Luke 10:25-37
Listen link: www.lcepc.org then look for “sermons” tab.
Back in 1983, Pastor Paul Brown is quoted in the Waterfront Newspaper. That’s the newspaper before the Missaukee Sentinel. In the filing cabinet in the supply office I found this article about the groundbreaking ceremony for this building. Listen to what he said then, “This building is not the focal point of this church, but a place from which to go out into the world…a base to do his work.”
I was very pleased to find that I am in full agreement with Pastor Paul Brown’s stated values about ministry in Lake City. If the building is not the focal point of the church. Then the people must be the real focal point. He is saying the church is the people not the building. This building is just home base for all your ministry.
He also said, later in the article, “Let’s get this church built to get on with the job.” That means that he saw the building as just the beginning of a long future of ministry together, a hub of outreach, a tool that you would use in your ministry. The ministry is evangelism, and evangelism happens out in the community away from home base. Home base is just where we gather to celebrate what God is doing in us, an among us, and because of our presence in the community.
Home base is also a place where we learn new things or keep up to date with what is generally going on in our environment, or find inspiration and motivation to do the work that God has called us to do. For example, a police station is a home base. The officers report for duty, receive updates on current events, receive training, and even duty rosters. But all the real peace keeping work happens out on the streets. Now, I am not saying that evangelists are supposed to be more like cops.
But I am saying that if this building is home base for your ministry, then, yes, you come here to celebrate faith and new life. And you come here to hear God’s Word, receive its wisdom, discern your SHAPE for your ministry, hear of new opportunities and avenues for ministry, and do practical training so you are more effective as evangelists out there. During the last 6 weeks, while I certainly hope you have been celebrating life in Christ, drawing near to God and giving thanks for the gospel, we have also been talking about the Christians’ purpose for existing in the world but not of it.
This building ought to be seen as a discipleship center, not a locus of evangelism. Evangelism is what we do out there! Now I could preach an evangelistic message and invite people to give their hearts to the Lord. Nothing would give me greater joy than to watch people come to faith and decide to follow Jesus with us. But we have to get them to be here for that. Most assuredly I am your partner in that regard out there during the rest of the week. And I am not discouraged by the slow or minimal response to my ministry thus far. I will not give up. I will keep at it and keep seeking the Lord for wisdom and guidance to success to get involved in and connected to this community to meet people who are not Christians. And so should you.
So, now that we have talked about purpose for a month and a half and hopefully you have become more eager than ever to fulfill your purpose and play your role in the evangelistic mission, for the next couple of weeks I am going to give some very practical tips and hopefully some inspiration. Evangelism is more challenging today for many reasons. But that doesn’t mean impossible. It just means we have to be a little more strategic and a little more aware of the reasons people are resistant and the ways we can get around that. And we must be in prayer for them.
Once upon a time, people knew their neighbors. They talked to them, had cook-outs with them, and went to church with them. In our time of unprecedented mobility and increasing isolationism, it's hard to make lasting connections with those who live right outside our front door. We may have hundreds of "friends" through online social networking, but we often don't even know the full name of the person who lives right next door.
That observation is from an online review of the book: The Art of Neighboring, by Dave Runyon and Jay Pathak. Much of what I am sharing here today comes from ideas in that book. But before we get to that, let’s see what we can learn from our text in the Bible.
When the lawyer asked that question, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan and the importance of helping total strangers. In Jesus’ day it was safe to assume that his audience would be able to love those nearest to them, their literal neighbors, the people most like them, who shared the same heritage and geography and in many cases, family. So, when Jesus told the parable of the Good Samaritan, he was stretching their concept of neighbor to include even people from a group they didn’t like.
Now here is the mission. Do not leave this in the abstract and think that “love your neighbor” only applies to the stranger you might meet on a road side in desperate need of help. Do not lose sight of the fact that if your next door neighbor is not saved, then he or she is dead in his or her sins and therefore in worse condition than the man who was left on the roadside near Jericho. Love your next door neighbor as you love yourself.
