Outline:

The Grace of God
The Means of Grace
The Habits of Grace

1. The Grace of God

Grace Justifies

Romans 3:23–28

All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. Then what becomes of our boasting? It is excluded. By what kind of law? By a law of works? No, but by the law of faith. For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law.

Romans 4:4–5

Now to the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift but as his due. And to the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness.

Titus 3:4–7

When the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that being justified by his grace we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life.

Matthew 11:28–30

Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

Grace Sanctifies

Titus 2:11–12

The grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age.

1 Corinthians 15:10

By the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.

Philippians 2:12–13

My beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.

Grace Glorifies

2 Thessalonians 1:11–12

May [God] fulfill [your] every resolve for good and every work of faith by his power, so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Ephesians 2:4–7

But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ — by grace you have been saved — and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.

2. The Means of Grace

How do we put ourselves on the path of God’s grace? The three crucial power sources for the Christian life:

hear his voice (in his word)
have his ear (in prayer)
belong to his body (in the fellowship of the local church)

Acts 2:42–47

They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. And awe came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need. And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved.

Hear His Voice

Hebrews 3:7–8

As the Holy Spirit says, “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion . . .”

Hebrews 4:12–13

The word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account.

Hebrews 12:25

See that you do not refuse him who is speaking.

Have His Ear

Hebrews 4:14–16

Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.

Hebrews 10:19–22

Brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.

Belong to His Body

Hebrews 10:23–25

Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.

Hebrews 3:12–13

Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called “today,” that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.

3. Habits of Grace

Hear his voice.

the Word: incarnate, Scripture, the gospel, written
read, study, meditate
begin with the Bible, move to meditation, polish with prayer

Have his ear.

private prayer, flowing from meditation
“without ceasing” and with company
accompanied, on occasion, with fasting

Belong to his body.

covenant membership and fellowship
church life as a means of grace: corporate worship, preaching, baptism and the Table

The End of the Means of Grace

John 17:3

This is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.

Philippians 3:7–8

Whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.

Audio Transcript

What distinguishes my life from the life of a non-Christian? What makes the Christian life distinct in this world? It’s one of the most important topics we can address, and we do today, on this Monday. Welcome back to the podcast. And we’re going to get there through another question. How do I serve in God’s strength? That question is sparked by 1 Peter 4:10–11. It was sent to us by a listener named Jacob in Minneapolis.

“Dear Pastor John, thank you for looking at my question. First Peter 4:10–11 says, ‘As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God’s varied grace: whoever speaks, as one who speaks oracles of God; whoever serves, as one who serves by the strength that God supplies — in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ.’ In my fight for faith and love and holiness, I want to glorify God. I don’t want my work to be in vain. So my question is this: What does serving by the strength of God mean? How do I do it? And how am I to work in such a way that it is God’s strength in me?”

I think this is just about the most fundamental question you can ask about how to live the distinctively Christian life. How do you live so that it is not you who live, but Christ who lives in you? How do you exert yourself and make resolutions in such a way that you are not relying on your exertions and your resolutions, but on the supernatural work of the Spirit of God in you?

The text that Jacob is focusing on — one of my favorites for ministry — is 1 Peter 4:11, which says, “Whoever serves, as one who serves by [or in] the strength that God supplies.” So there’s the command, and Jacob is just saying, “Please help. How do you do that?” What a mystery, what a miracle that is. We serve, but we serve by the strength supplied by another. “How?” Jacob asks.

All Across Scripture

Of course, this is not the only text that presses this huge issue upon us. There’s also Romans 8:13: “By the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body.” So we are to do the sin-killing, but we are to do it by the Spirit. How?

And we have Philippians 2:12–13: “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” So we are to work, but the willing and the working are God’s willing and working. How? How do we experience that?

And 1 Corinthians 15:10 says, “I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.” So Paul did work hard, but his effort was in some way not his. How do you do that?

