Living as a Church family

(Otaika Gospel Chapel - 1 Jan 2006)

Verses:
Luke 10:25-37
Col 3:12-15
Ephesians 4:1-16
Luke 8:19-21
James 2:14-20
1 John 4:7-21


Well good morning. How are we doing today?

My name is Sym. My wife, Claire and I are from the other end of the North Island in a little wee place called Wellington. Perhaps you have heard of it? And we bring you greetings from our church family at Onslow Community Church.

Well I am really excited to be here today. It is the beginning of a new year. I think at times like this we can lift up out of the busyness of life and focus a little bit more long term. And this is what I hope to encourage us all to do today.

So today we are going to be getting into Luke 10:25-37. I’ve been told as a church family you have been looking at the sayings of Jesus. This is awesome and I feel privileged to be able to share in this part of your journey.

Along the way I’ll share a little bit about our recent trip to Irkutsk, Siberia. Our church has been blessed with a relationship with a small church in Irkutsk. This year we went back over there with a small team of people from our church and spent time helping with youth camps and living with this church community for a couple of months.

So Luke 10:25-37… let’s take a look.

25 One day an expert in religious law stood up to test Jesus by asking him this question: "Teacher, what must I do to receive eternal life?"
26 Jesus replied, "What does the law of Moses say? How do you read it?"
27 The man answered, " `You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your strength, and all your mind.' And, `Love your neighbor as yourself.' "*
28 "Right!" Jesus told him. "Do this and you will live!"
29 The man wanted to justify his actions, so he asked Jesus, "And who is my neighbor?"
30 Jesus replied with an illustration: "A Jewish man was traveling on a trip from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he was attacked by bandits. They stripped him of his clothes and money, beat him up, and left him half dead beside the road.
31 "By chance a Jewish priest came along; but when he saw the man lying there, he crossed to the other side of the road and passed him by. 32 A Temple assistant* walked over and looked at him lying there, but he also passed by on the other side.
33 "Then a despised Samaritan came along, and when he saw the man, he felt deep pity. 34 Kneeling beside him, the Samaritan soothed his wounds with medicine and bandaged them. Then he put the man on his own donkey and took him to an inn, where he took care of him. 35 The next day he handed the innkeeper two pieces of silver* and told him to take care of the man. `If his bill runs higher than that,' he said, `I'll pay the difference the next time I am here.'
36 "Now which of these three would you say was a neighbor to the man who was attacked by bandits?" Jesus asked.
37 The man replied, "The one who showed him mercy."
Then Jesus said, "Yes, now go and do the same."


When we wrestle with scripture like this, I think our goal is to try to figure out how it relates to us? How can God take these words and impact them on my life and the way I live?

In doing this, the temptation is to treat the bible as a detailed “How too…” or “Dummies guide too…” manual. And we seem to love to look at the little details. We dice the scriptures up, we turn them upside down and around and look at them from a thousand different directions. This is not necessarily a bad thing.

But almost invariably we start to major on the minors. The core of what God is trying to get across to us is lost in a cloud detail.

Now I have to confess that I enjoy majoring on the minors. Discussions about Calvinism verses Arminianism or should we eat pork or what is the best worship or how does the Holy Spirit manifest Himself or what is the best bible translation… you name it… these debates fascinate me. Does anyone else like these debates?

This morning I would like to suggest that issues like these are not central to what Jesus was teaching. In fact I would like to suggest that this is pretty akin to being a Pharisee if we impose our take on these issues on other people. I think we are all quite aware of the way Jesus felt about Pharisees.

And while Jesus was pretty clear about what He thought about the Pharisees, we can see through history and today that the church has not been clear about this. It has sadly not been able to shake off this temptation. Check out 1 Tim 1:4-5 for an example where Paul says that he implored the Ephesian church to focus on the core. Yet time and time again we drift off into the murk of detail and lose sight of the core.

So what is the core? What is it that God, through Moses, the prophets, Jesus and the Apostles has been trying to get through to us for all these years?

