Northside Church - Sydney
Never Ending Story Week 5 AM: The Power of One
You're listening to another great message from Northside Community Church. I imagine this is your situation. You've paid the dues 12 months in advance. And in one cold night, cold and rainy, splutter, splutter, splutter, your car limps to a stop at the side of the road. And so of course what you do, you get out your membership card right, call the 13100 number, lovely lady on the end of the phone answers, and they, a car will be right out immediately to you. And you wait there for half an hour, an hour, or four hours, depending on how lucky you might be on that particular night. And there you see, almost like an angel from heaven, the funny, flashing lights and the blue and white ute style truck that's so characteristic of help around the place, it pulls up on the opposite side of the road and thinking that they were going to do a U-turn, they wind down their window and they say, hey brother, sister, peace, blessings, I wish you well, wind up the window and drive back off again. How would you feel? I'd cancel my membership, that's what I would do, if that happened to me. And yet we had read in James' book, the book of James last week, the N.R.M.A. principle that it is insufficient, brothers and sisters, James says, given that God has commissioned you to be His heavenly kingdom roadside assistance technicians, that you should go to all the extent to be next to your neighbor and say, peace, I wish you well, and go the other way, down the road. It's inconceivable to James and I wonder if his basis for that teaching came from his very own brother, Jesus, from the passage that we have just read and the story he told. You see, here's the reality. We've been spending the past three, four weeks talking about the ways in which God calls people into His never-ending story. And as we've gone from the theoretical that your God's workmanship and you've been created in Christ Jesus to do the good deeds that He's prepared in advance for you to do, we get right down to the practical with Jesus Christ Himself. And so Jesus says, the way that you are going to win the world is not just with great preaching, great messages and great blessings, but through good deeds to your neighbor. And He says that how you will call people into God's never-ending stories by being a true neighbor, that is meeting the needs of the people around you, whether they believe in Him or not. And so the question we're going to have to ask and unlock this dynamic for being a true neighbor. That's really what we're going to look at in this passage this morning. What is the dynamic of a true neighbor? We see the requirement of a true neighbor. We see in this passage the representation of a true neighbor. We also see the reason why anyone is a true neighbor in the first place. You see, first and foremost, the requirement of being a true neighbor. I had gone for a walk through the HIA Home Show in Darling Harbour for exhibition halls full of all sorts of goodies for houses. And I don't know about you, but when you go to those shows you tend to pick out a million in one different brochures. You get thrust into your hand, you come with a whole show bag full of brochures. And I got one brochure, it was about 120 pages thick because I thought if I'm going to get this much paper, I'm going to get my money's worth here. And so I got that, it was on my bedside table, I thought I'm going to read this. And as I flicked open the page, there was a page there telling me that the minimum requirement of the straightness of a retaining wall for your house, something like five millimetres between the vertical if you're wondering, or if you're building a retaining wall this morning. But there was all other sorts of how at right angles your house had to be. What sort of wood you had to use, you see, it was the building code of all the brochures that I'd picked up, I'd picked up the New South Wales building code, just full of laws and what the minimum requirements of building a house is. Now isn't that what laws are supposed to do? Laws always tell you what is the minimum requirement. And that's what we see in this passage here, in this altercation between Jesus and this teacher of the law. Starts off with him saying what's the minimum requirement? It says on one occasion an expert in the law, now that's not the building code that is in the Jewish law, he stood up to test Jesus and he says, "Teacher," he asked, "What must I do to inherit eternal life? What must I do?" Jesus says, "Well you're the expert, tell me how you read it." You see saying, you know all the laws, or 400 and something of them, how do you read this? Not read out the 400 laws, but what's your spin? There's an expert of law, what's your summary on all of this? And the guy says, "Oh yeah, effectively it's love God and love other people." Yeah that's it, it was a reflection of Deuteronomy and the great Shamer from the Old Testament, one of the heart of the Jewish nation and psyche. And so