And then there’s Colossians 1:29, where Paul says, “I toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me.” Wow. We toil, we struggle, we expend effort and energy — but there is a way to do it so that it’s God’s energy, God’s doing. How?

APTAT

So there it is. It’s a pervasive issue. It’s fundamental. It’s right at the heart of what it means to be a Christian. I wish everybody were asking this question. In 1984, J.I. Packer, who has gone to be with the Lord now, published his book Keep in Step With the Spirit. I really enjoyed it. I remember reading it the year it came out. In it, on page 125, he gives his answer to this question. I’m going to read you his quote, just one paragraph.

First, as one who wants to do all the good you can, you observe what tasks, opportunities, and responsibilities face you. Second, you pray for help in these, acknowledging that without Christ you can do nothing — nothing fruitful, that is (John 15:5). Third, you go to work with a good will and a high heart, expecting to be helped as you asked to be. Fourth, you thank God for help given, ask pardon for your own failures en route, and request more help for the next task.

Well, I was 38 years old when I read that. I had been a pastor for four years, and what thrilled me about his answer to the question — “How do you do this, Packer? Tell us, how do you live this life in the strength of another?” — is that he spelled out exactly what I had preached the year before on March 13, 1983. I called it APTAT, an acronym:

A: Admit you can do nothing.
P: Pray for supernatural help.
T: Trust a specific promise about your situation.
A: Act; use your will; move.
T: Thank God.

I was just blown away that, the year after I wrote APTAT, I found in my favorite theologian just about a duplicate of what I was thinking. I thought, “I’m not quirky here at all. This is just old-fashioned.” He calls it “Augustinian sanctification,” or something like that.

How Christians Neglect Trust

But the difference between my APTAT and Packer’s paragraph is this: he barely mentions my middle T, to trust a specific promise about your situation that you’re about to walk into. You can hear that he means and believes it — of course he does. You can hear it in his third point, but it’s almost lost. He says it this way: “Third, you go to work with a good will and a high heart,” and then he says, “expecting to be helped.” I say yes, exactly — that’s faith: expecting to be helped according to your request for help.

But I think there is still a difference because it’s a matter of emphasis. I think this middle T — admit, pray, trust, act, thank — is so crucial. I wrote a whole book about it called Future Grace. That’s a four-hundred-page book on T. We need a book for every one of those letters, but for me, it was so huge for it not to get muted in other points that it got blown up in Future Grace. So that book was really about the middle T, to trust a specific promise when you’re facing a situation that causes you uncertainty or anxiety or fear.

And I think that step of T — trust in a specific promise — is missing in most Christians’ attempts to live the Christian life. It’s certainly my most common mistake. Most of us face a difficult task that makes us anxious, and we remember to say, “Help me. Help, God. I need you.” So we more or less reflexively express the first two steps, A (admit helplessness) and P (pray for help). But then we move straight from admit and pray to act. We pray, and then we act.

But this robs us of a very powerful step in walking by the Spirit, walking in the strength that God supplies.

Walking by Focused Faith

After we pray for God’s help, we need T. We should remind ourselves of a specific promise that God has made, and fix our minds on it, and put our faith in it. I wish I did it absolutely consistently because it’s so precious when you consistently do it. How many times have I said, “I believe you — I’ve got myself a promise”? Like the promise of, “I will help you, John Piper.”

“We should remind ourselves of a specific promise that God has made, and fix our minds on it, and put our faith in it.”

For the promise of help, I go to Isaiah 41:10 specifically: “I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.” And I say, “I believe you. I believe you. Right now, I’m walking into this pulpit. I believe you, walking onto the stage. I believe you, walking into this difficult conversation I’m going to have down here at Maria’s. I believe you right now. This promise is true. Help is on the way. Increase my faith. I’m trusting you, Lord. Here I go.” And then you act.

