Chuck Foreman – Teaching Pastor
Many of the parables Jesus told have become so familiar to us that perhaps we’ve missed what He was really saying. The Parable of the Good Samaritan is one of those parables. We gloss over it and it becomes nothing more than a nice story about doing a good deed. But if we really pay attention to Jesus, it’s difficult to escape the startling idea that loving your neighbor as yourself means loving, helping and serving the people you find most difficult to love. You see, in the story Jesus would create for you (like He did for that expert in the Jewish law), your Good Samaritan will be the person you would never stop to help in a million years! And you must love, help and serve the person who would never give you a second look!
If Jesus was here today, every time you run into Him, He’d be having dinner with all the people on your list of people you think God doesn’t like and has exempted you from loving! This ‘love you neighbor’ thing is not intuitive or natural or easy for us. But it’s the way God does things, and it’s the way of Jesus. It’s what He came to demonstrate, because we weren’t, and still aren’t, getting it on our own.