he says, "Love God, love others." And Jesus goes, "Yeah, love God, love others, yep that's all you have to do." That's it. Love God with such a priority that he is the only thing that you think about when you wake up in the morning, and love other people so that you meet their needs with the same force and the same power and the same joy and the same self-interest that you meet your own needs. That's as simple as that. You start to feel the weight of what Jesus is saying here. I think that's why the teacher of the law then says in here, "Well he wanted to justify himself." I sort of imagine that if Jesus was at a dinner party, the conversation would go like this, the teacher would go, "The law would be there with a big carafe of port in the hand." And he says, "Yeah, that's so true Jesus, but Jesus, who is my neighbor?" You know those sorts of people, right? They try and weasel out of it because you see the teacher, he's feeling the full weight of what Jesus is saying. See what he's really saying here, and this is what religious people are, it's the difference between religion and Christianity, religious people ask, "What's the bare minimum Jesus? What's the bare minimum of the law that I have to scrape over to be right with God?" People ask that all the time, "Which part of the Bible tells me that I have to do that? Show me the bare minimum. Which verse is that? Which verse is that? Show me the bare minimum." And what's amazing is that Jesus always goes beyond that you see. This guy was asking, "What's the minimum standard of humanity that God wants on the earth?" What's the minimum standard? What's God's building code, I guess, is a way of saying it. We have to understand when Jesus says, "Hey, great question, let me tell you a little bit of a story which we're going to look at in a sec." We're going to understand the story that Jesus tells in his passage is we've got to understand the question that that story is answering, the question is this, "What is the bare minimum that God requires of us in loving our neighbor?" And here it is. The answer is, "Meet the needs of your neighbor with the same joy and the same fervor and the same intensity and the same level of self-interest that you would want to meet your own." That's it. I don't know about you, but when I read this passage this morning, I feel like the teacher of the Lord. Can you be serious, Jesus? Can you just turn down a little bit, turn the volume down a little bit, Jesus? Come on, that's heavy stuff. And then we see the representation of what true neighborship looks like. See, that's the requirement. That's the bare minimum. And then we see the representation. Jesus is, "Oh, what I love about Jesus is you watch him whenever there's technical talk about the law, he doesn't fight with fire, he doesn't get technical on him, he tells people a story." I think I'll say, "Let me tell you a bit of the story here. Men's been almost beaten to death. He's been beaten half to death in that sense. He's been stripped by robbers. A priest comes along, a minister comes along, sees him, walks to the other side of the road. Then a Levite, a Levite's like a key lay person or an elder of the church, sees him, and he walks to the other side of the road. And then a Samaritan comes along, sees him and his heart goes out to him." What's so special about that story? You see, first and foremost, Jesus paints the representation of what this motherhood statement of love God and love others looks like, right? First of all, we see and we learn this morning, verse 33, he sees the guy. Verse 33 says, "But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was, and when he saw him, he took pity on him. It means his heart went out to him. He had compassion on him as another way to translate that word there. His heart went out to him." The phrase, go back to where you came from, is a phrase that is in the heart of many Sydney siders and Australians at the moment in response to the SBS documentary that's floating around on television, which tracks the plight of asylum seekers as they seek to reach our shores. You see the asylum seeker debate is at the very heart of this nation at the moment, and it's tearing it apart. Now, you can relax, it's okay, I'm not going to preach on the nuances of the asylum seeker debate here this morning, but here's what I find fascinating about that documentary. It's so powerful about that documentary. You see, the documentary gives us an insight into the people behind the issue. That's exactly what Jesus was doing with this teacher of the law and this funny little story. You see, these guys went to the other side of the road. It says they saw him, but they didn't really see him, you see, and I don't think we really see our neighbors because we're always building fences. It's natural to love who is like you. It's natural to like those who like you. It's natural to like those who like what you like, right? But we create conscious and subconscious fences between us and our neighbors, right? Not wooden