Now Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5:7 that “we walk by faith,” and he says in Galatians 2:20 that we “live by faith.” But for most of us, this remains vague. I walk through the day like, “Yeah, I guess I’m a believer.” Of course, I’m a believer as I walk through the day, but am I believing anything specific about God, anything specific about what he’s going to do in the next half hour that I’m struggling with?

Hour by hour, we need to do this. We do it by reminding ourselves of specific, concrete promises that God has made and Jesus has bought with his blood. As 2 Corinthians 1:20 says, “All the promises of God find their Yes in [Jesus].” We consciously trust the promises that we have, and we act on them.

Promises in Hand

So here’s my suggestion to Jacob for how to put this into practice. Read the Bible every day, always on the lookout for specific promises God may want to give you for that very day, but don’t lean only on the Bible reading for the day. Memorize a few promises that are so universally applicable to every situation that they will serve you when you face a task to be done in the strength that God supplies. Then as those tasks come, go through APTAT:

Admit you cannot do this on your own — not fruitfully, not with any eternal significance.
Pray for the help you need.
Call to mind one of your memorized promises and trust it. Put your faith in it.
Act, believing that God is acting in you and through you according to his promise.
Thank him.

“Read the Bible every day, always on the lookout for specific promises God may want to give you for that very day.”

Here are a few of my go-to promises day by day. I suppose the most common one over the last fifty years is Isaiah 41:10. In this verse I hear God talking. I hear Jesus say, “I bought this promise for you, John: ‘Fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you [in the next half hour], I will help you [in the next hour], I will uphold you with my righteous right hand [in the next day].’ I will. Do you believe me, John Piper? Do you believe me?”

Oh, what a difference it makes when you have a concrete word from God, from the Scriptures, and you believe it as you walk into a difficult, trying situation. Another promise I lean on is Philippians 4:19: “My God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus.” Every need. No question. What you need, you’ll have. Go.

Or Hebrews 13:5–6: “‘I will never leave you nor forsake you.’ So we can confidently say, ‘The Lord is my helper; I will not fear; what can man do to me?’” Man can’t do anything to me except what God at my side omnipotently permits him to do because he loves me.

And foundational for every one of those promises I’ve written down is Romans 8:32, which says, “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all [that’s the foundation of absolutely everything, that Christ died for me], how will he not also with him graciously give us [that includes you, John Piper] all things?” What a great promise to walk into every situation with.

So never cease to ponder Paul’s words in Galatians 2:20: “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” There’s that switch — no longer I, but Christ. And then he explains it: “And the life I now live” — oh yes, you do live a life — “in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” So not I, yet I by faith. And I’m simply saying, make it specific by putting your faith in a particular, precious promise.

Suppose I wrote you a letter, about five pages long, in which I explain in some detail a controversial behavior of mine a week ago that people have been misinterpreting. And suppose that in the letter, I describe the behavior in a paragraph, and I give the background for it, and I explain my motivations, and I tell you about the outcome and where it all led, and I explain how it relates to my faith in Jesus and how his death and resurrection give me hope.

And suppose you read the letter, and then you take the paragraph from the letter, the one that simply described the controversial behavior, and you lifted it out of the letter, and you ignored everything I said about the background and my motivation, and everything I said about the outcome of the behavior, and everything I said about how it relates to my faith and the death of Jesus, and you simply spread all over social media that “John Piper has this behavior” — with none of the context that I provided.

What would you be doing?

Love’s Surest Measurement

One answer to that question is that you would be disobeying this text. When the lawyer says at the end of Luke 10:27 that you should not only love God, but also love your neighbor as yourself, Jesus approved of that answer. Verse 28: “You have answered correctly.” So, one of the teachings of this text is that we should love our neighbor as we love ourselves — which is about as radical a thing as you can say.

“Love your neighbor as yourself” is not about self-esteem. It’s about the fact that every one of us does what we think will make us happy. We don’t walk in front of trucks. We don’t drink poison. We don’t jump off buildings. We put a roof over our head when it’s raining. We wear warm clothes in the winter in Minnesota. We try to get enough sleep and exercise to function. We want good grades for ourselves in school. We want a job that will put bread on our table. And we want to be treated fairly. We want people to read our letters fairly.