I would like to suggest today that the first part of our verses for today, Luke 10:25-28, summarises it. Two things, in this order:

" `You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your strength, and all your mind.' And, `Love your neighbor as yourself.' "

Love God. Love your neighbour. In that order.

That’s it. That’s the core. Everything else rolls off these two commands, concepts… whatever you wish to call them.

Love for God is the foundation.

This is our response to the amazing grace that we have been shown. The Old Testament sings of this grace, poured out on the people of Israel. And I mean poured out… these guys were a pretty trying bunch. The New Testament blasts out the incredible love God has for us and the immense grace He shows us through Jesus. I am sure you can think of many examples of how God has shown you immeasurable grace.

I would like to skip onto the second of the ‘commands’ (Love your neighbour) not because I think it is any more important… rather because it is what I personally find more difficult. I’m guessing this might be the case for other people as well. Also, if you read 1 John 4:7-21 or James you will see that these two ideas are different sides of the same coin.

However if loving God is something you find difficult, come and have a chat with me or one of the leaders in this church. We would love to encourage you and pray for you and walk with you as you wrestle with this. It is a good and important thing to wrestle with.

So part two… love your neighbour. This is a big scary concept to get a grip on. In Luke we have the question… Who is my neighbour? Another question is what is love? Springing from that, what does love look like?

So let’s work this idea of love around. I want to toss some words out that come to mind when thinking about love. Many of these may be familiar. Maybe you can help me as well. So a few to start with:

o Patient
o Kind
o Not Jealous
o Not boastful
o Not proud
o Not rude

What are some others???

o Not demanding its own way (humble)
o Not irritable
o Keeps no records of wrong (forgiving) *******
o Seeks justice
o Celebrates truth
o Perseveres
o Joy
o Peace
o Patience
o Kindness
o Goodness
o Faithfulness
o Gentleness
o Self control (or control of being self obsessed)
o Not demanding *******
o Always trusting ******
o Tenderhearted mercy
o Others…

So these are great ideas or ideals.

Can I suggest there might be a word that captures… that wraps up some of these characteristics? That is the word UNCONDITIONAL. This word particularly brings together the aspects of forgiveness, trust and not demanding ones own way. We will come back to this later.

Who has heard of the band DC Talk? They had a song called Love is a Verb. DC Talk made the observation that the way the word LOVE is principally used in the bible is as a verb. They observed love is about action. About doing.

I guess a question I wrestle with is how we “do love” in an everyday sense? How do we show love? How do we work out love? We have just listed off a big list, a big checklist of characteristics. And this is helpful. But I know I will not be able to hold all of this in my tiny brain while I am trying to deal with life. I need something simple.

Recently I saw a movie called Robots. Who has seen it? Great movie. If you haven’t seen it, it is highly recommended.

In the movie there was a phrase that stuck out to me. “See a need, meet a need”. This phrased jumped out because it connected with a whole pile of stuff I had been studying and wrestling with, including the question… what does love look like?

Look at the second part of our passage for this morning… Luke 10:30-37. Look at all of James. Look anywhere you like and you will find this theme… See a need, meet a need.

One of the things I’ve noticed when I have travelled overseas is the number of beggars. As a Kiwi and a Christian I have struggled with seeing people beg. My Kiwi side says the government will/should look after them and if I give them money they will probably spend it on drugs or alcohol and I just don’t understand all this anyway and I am really uncomfortable and if I walk faster I won’t have to deal with it. As a Christian my heart literally groans at the sight of these people… people made by God.

So for the first few years when we travelled through China, Mongolia and Russia I would try to blinker out beggars. And this was actually re-enforced by an incident in Mongolia.

[Mongolia train beggar story]

But closing our eyes to needs is not God’s way. And so doing this has rested very uneasily with me. You know when you aren’t following God’s way and your conscience sits there letting you know about it???

