank you for your gift of $35 or more. To give, just call us at 866-335-5220. That's 866-335-5220.

Or visit us online to give at jdgrier.com. I'm Molly Vidovitch with your friendly reminder to join us tomorrow as we discover what it really means to be a follower of Christ. Make sure you really know what God's Word says Friday on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.