So, to love our neighbor as we love ourselves is to keep them from walking out in front of trucks, or drinking poison, or jumping off buildings. To help them have a roof over their heads. To help them have clothes in winter and sleep and exercise and good grades and jobs and be treated fairly. Because all of that we want for ourselves, which is what it means to love ourselves.

The apostle Paul applied this command to marriage in Ephesians 5:28–29, saying, “Husbands should love their wives as their own bodies [as they love themselves]. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it.” That’s what “self-love” means. And of itself, it’s not wrong. To love your neighbor as you love yourself is to make your own self-care the measure of your care for others. It’s very radical. Crazy radical. It’s absolutely life-revolutionizing. Churches full of people like this, scattered throughout the cities, would be gloriously strange.

Will You Love Luke?

To read my letter in a way that you would never want your letter to be read is to disobey this text. Why in the world am I pointing that out? Because that’s the way millions of people read the Gospel of Luke, especially when it comes to this parable — the parable of the good Samaritan. Millions of unbelievers love this parable and ignore what Luke teaches. And I’m saying that when you read the Gospel of Luke that way, you are disobeying the Gospel of Luke. You’re disobeying Jesus and not loving Luke.

It is disobedient to Jesus and unloving to Luke to take this parable, lift it out of its Gospel-setting, and use it to build your own wrath-omitting, repentance-omitting, faith-omitting, blood-omitting, justification-omitting ethic of good deeds. That is the playbook of theological liberalism, which rejects the authority of the Bible but keeps the Bible, picking and choosing the parts it likes, and treating the rest as legend or mythology.

And I’m saying that is disobedient to Jesus and unloving to Luke. When you treat a biblical author that way, you are breaking the commandment to love your neighbor as yourself. In this case, to love Luke as you love yourself. If you love Luke, if you treat him the way you want to be treated — if you read him the way you want to be read — you will keep in mind the other crucial things that he says when you read this parable.

For example, John the Baptist warns about the wrath of God that is coming (3:7). Jesus warns that unless we repent, we will all likewise perish (13:3). Jesus said not to fear those who simply kill the body, but to fear him who, after he has killed, can cast into hell (12:5). So, one burning question not only for the lawyer, the priest, and the Levite in this text, but also for the Good Samaritan is this: Will they escape the wrath of God?

And if we say to Luke or to each other, “There’s no wrath in this story,” wouldn’t Luke say, “Do I have to put everything in every paragraph? Isn’t it enough that I tell you about these things all over my Gospel? Is it too much to ask that you would keep them in mind as you read? And, oh — this is a story about inheriting eternal life [verse 25].”

Another example is the forgiveness of sins. Jesus says in Luke 5:24 that “the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins.” And in Luke 7:47 he says, “He who is forgiven little, loves little,” implying that genuine love for others is going to flow from a sense of having been forgiven by God.

Luke’s List Goes On

Or then there’s justification. In Luke 18:11–14 Jesus says there was a boastful man who went up to the temple, and there was a broken man who went up to the temple. The broken man said, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” To which Jesus responded, “I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other.” That has something to do with eternal life.

And then there’s inner transformation. In Luke 6:43–44 Jesus says, “No good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit, for each tree is known by its own fruit.” And later he says, “Did not he who made the outside make the inside also? But give as alms those things that are within” (11:40–41). Outward good deeds without inward change is Pharisaism. So, what is the lesson of the Samaritan’s good deeds?

Or what about faith in Jesus, allegiance to Jesus? In Luke 12:8–9 Jesus says, “Everyone who acknowledges me before men, the Son of Man also will acknowledge before the angels of God, but the one who denies me before men will be denied before the angels of God.” Will the Good Samaritan be acknowledged before God?