And guess what. If you do that you will also be loving God by obeying his commandment to love. Guess what else. The only way you can really love your neighbor is if you first love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. Guess what else. You can’t obey either of those commandments to the full unless you first know how much God loves you, that he loved you first, while you were still a sinner, that Jesus came and died on a cross to fix the problem you have with sin, and that he rose again from the dead to prove his power and love, and by knowing that you are alive in Christ!
So, let me preach the gospel that is in this parable of the Good Samaritan. You will remember of course that the religious guys, the priest and the Levite, had reasons why they couldn’t help the poor unfortunate victim in the road. Jesus had a word here that speaks against people who like organized religion. So, if you meet people out there who say they believe in God, but they do not like organized religion, you could very well agree with them and you would be in line with what Jesus said here. Then you might mention that they’d probably like your church because your pastor is a pretty disorganized guy!
But those organized religious guys, they had rules for keeping holy by steering clear of such unclean things as nearly dead bodies on the road side. They did this so that they could have access to the temple, be allowed to perform their religious duties and ceremonies and maybe pray for the guy to be ok. They also didn’t have any time to waste on who knows how long it would have taken to properly care for the man. And maybe, like a lot of American citizens still say today on occasion, they just didn’t want to get involved. It was not their business.
Now, the man on the road couldn’t save himself. He needed a Savior, and that came from a most unlikely person. A Samaritan stopped to help a Jew. For Jesus, as a rabbi, to even mention a Samaritan in his story and have him in the role of the hero was scandalous! For the Samaritan to stop and help a Jew was unheard of! In doing that, the Samaritan ignored social custom and customary prejudice, just as Jesus often did, in spite of the feelings of the religious Pharisees around him, always looking to criticize. And remember, as far as the Pharisees were concerned, Jesus was a most unlikely Messiah. He just wasn’t qualified in their view.
Similarly, we cannot save ourselves from sin, and most of the religious people around us expect us to help ourselves. Even people of Christian heritage often misquote the Bible saying, “The Lord helps those who help themselves.” But the gospel is, the Lord helps those who can’t help themselves and who know that they can’t. The Lord helps those who are tired of living in the death they have created and would turn from their sins, if only they knew there’s real forgiveness, more than just a hope that they might get grace if they start acting good enough. That is a most unexpected gospel! Every other religion in the world demands that the seeker of blessing must behave himself or herself according to the rules.
And you know what? Since I haven’t had the opportunity to personally examine each of you and know your personal theological views, I must concede that it is possible that there are still people sitting in the room right now who are still laboring under that false religion that still causes you to think that you have to behave well enough and maybe you’ll make it heaven. Or on the other hand, perhaps your sins and imperfections are what the devil uses to cause you to doubt your salvation, but you’re still trying anyway. The gospel message says, we all lay dead in our sins. Only Jesus can pick us up and restore us, to give us life and health, paid for out of his own resources. That’s the gospel, what God has done for us not what we can do for him.
Now for those who believe that gospel, we end up being eternally grateful and eager to pay it forward in any way we can. So, Jesus also gave us the Holy Spirit, so that we are filled with His love and enabled to obey him starting on the day we are born again in living faith! Then, when we hear the call to love our neighbors, and think of the people next door or down the road, we are led to pray for them. We will want to bless and love them. And we won’t be afraid to.
But you may object, my next door neighbors aren’t good people, aren’t safe people. OK, in the normal way we think we may look at some of our next door neighbors and feel they are not worthy of our blessing, or that they have been bad neighbors, mean and hurtful. Guess what, Jesus came to love and forgive the very worst of sinners, and he wants you to demonstrate that. He wants you to show them what that looks like. So, in Christ, we will be led by the Spirit to forgive them, and then find a way to bless them just by being a good neighbor. Instead of quibbling for loopholes like the lawyer, we will answer the question of “who is my neighbor?” by saying, “Everyone.” Yes, but instead of leaving it in the abstract like that, we will start by loving those neighbors closest to us who are dead if they’re not saved. And love means you want to see them come to life!