fence palings, we've got enough of those in our society at the moment, but I'm talking fences of ethnic differences, fences between our religious differences, fences between sexuality, fences between belief systems and religion. We're always building fences, socio-economic fences, fences of the classes, fences between the cultures. And going down the road, this guy crosses across and his heart went out to him. You see, what's really interesting is the words good Samaritan actually don't appear in this passage if you read it carefully, because it would have been an oxymoron to the teacher of the law that was hearing that. There was no such thing as a good Samaritan, only good Samaritan back in those days was a dead Samaritan, as far as their concern. You see, because here's the thing, the Jews hated the Samaritans and the Samaritans hated the Jews. The Jews thought they were like half-breeds. The Jews thought their religion was blasphemous and the Samaritans thought the Jewish religion was blasphemous. And so Jesus deliberately picks this guy to thrust him in as the hero of the story. Talk about a shock jock. Jesus the great shock jock, he's saying this. If he was to preach it, Carl Sandaland style, Darren Hinch style for those of the older members of the congregation, look, if Jesus was preaching this message today, you know what he'd be saying here to be the story of the good Taliban, and to be the story of the good Muslim, to be the story of the good prostitute, to be the story of the good homosexual, to be the story of the good asylum seeker. The Samaritans saw the guy because he saw over the fences of ethnicity and religious difference and the barriers that we inherently, consciously or unconsciously create now our own hearts. And I think the challenge, I'm just a messenger here this morning, right? I think the challenge that Jesus is saying to you this morning, he's asking himself the tough question, what fences exist in your heart this morning? He saw the guy and he took pity on him. Secondly, we learned that he was inconvenienced, verse 34, it says, "Then he put the man on his own donkey, took him to an inn and took care of him." You see that? He gets off his donkey, he gets down amongst the blood and all the mark and the ripped clothes and he feeds him, it says he poured oil and wine upon him and he got his hands dirty with all the junk that was there and he got down off his donkey and he put him up there and he took him off to an inn. I think what God's word is teach us this morning is that sometimes we've just got to get off our ass. Sometimes we've got to get off our donkey, we've got to be inconvenienced. I'm sure that the Samaritan didn't turn to his wife in bed that morning and said, "Hun, I've got to meet and meeting, I've got to go to Jericho of all places from Jerusalem." And can you please pray that I'm going to run into some Jewish bloke that's bloodied and beaten and half-naked in in a coma this morning? I'm sure he didn't think that, I'm sure we often don't pray that level of inconvenience into our life. If the Samaritans just like us today, the reality is that the needs of people interrupt us. And the issue is, look guys, that not that we're not willing or we're not, we're not kind-hearted as a church, I know at least if it's my story and the way that God's speaking to be in this, but it's just we're too busy. We're too busy, the question that Jesus is asking us through his word is, "Are you willing to be inconvenienced?" The minister and the lay leader here, they were asking themselves a question, "What is going to happen to me if I stop and help this guy?" And yet the Samaritan asked a question, "What's going to happen to this guy if I don't stop and help him?" Two totally different paradigms here. Rick Russo is one of our ministers over in the state says, "Getting out of your own way is difficult, going out of your own way is even more difficult." And in that sense, true neighborship means being prepared to wander off the pathway of your own agenda onto the other side of the road sometimes. To be a true neighbor means sometimes you need to get off your donkey. So he was inconvenienced. Thirdly, he carried the cost, verse 35, next day he took out two silver coins and he gave them to the innkeeper and said, "Look after him. He said, 'And when I return, I'll reimburse you for any extra expense that you might have.'" Now, I'm sure you're thinking, "Here we go. Here's the hit up, carried the cost, big financial appeal, to get the wallets out. It's what you're going to hit me with Sam, isn't it?" But here's the thing that I got from this passage today. Isn't it interesting that giving money was the last thing that the Samaritan did? Coming up until this point was under the broad heading of what we would call today social work. Jesus is painting this story, this incredible picture of holistic ministry of the guy's resources and of his time and bending down to clean up the mark and the relationship that was established there with him on the side