Or what about that other time a man came to Jesus in Luke 18:22 and, like this lawyer, asked how to inherit eternal life? And Jesus says, after all the man’s law-keeping, this: “One thing you still lack. Sell all that you have and distribute to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” Bottom line: “Follow me. Confess me. Without me, no eternal life.” Does it matter if the Good Samaritan follows Jesus?

Or most important, what about the blood of Jesus shed for the forgiveness of sin? Jesus says in Luke 22:20, “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.” And the new covenant is this: “You believe in me; I forgive your sins.” As Luke 24:47 says, “Repentance for the forgiveness of sins [will] be proclaimed in his name to all nations.”

“Jesus changed the question from ‘What kind of person is my neighbor?’ to ‘What kind of person am I?’”

So, when we come to read the parable of the good Samaritan, we should love Luke the way we love ourselves. We should read him the way we would want to be read. As I was preparing for this message, I heard Luke, so to speak, say to me, “Pastor John, as you talk about this parable, please remind people of what I said about wrath and repentance and justification and the blood of Jesus and forgiveness of sins and faith in Jesus.” Yes, Luke, I will.

With that great vision of reality, let’s watch this story unfold.

Law-Keeping Isn’t the Path

In verse 25, an expert in the Mosaic law, called a “lawyer,” puts Jesus to the test by asking, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” You don’t want to approach Jesus like that — putting him to the test. If you ask Jesus a question, it better be because you want to know, not because you want to trip him up. If you come to Jesus like the lawyer, he will trap you in your own words. We’re going to watch it happen.

In verse 26 he turns the test around and says, in effect, “You’re the expert in the law — you tell me.” The lawyer answers, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself” (verse 27). To which Jesus responds in verse 28, “You have answered correctly; do this, and you will live.”

Now, there are two ways you can understand Jesus’s approval of the lawyer’s answer. Jesus may be saying, “That’s right, Mr. Lawyer, if you choose the path of law-keeping as a means of getting right with God and a means of earning your way into eternal life, then following these two commandments is the way to go about it. Love God with your whole being, and love your neighbor as yourself. And you must do it perfectly if you’re going to show that you deserve to be in the presence of the perfectly holy God by law-keeping.”

If that’s the way you understand it, then Jesus would be showing the lawyer that he’ll never be able to do that, and that he should look away from law-keeping to the work of Christ, the forgiveness of sins, justification by faith, and salvation by grace, not works. That would be a theologically, orthodox, and biblically faithful way of understanding Jesus’s approval of the lawyer’s answer.

Love Is on the Path

But there’s another way to understand this text, which I’m inclined to think is closer to the mind of Christ. Namely, Jesus agrees that loving God and loving your neighbor is the path that leads to the inheritance of eternal life — the only path that leads to that inheritance. It is the path that you are on right now, if you are a Christian — if you are saved by grace through faith.

Luke wants us to know, in the context of his whole Gospel, that Jesus died for our sins, and that we are justified, and that our sins are forgiven by faith, not by works of the law, and that we receive the Holy Spirit and are changed from the inside by turning to Jesus and renouncing law-keeping as a way of earning eternal life. But rejecting law-keeping as a way of earning eternal life does not mean rejecting love — for God and neighbor — as the path that leads to eternal life. And the only path.

The apostle Paul said to the Christian church at Corinth, “If anyone has no love for the Lord, let him be accursed” (1 Corinthians 16:22). No love for God, no eternal life. That’s true for Christians. And earlier in the same book he said, “If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing” (1 Corinthians 13:3). No love for people, no eternal life.

Why? This is not about earning life. The apostle John puts it like this: “We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brothers. Whoever does not love abides in death. . . . Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love” (1 John 3:14; 4:8). Loving God and loving neighbor is necessary to inherit eternal life not because it is a work of merit to earn life, but because it is a fruit of the Spirit that proves life is present.