Now, let me give you a little break. You don’t have to save them. You can’t save them. You just love them. There is inherent value in just being a good neighbor, even if your neighbor never becomes a Christian. There is inherent value in being a good neighbor, even if you never get to have a conversation about Jesus. You should want to bring him up. You should try to share the gospel. But for those who put you off and don’t want to talk about the God, or the Bible or religion, you can still be a good neighbor.
But guess what. Most people are not really all that scary. Guess what else, most people do want to talk about God, the Bible, religion and their opinion of Jesus. But they might not care about your opinion. So, instead, you care about theirs. Just ask them what they think of these things without being concerned about making them hear you. If you listen, you will hear what they think and you may be given a spirit guided way to share your opinion too. Especially if they notice they’ve been doing all the talking, they might just get around to asking you what you think. People like to compare notes. And even if you never get to say what you think in contrast or correction of their views, at least you know better how to pray for them. Praying for them is being a good neighbor.
Truly our ultimate desire in engaging our neighbors is to share the gospel with them and our ultimate motive is to see them turn to the Lord. But this must never be our ulterior motive. By that I mean that we don’t want to use engaging our neighbors as a thinly-veiled guise to try to “win them,” only to give up on them when they do not respond positively. Here I want to quote from a book about the Art of Neighboring. The authors say, “The ‘agenda’ we need to drop is the well-meaning tendency to be friends with people just so that we can convert them to our faith. Many so desperately want to move people forward spiritually that they push them according to their timetable, not according to how God is working in them. It’s tempting to offer friendship with strings attached.”
They clarify: “Sharing the story of Jesus and his impact on our lives is a good thing, but it cannot be the only reason we’re developing relationships. We don’t love our neighbors in order to convert them; we love our neighbors because we are converted people whose hearts are filled with God’s love for them.” Jesus never called us to use a bait-and-switch approach where we are friends only so we can share the gospel. “We are called to love our neighbors unconditionally, without expecting anything in return.” This doesn’t mean ignore the importance of sharing the gospel. It means relax and prayerfully let God lead. You love your neighbors. God will open the doors of communication as he sees fit.
Evangelism is your mission. I have just given you some discipleship and directives. Give thanks to God for your own salvation and go try to be a good Samaritan to your next door neighbors. On the back of your bulletin, number 7 in the essentials of our faith clearly says that the Lord Jesus Christ commands all believers to proclaim the gospel. Which of you is not included in that all believers?
Now I want to encourage you and make this a really practical message with a big idea to take home with you. So, the bulletin insert I asked you to look at is homework. For my readers:
(Distribute this: Here’s a little devotional and practical project for you.
1. First, write the names of the people who live in the house represented by each of the boxes. If you can give both first and last names, that’s great. If you’ve only got first names, that’s okay too. You might have to use your imagination a little to decide who your eight nearest neighbors are if they aren’t just all around you as in the diagram. For example, if you live on a long road with no side streets or blocks to go around, you will probably list the four next houses to your left and the four next houses to your right.
2. Second, write down some information or facts about each of the people in that house. I don’t mean facts that you could observe by standing on the road and looking at their house (“Drives a red car”) but facts that you’ve gathered from speaking to them (“Works for a bank,” “Grew up across town.”).
3. Third, write down any in-depth information you know about each of the people. This could include details like their career plans or religious beliefs—the kind of information that comes from real conversation.
4. Over the coming weeks and months pray and try to visit each of these neighbors and learn more about them, starting with name, and adding details as you develop relationships. In the rest of this work sheet I have given you space to write additional information as you learn more about each of your neighbors. But I know that most houses have more than one person in them, so you will probably end up praying for and caring about more than eight people. Just make the best use you can of this resource. Let God guide you. Let God’s love for all people move you. Even if your neighbors are the worst of sinners, remember that Jesus died for them too. They need to hear the gospel! Jesus came not for the righteous, but to save sinners!
In closing, here's a quote from Fred Roger’s, you know, from Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood. “I believe that appreciation is a holy thing—that when we look for what’s best in the person we happen to be with at the moment, we’re doing what God does all the time. So, in loving and appreciating our neighbor we are participating in something sacred.”