of the road. It was everything. And the last thing that he did was pull his wallet out to help this guy. I think it's important because, look, let's be real in our part of the world here. We are so blessed and low and all sure as Sydney, and don't get me wrong, sometimes pulling out the wallet can be the easiest thing for us to do. But at the same time, Jesus is painting a picture that involves not just your money, but your muscle. It involves not just the coins in your wallet, but the practicalities of getting in there and helping. And so, look, don't get me wrong. Money is such a significant part of it all. I'm so grateful. Look at the story of Madagascar and how much we've raised for that incredible trip there. But it's both the money and the muscle. On the other hand, some people go, "Well, I can't afford to help out. I haven't got the resources to help out," or the problems too big. I'm not going to make much of an impact here. And yet, I think about, remember the floods in Victoria. We saw those incredible scenes of how trucks would drive into the town, and they would be full of sandbags, and you would see the entire community lined up shoulder to shoulder between the truck and the broken levee, that place of need. And each person just stood there, and I love those lines because you see them. These heavy sandbags just get passed from one person to another. You guys seeing how that works? I think as the church, sometimes we feel that the problem is too big, and of course it would be too big. If I got down to Victoria and saw a truck full of sandbags by myself, I go, "There's no way I could fix that problem." But shoulder to shoulder, I know that I can at least carry my little bit of the load, right? Eddie Stanley says, "Yes," he says, "When we come against this self-justification that I don't have the resources to help a neighbour in need," he says, "Think of it this way. Just do for one what you wish you could do for everyone. Do for one what you could wish you could do for everyone." And that's why God brings His church to the world in order to carry those burdens, speak your burdens. When Jonathan Edwards, a great, reformed minister, was commentating on Galatians 6 where it says, "Carry each other's burdens." He said this, "In many cases we may, by the rules of the gospel, be obliged to give to others when we cannot do it without suffering ourselves." How else is the rule of bearing one another as burdens fulfilled? I mean, if we never are obliged to relieve others' burdens but then seek to do it without burdening ourselves, then how can we bear another neighbour's burdens when we bear no burdens at all? You see what he's saying here, he's saying that, "How can you possibly carry one's burden if you don't carry the cost, some cost of that burden?" So in that sense, Jesus is saying here, "You're not being a true neighbour until it costs you." Wow, shock-jock, hinchi, wouldn't you like to be like that? I mean, if we could just get two people like this to move into our neighbourhood, look at them, you know, a person who sees beyond the fences of belief or of preference, someone who inconveniences themselves at the risk of their life, someone who carries the cost, not just financial, but of holistic ministry. I'm going to ask you the question, if you had two people in your street, wouldn't you love to live next to them, who are these people? And I think realistically, we go, "Who lives like this?" Not many. It's a radical nature of Jesus' teaching. I mean, I even struggle to get my next door neighbour to open the door these days. Here's the thing. You can be like that. The world could be like that. They just need the reason of true neighbours. You see, we've had the requirements, we've seen the representation, but there's got to be the reason as we finish this morning. You see, there's two approaches that I could throw out here as we walk out of this place. And this is where I think, you know, we could preach this passage in such a wrong way. There's two ways. There's either just go and do it, or we could look at the dynamic for what is going to make you a true neighbour. You see, the key difference between these two stories pivots on where Jesus put the teacher of the law in this story. You see, like, what if Jesus said to the teacher of the law here in this interaction, what if he said to us, "Here's a person who's just like you." And they saw the guy, they were inconvenienced, they carried the cost now, go and do likewise. The teacher of the law would have laughed at him and said, "You're kidding me? That's a Samaritan. That's a half-breed. I don't talk to them, man. Forget it." Jesus wouldn't have lost the guy, there wouldn't have been any motivation, but look, here's the thing, have you picked up on the genius of Jesus yet in this story? Can you see how he switches the reason for true neighbourship from just to do it, go and do likewise to a dynamic, an engine, an engine for true neighbourship for the rest of your life, for the rest of his life? Here's