More recently if I can help, I try. If I am concerned that money will just go to drugs or alcohol then I always have the option to buy some food. But this is not easy, particularly when you can’t communicate. And particularly when these people aren’t part of your circle of friends. And particularly when you know that some times it will get chucked back into your face.

This is probably a good point to jump back to that word… UNCONDITIONAL?

One of the most important characteristics of real love is that it is unconditional. In the Luke we see the Samaritan helped a Jew. The fact that they were from two people groups that were to have nothing to do with each other did not matter. The Samaritan stopped on what was known as one of the most dangerous roads in the region. His own safety didn’t matter. The Samaritan said he would reimburse the innkeeper what he spent on helping the injured man when he returned. There was no condition of... “up to a certain value”.

The Samaritan’s help was unconditional.

Can I suggest that this unconditional characteristic answers the question of who is your neighbour and actually illuminates the real meaning of love? Everyone that God puts on your path is your neighbour. Not just your friends or people who border you place of residence. If you can observe someone, then they are your neighbour. Remember… no conditions.

Can we take a jump into the realm of the church?

As I was preparing for this talk, I kept coming across content about the church and in particular the unity that should be within the church. It is kind of weird when this type of thing happens.

Have you ever wondered, as you have read the letters in the New Testament why the writers sometimes seemed almost grouchy? Paul in particular seems to find it frustrating (maybe painful is a better word) that this core message about loving your neighbour, loving in an unconditional way, wasn’t being lived within the body of Christ… the church.

I mean surely this would be the environment you would most expect to see people exercising unconditional love towards one another. Seeing needs that your church family have and meeting them. If unconditional love was not central within the church, how could the church look outwards with any credibility towards their local community, towards their nation and even globally and preach love God, love your neighbour.

On our recent trip to Siberia we experienced this pain. The church we are involved with in Irkutsk was made up of four distinct groups. There was about a quarter of the church who are ex-Baptists. Another quarter who are recent converts. Another quarter who are the youth. And another quarter who are charismatic. While we were there a person in the charismatic part of the church left and persuaded most of the charismatic quarter to leave to form a new church. Now there were many reasons for this, some true, some mis-communications. But these reasons did not matter. The real reason is that the love within the church had become conditional.

We will love you as a fellow child of God… but only if you believe this and that or sing this way or that way. Conditions. This is not love in the sense Jesus talked about. This is not love that we as self-proclaimed followers of Jesus are signed up to… committed to… that we preach.

Working with young people has been our passion over the last 10 years we have been in Wellington. Our focus in Siberia has been the young people. We were blessed while this splitting was occurring to have the opportunity to speak into the lives of the young people. I can remember thinking that if this was the only thing we did in the 2 months we were there, then the whole trip would have been worth while. In the end the young people decided to remain within the church. And this, conversely, is one of the most joyful things that we have ever been connected with. I think we got a small taste of the joy that unity… unconditional love… brings to God.

As we start another year I hope and pray we all will be challenged… that we will have to really wrestle with what is core to Jesus’ teachings and what is peripheral. I hope that we can grasp what Jesus is teaching and calling us to and what is from our culture or tradition. My desire is to see a church family who is dedicated to being Jesus, whatever that looks like or costs.

I hope we wrestle with what it is to love and what that looks like, particularly in the context of our church family. But also in our relationships… with our husbands and wives, with our siblings, with our friends, the shopkeeper at the corner diary, the petrol station attendant… whoever it is that God brings across our paths.

I hope that little catch phrases like “See a need, meet a need” and UNCONDITIONAL will aid in grasping what it is to work out love as a follower of Christ.

Let’s pray…

Lord Jesus… we want to be imitators of you. We want to live lives that honour you… that bring you glory. Lord… help us to love unconditionally… to work this out through being a blessing to those you bring into our sphere of day-to-day life. Help us to see their needs and to meet them. Jesus… we know we can’t do this in our own strength. We praise you that you have not left us alone to do this. We thank you for your Holy Spirit.

Amen.