Listen link: www.lcepc.org then look for “sermons” tab.
Back in 1983, Pastor Paul Brown is quoted in the Waterfront Newspaper. That’s the newspaper before the Missaukee Sentinel. In the filing cabinet in the supply office I found this article about the groundbreaking ceremony for this building. Listen to what he said then, “This building is not the focal point of this church, but a place from which to go out into the world…a base to do his work.”
I was very pleased to find that I am in full agreement with Pastor Paul Brown’s stated values about ministry in Lake City. If the building is not the focal point of the church. Then the people must be the real focal point. He is saying the church is the people not the building. This building is just home base for all your ministry.
He also said, later in the article, “Let’s get this church built to get on with the job.” That means that he saw the building as just the beginning of a long future of ministry together, a hub of outreach, a tool that you would use in your ministry. The ministry is evangelism, and evangelism happens out in the community away from home base. Home base is just where we gather to celebrate what God is doing in us, an among us, and because of our presence in the community.
Home base is also a place where we learn new things or keep up to date with what is generally going on in our environment, or find inspiration and motivation to do the work that God has called us to do. For example, a police station is a home base. The officers report for duty, receive updates on current events, receive training, and even duty rosters. But all the real peace keeping work happens out on the streets. Now, I am not saying that evangelists are supposed to be more like cops.
But I am saying that if this building is home base for your ministry, then, yes, you come here to celebrate faith and new life. And you come here to hear God’s Word, receive its wisdom, discern your SHAPE for your ministry, hear of new opportunities and avenues for ministry, and do practical training so you are more effective as evangelists out there. During the last 6 weeks, while I certainly hope you have been celebrating life in Christ, drawing near to God and giving thanks for the gospel, we have also been talking about the Christians’ purpose for existing in the world but not of it.
This building ought to be seen as a discipleship center, not a locus of evangelism. Evangelism is what we do out there! Now I could preach an evangelistic message and invite people to give their hearts to the Lord. Nothing would give me greater joy than to watch people come to faith and decide to follow Jesus with us. But we have to get them to be here for that. Most assuredly I am your partner in that regard out there during the rest of the week. And I am not discouraged by the slow or minimal response to my ministry thus far. I will not give up. I will keep at it and keep seeking the Lord for wisdom and guidance to success to get involved in and connected to this community to meet people who are not Christians. And so should you.
So, now that we have talked about purpose for a month and a half and hopefully you have become more eager than ever to fulfill your purpose and play your role in the evangelistic mission, for the next couple of weeks I am going to give some very practical tips and hopefully some inspiration. Evangelism is more challenging today for many reasons. But that doesn’t mean impossible. It just means we have to be a little more strategic and a little more aware of the reasons people are resistant and the ways we can get around that. And we must be in prayer for them.
Once upon a time, people knew their neighbors. They talked to them, had cook-outs with them, and went to church with them. In our time of unprecedented mobility and increasing isolationism, it's hard to make lasting connections with those who live right outside our front door. We may have hundreds of "friends" through online social networking, but we often don't even know the full name of the person who lives right next door.
That observation is from an online review of the book: The Art of Neighboring, by Dave Runyon and Jay Pathak. Much of what I am sharing here today comes from ideas in that book. But before we get to that, let’s see what we can learn from our text in the Bible.
When the lawyer asked that question, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan and the importance of helping total strangers. In Jesus’ day it was safe to assume that his audience would be able to love those nearest to them, their literal neighbors, the people most like them, who shared the same heritage and geography and in many cases, family. So, when Jesus told the parable of the Good Samaritan, he was stretching their concept of neighbor to include even people from a group they didn’t like.
Now here is the mission. Do not leave this in the abstract and think that “love your neighbor” only applies to the stranger you might meet on a road side in desperate need of help. Do not lose sight of the fact that if your next door neighbor is not saved, then he or she is dead in his or her sins and therefore in worse condition than the man who was left on the roadside near Jericho. Love your next door neighbor as you love yourself.