how he does it. He puts the Israelite on the road and the Samaritan in the saddle. You see, the unnamed man in the story that was beside the side of the road was a Jew. The teacher of the law was a Jew. And so in that sense, Jesus is saying to the law expert, "Who's a Jew? What if the person on the side of the road was you? What if you're on the side of the road and you're lying, bloodied and beaten and robbed of everything you have and almost in a coma?" He says to the teacher of the law subtly through this story, "What if that was you?" And what if you had an experience of grace from someone on a saddle who had every right to reject you because of your differences, and yet they reached down and extend their hand in help to you, would you take it, regardless of who they are? See that Jesus doesn't give the guy another do it. He gives him a dynamic that if he took it into the heart of who he was would make him a true neighbour for the rest of eternity. And here's the thing for you and I today, we don't need another do it church. We don't need you to be feel gilted into this process because Sam crafted a nice sermon to make you feel guilty that you're not a good enough neighbour. You need a dynamic this morning, something that is always going to change you the minute that you stand out of this door. Here it is. Look, until you have been radically neighbours, you won't be a radical neighbour yourself. Until you have been truly neighbours, then you won't be a true neighbour to anyone else this week. And you think, "Well, how do I get that? Where does that come from?" Well, I'm glad you asked. You see, you don't need a good Samaritan in your life. You need the great Samaritan. Where do I get that, you ask? The gospel, the gospel. You see, the gospel is this, the gospel is that anyone is a Christian recognises at one point in their life or each and every day that's spiritually, that they're the person on the road, that spiritually they are bloodied and beaten and broken and half in a coma. And that Jesus, even though we deserved rejection, got off the saddle. Got off his saddle to cross the road and to extend to you and I and each and every person in the world an act of holistic grace. And the question is, will you take it this morning? If you don't believe in him, will you take it this morning? You see, the only way, friends, that we will be, the only way that we're going to take pity on people and our heart will go out to people that we never mix with or never think about mixing is when we realise that Jesus is heart first when out to you and I. The only way that we're ever going to be inconvenienced on the pathways of our lives is recognise that Jesus who had equality with God, it was so inconvenienced to expand the universe and became a man. The only way that we're going to carry the cost of someone else's brokenness is to recognise this, the Samaritan, the Samaritan, see, here's the thing. If he's bloodied and bleeding and he's been stripped of his clothes, then it means the robbers wouldn't have been too far away. The Levite and the minister were smart, the reason they're going to the other side of the road is there was still danger in the area. They were trying to avoid the robbers too if this guy is freshly beaten up and the Samaritan goes down into that at the risk of his life in order to help him. And yet in the great Samaritan Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ was inconvenienced, not at the risk of his life but knowing that it would cost his life. He crossed the road, he did it and at the cross Jesus put himself in your place, he took your place on the road, he was bloodied and he was beaten and he was half comatose so that you could have his place in the saddle. So friends if you have him as your great Samaritan then and only then can you be a good Samaritan and other people on this side of eternity, see how the gospel is not a do it, it's a dynamic and an engine for your life this week. So Jesus never should anyone into anything, he gives him a dynamic and an engine to change the world and only when you see that the true neighbour Jesus Christ and what he has done for you will you become a true neighbour for someone else this week, a true neighbour in the board rooms, a true neighbour on the bus or a true neighbour in the mother's group this week or a true neighbour in your local neighbourhood or a true neighbour at your shopping centre. We've been learning God provides intersections at every point of your life to cross the road. Your friends that's the question it isn't it, well Jesus who is my neighbour? May we be a church that doesn't ask that question this week, you see the genius of Jesus how he flipped it on his head with that wonderful story, the question is not who is my neighbour, the real question Jesus is saying this week who will I be neighbourly to? Being as part of God's never-ending story means that you're going to have to cross the road you in RMA technicians and offer a little bit of God's roadside assistance.