So, in this parable, we are going to be shown the path of love that leads to eternal life. We can walk this path by faith, trusting the blood-bought promises of Jesus, or we can miss the path and join the lawyer in his desire to justify himself. Self-justification is the opposite of faith and the opposite of love.

A (Shocking) Story for an Answer

Verse 29: “But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbor?’” In other words, “Which groups of people don’t I have to love?” Jesus likes questions — but not that kind. Questions that are designed to escape the sacrificial path of love, Jesus won’t answer. So, instead of answering, he tells a story. And at the end of the story, he’s going to turn the lawyer’s question upside down — and look us right in the eye. Verses 30–35:

A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho [a drop of about 3,500 feet in 17 miles], and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him and departed, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road, and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was, and when he saw him, he had compassion. He went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he set him on his own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him. And the next day he took out two denarii [two days wages, maybe $400] and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, “Take care of him, and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.”

There are at least three shocking things here.

First, it is shocking that the people who pass by on the other side, leaving the man half dead to die, are the ones who serve most closely to the holy place of God: the priest, who serves in the temple, and the Levite, who assists priests. I thought maybe Jesus would make one of the bad guys a lawyer. That would work, wouldn’t it? But it seems that the point is this: getting religiously “close” to the most sacred acts, events, and places does not necessarily make you a loving person. This is very sobering to those of us who spend most of our lives with God’s sacred book and God’s sacred church. Very sobering.

Second, it is shocking that the hero of the story is a Samaritan. John 4:9 says that “Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.” Luke 9:53 says that the Samaritans wouldn’t receive Jesus and his apostles because they were going up to Jerusalem. The Samaritans are Jewish half-breeds who intermarried with the pagan people of the land and set up their own temple. They are outcasts and unclean.

And the shocking thing is not that a Samaritan cared for a Jew (the half-dead man is never called a Jew), but that a Samaritan surpassed a priest in becoming the kind of person Jesus came into the world to create. The message is clear: this Christ does not limit his transforming work to one ethnicity.

Third, it is shocking how over-the-top lavish the Samaritan’s care is for a total stranger. Bound his wounds. Poured oil and wine. Let him ride the Samaritan’s animal. Took care of him at an inn. Gave him $400 for his needs. Promised to return and pay more. “Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your [lavish] good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 5:16).

“Christ died to create a people who are so secure, and so content in Christ, that we move toward need, not comfort.”

What’s the difference between the religious leaders and the Samaritan? The one difference that Jesus points out is that the Samaritan felt compassion. Verse 33: “A Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was, and when he saw him, he had [felt] compassion.” Compassion is a feeling, not an act. But oh, how it overflowed in lavish acts — gifts of time and money and risk. But the root was compassion. And compassion rooted in love for God requires a new heart.

How Compassion Moves

The story ends in verses 36–37 with Jesus turning the lawyer’s original question upside down. The lawyer asks, “Who is my neighbor? Which group don’t I have to love?” Jesus says,

“Which of these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbor [became a neighbor] to the man who fell among the robbers?” [The lawyer] said, “The one who showed him mercy.” And Jesus said to him, “You go, and do likewise.”

Jesus changed the question from What kind of person is my neighbor? to What kind of person am I? He changed the question from What status of people are worthy of my love? to How can I become the kind of person whose compassion disregards status?

How can I become the kind of person who, instead of moving to the other side of the road (or the other side of town), moves toward need and sacrifice and risk? For decades at Bethlehem one of our standing mottos for the neighborhoods and for the nations was this: “Christians move toward need, not comfort.”

And hundreds have found, as Jesus says, that “it is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35). More blessed to move toward need than comfort. The risk of crossing the road, or the ocean, is worth it.

As we move to the Table, remember this: among the many things in Luke’s Gospel in which this parable is embedded, is this great word of Jesus: “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood” (Luke 22:20). Christ died to create a people who are so secure, and so content in Christ, that we move toward need, not comfort.