And guess what. If you do that you will also be loving God by obeying his commandment to love. Guess what else. The only way you can really love your neighbor is if you first love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. Guess what else. You can’t obey either of those commandments to the full unless you first know how much God loves you, that he loved you first, while you were still a sinner, that Jesus came and died on a cross to fix the problem you have with sin, and that he rose again from the dead to prove his power and love, and by knowing that you are alive in Christ!
So, let me preach the gospel that is in this parable of the Good Samaritan. You will remember of course that the religious guys, the priest and the Levite, had reasons why they couldn’t help the poor unfortunate victim in the road. Jesus had a word here that speaks against people who like organized religion. So, if you meet people out there who say they believe in God, but they do not like organized religion, you could very well agree with them and you would be in line with what Jesus said here. Then you might mention that they’d probably like your church because your pastor is a pretty disorganized guy!
But those organized religious guys, they had rules for keeping holy by steering clear of such unclean things as nearly dead bodies on the road side. They did this so that they could have access to the temple, be allowed to perform their religious duties and ceremonies and maybe pray for the guy to be ok. They also didn’t have any time to waste on who knows how long it would have taken to properly care for the man. And maybe, like a lot of American citizens still say today on occasion, they just didn’t want to get involved. It was not their business.
Now, the man on the road couldn’t save himself. He needed a Savior, and that came from a most unlikely person. A Samaritan stopped to help a Jew. For Jesus, as a rabbi, to even mention a Samaritan in his story and have him in the role of the hero was scandalous! For the Samaritan to stop and help a Jew was unheard of! In doing that, the Samaritan ignored social custom and customary prejudice, just as Jesus often did, in spite of the feelings of the religious Pharisees around him, always looking to criticize. And remember, as far as the Pharisees were concerned, Jesus was a most unlikely Messiah. He just wasn’t qualified in their view.
Similarly, we cannot save ourselves from sin, and most of the religious people around us expect us to help ourselves. Even people of Christian heritage often misquote the Bible saying, “The Lord helps those who help themselves.” But the gospel is, the Lord helps those who can’t help themselves and who know that they can’t. The Lord helps those who are tired of living in the death they have created and would turn from their sins, if only they knew there’s real forgiveness, more than just a hope that they might get grace if they start acting good enough. That is a most unexpected gospel! Every other religion in the world demands that the seeker of blessing must behave himself or herself according to the rules.
And you know what? Since I haven’t had the opportunity to personally examine each of you and know your personal theological views, I must concede that it is possible that there are still people sitting in the room right now who are still laboring under that false religion that still causes you to think that you have to behave well enough and maybe you’ll make it heaven. Or on the other hand, perhaps your sins and imperfections are what the devil uses to cause you to doubt your salvation, but you’re still trying anyway. The gospel message says, we all lay dead in our sins. Only Jesus can pick us up and restore us, to give us life and health, paid for out of his own resources. That’s the gospel, what God has done for us not what we can do for him.
Now for those who believe that gospel, we end up being eternally grateful and eager to pay it forward in any way we can. So, Jesus also gave us the Holy Spirit, so that we are filled with His love and enabled to obey him starting on the day we are born again in living faith! Then, when we hear the call to love our neighbors, and think of the people next door or down the road, we are led to pray for them. We will want to bless and love them. And we won’t be afraid to.
But you may object, my next door neighbors aren’t good people, aren’t safe people. OK, in the normal way we think we may look at some of our next door neighbors and feel they are not worthy of our blessing, or that they have been bad neighbors, mean and hurtful. Guess what, Jesus came to love and forgive the very worst of sinners, and he wants you to demonstrate that. He wants you to show them what that looks like. So, in Christ, we will be led by the Spirit to forgive them, and then find a way to bless them just by being a good neighbor. Instead of quibbling for loopholes like the lawyer, we will answer the question of “who is my neighbor?” by saying, “Everyone.” Yes, but instead of leaving it in the abstract like that, we will start by loving those neighbors closest to us who are dead if they’re not saved. And love means you want to see them come to life!
Now, let me give you a little break. You don’t have to save them. You can’t save them. You just love them. There is inherent value in just being a good neighbor, even if your neighbor never becomes a Christian. There is inherent value in being a good neighbor, even if you never get to have a conversation about Jesus. You should want to bring him up. You should try to share the gospel. But for those who put you off and don’t want to talk about the God, or the Bible or religion, you can still be a good neighbor.
But guess what. Most people are not really all that scary. Guess what else, most people do want to talk about God, the Bible, religion and their opinion of Jesus. But they might not care about your opinion. So, instead, you care about theirs. Just ask them what they think of these things without being concerned about making them hear you. If you listen, you will hear what they think and you may be given a spirit guided way to share your opinion too. Especially if they notice they’ve been doing all the talking, they might just get around to asking you what you think. People like to compare notes. And even if you never get to say what you think in contrast or correction of their views, at least you know better how to pray for them. Praying for them is being a good neighbor.
Truly our ultimate desire in engaging our neighbors is to share the gospel with them and our ultimate motive is to see them turn to the Lord. But this must never be our ulterior motive. By that I mean that we don’t want to use engaging our neighbors as a thinly-veiled guise to try to “win them,” only to give up on them when they do not respond positively. Here I want to quote from a book about the Art of Neighboring. The authors say, “The ‘agenda’ we need to drop is the well-meaning tendency to be friends with people just so that we can convert them to our faith. Many so desperately want to move people forward spiritually that they push them according to their timetable, not according to how God is working in them. It’s tempting to offer friendship with strings attached.”
They clarify: “Sharing the story of Jesus and his impact on our lives is a good thing, but it cannot be the only reason we’re developing relationships. We don’t love our neighbors in order to convert them; we love our neighbors because we are converted people whose hearts are filled with God’s love for them.” Jesus never called us to use a bait-and-switch approach where we are friends only so we can share the gospel. “We are called to love our neighbors unconditionally, without expecting anything in return.” This doesn’t mean ignore the importance of sharing the gospel. It means relax and prayerfully let God lead. You love your neighbors. God will open the doors of communication as he sees fit.
Evangelism is your mission. I have just given you some discipleship and directives. Give thanks to God for your own salvation and go try to be a good Samaritan to your next door neighbors. On the back of your bulletin, number 7 in the essentials of our faith clearly says that the Lord Jesus Christ commands all believers to proclaim the gospel. Which of you is not included in that all believers?
Now I want to encourage you and make this a really practical message with a big idea to take home with you. So, the bulletin insert I asked you to look at is homework. For my readers:
(Distribute this: Here’s a little devotional and practical project for you.
1. First, write the names of the people who live in the house represented by each of the boxes. If you can give both first and last names, that’s great. If you’ve only got first names, that’s okay too. You might have to use your imagination a little to decide who your eight nearest neighbors are if they aren’t just all around you as in the diagram. For example, if you live on a long road with no side streets or blocks to go around, you will probably list the four next houses to your left and the four next houses to your right.
2. Second, write down some information or facts about each of the people in that house. I don’t mean facts that you could observe by standing on the road and looking at their house (“Drives a red car”) but facts that you’ve gathered from speaking to them (“Works for a bank,” “Grew up across town.”).
3. Third, write down any in-depth information you know about each of the people. This could include details like their career plans or religious beliefs—the kind of information that comes from real conversation.
4. Over the coming weeks and months pray and try to visit each of these neighbors and learn more about them, starting with name, and adding details as you develop relationships. In the rest of this work sheet I have given you space to write additional information as you learn more about each of your neighbors. But I know that most houses have more than one person in them, so you will probably end up praying for and caring about more than eight people. Just make the best use you can of this resource. Let God guide you. Let God’s love for all people move you. Even if your neighbors are the worst of sinners, remember that Jesus died for them too. They need to hear the gospel! Jesus came not for the righteous, but to save sinners!
In closing, here's a quote from Fred Roger’s, you know, from Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood. “I believe that appreciation is a holy thing—that when we look for what’s best in the person we happen to be with at the moment, we’re doing what God does all the time. So, in loving and appreciating our neighbor we are participating in something sacred.”
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