N.B. This talk is in two parts. This is the first. The second talk is uploaded as '3 The Good Samaritan, Part 2'.
Also, I can email you the slides I used - simon@roseberypark.org
INTRODUCTION
[Slide 1]
This is my first talk as minister of Rosebery Park Baptist Church – or as minister of any church! I think it would be hard to find a much better choice of passage for a first talk than the parable of the Good Samaritan. It goes right to the heart of what the Christian faith is about.
We all know this parable; we’ve heard it loads of times before. But even so, I think we can miss its main message.
A teacher of the law asks Jesus “Who is my neighbour?” That is a vitally important question. For example, in the 2015 migrant crisis Europe really struggled to answer the question of what responsibility we have to the migrants who were coming to Europe. Are they our neighbours? What responsibility do we have towards them? So the lawyer’s question, “Who is my neighbour?” is one we definitely need to answer today.
But before the teacher of the law asked Jesus “Who is my neighbour?” he asked another question. Do you remember what it was?
Reading: Luke 10:25-29
What was the first question the teacher of the law asked? It was, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?”
[Slide 2]
That question is at the core of what the Christian faith is about. If we are blunt, that’s what we really want, and it’s what Jesus wants for us. It’s the key question of life, and so it’s an excellent place for ‘Talk Number One’.
So we have two questions: “What shall I do to inherit eternal life?” and “Who is my neighbour?” and the second question is a follow-on to the first.
In the church Bibles this passage is divided into two sections and I’ve decided to split this talk into two parts. We’ll do the first section, from verses 25-29, this week and the parable itself next week.
This first section makes three really important points.
[Slide 3]
Doing is essential for our salvation.
Doing means keeping God’s law.
But we can’t be justified by doing!
So let’s dive in and take a look.
Doing is essential for our salvation.
If you have Bible with you please look at v.25. The story opens with a lawyer asking Jesus, ‘What shall I do to inherit eternal life?’ Let’s pause for a moment. The lawyer says, ‘What shall I do..?’ Some of us here may think that is fundamentally wrong. Let’s do a little straw poll. Can you put your hands up if you think inheriting eternal life requires doing? And now, if you think it doesn’t require doing?
When I was at school we had a Christian Union. A lot of speakers came to give talks. One of the common presentations of the gospel was based around ‘A,B,C’.
[Slide 4]
‘A’ stood for ‘Admit’ your need. ‘B’ was ‘Believe’. And ‘C’ was ‘Come’.
There is nothing in this presentation to suggest that we actually have to do anything to be saved. But the lawyer asks Jesus what he must do. He assumes that he has to do something. Jesus, to our surprise, doesn’t say to the lawyer, ‘My friend, you are wrong, you don’t have to do anything’. He doesn’t say, ‘Salvation is by faith alone’. Quite to the contrary! Jesus’ answer is all about doing. The Good Samaritan does something.
And to add insult to injury, notice that Jesus doesn’t say anything about ‘A’, ‘B’ and ‘C’. What’s happened to the steps to salvation that I was taught in my Christian Union? There is nothing wrong with ‘A’, ‘B’ and ‘C’. We do have to admit our need, believe and come. I think that neither Jesus nor lawyer mentioned ‘A’, ‘B’ and ‘C’ because for both of them they were a given. Every Jew in Jesus’ day would have believed in God. He would have accepted that he was a sinner. He. He would certainly have come to God. The ‘A’, ‘B’ and ‘C’ were all there. The question mark was on the ‘D’. The lawyer focused on ‘D’ for ‘do’. And ‘D’ for ‘do’ is a missing component for many Christians.
[Slide 5]
This is a very common view of many Christians today: that we don’t have to do anything to be saved. Surely, we think, that was the point of the Reformation. Salvation is by faith alone and by grace alone. We don’t have to do anything. But there is ‘D’ for ‘do’. It is as clear as day in Scripture.
[Slide 6]
One of the clearest passages of Scripture on this subject is in James 2:20-22.
[Slide 7]
James asks, ‘What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him?’ It’s a rhetorical question. James clearly means, ‘no’. Can that faith save him? No: faith without works does not save. James then continues, ‘Do you want to be shown, you foolish person, that faith apart from works is useless? Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered up his son Isaac on the altar? You see that faith was active along with his works, and faith was completed by his works.’
We may ask, why is doing important? This last phrase gives us part of the answer.
[Slide 8]
It says, ‘faith was completed by his works.’ John Calvin wrote in 1547, ‘It is therefore faith alone which justifies, and yet the faith which justifies is not alone’. Genuine faith produces a result. Yes, salvation is by faith alone and by grace alone. But faith is never alone.
We can compare faith and deeds to two sides of a coin. [Show coin]. Coins are never minted with an image on just one side. If you found a coin with an image on just one side you’d say it was a fake. In the same way, deeds always come with faith, and if the deeds aren’t present then we can conclude that the person’s faith isn’t genuine. So faith alone saves, but our deeds prove that our faith is genuine.
But there is another point. It’s a really interesting one but we just don’t have time to go into it now. It is that the works we do change us. Salvation isn’t simply an event but a process, and when we are busy with the work God has for us, that work changes us. I have one verse here to give this idea of salvation being a process. The Book of Hebrews tells us that Jesus was perfected through his suffering.
So our first point is that doing is essential for our salvation.
[Slide 9]
It’s something that many Christians don’t grasp, to their loss, and to make that point we’ll have an intermission and listen to a song by Amy Grant.
[Amy Grant song ‘Fat Baby’]
So we said doing is essential. But what do we have to do?
Doing means keeping God’s law.
Let’s go on to the next verse.
In answering the Teacher of the Law’s question the first thing Jesus asks is, ‘What is written in the Law?’ I read a book recently by an American called John Frame. He wrote that our response to God’s word is the supreme criterion of discipleship. I agree with that. Jesus once told his disciples, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven”.
So which law is Jesus talking about? Today in England we have a whole lot of laws. In Jesus’ day, in Jewish life, ‘The Law’ would have meant one thing: the first five books of the Old Testament. Actually, Genesis doesn’t contain much law, so it’s really Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.
That’s intriguing. Many Christians today would like to ignore large parts of the Old Testament, and these books in particular.
[Slide 10]
I came across a study that was done in 2017 by Christianity Today magazine. They looked at 300 works of theology to find the 100 verses which were most often used by theologians to form their theology. Not one came from these four books of the Bible. The headline in Christianity Today magazine was ‘Sorry, Old Testament: Most Theologians Don't Use You’. But Jesus certainly did. On another occasion Jesus told his disciples: ‘For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.’
Baptist minister Steve Chalke wrote, “many Christians - let alone anyone else - sometimes wonder if it might be best to archive large chunks of it in a filing cabinet labelled ‘no longer relevant’”. I have a feeling that he had the Old Testament particularly in mind. But we cannot dismiss the Old Testament as irrelevant if Jesus put so much weight on it.
So the lawyer, in his quest for eternal life, is on the right track. He needs to go to God’s law, read it, understand it, and do it.
[Slide 11]
So the second really important lesson that this passage teaches us is that the law is still essential for our salvation.
I think that at this point some of us here might be feeling a bit uncomfortable. Are we saved by keeping the law? That doesn’t sound right. But let’s read further.
We can’t justify ourselves
In v.29 Luke makes a very interesting observation. Luke writes, ‘But he’ (in other words, the lawyer) ‘desiring to justify himself’.
Who thinks the lawyer could justify himself? Can you put your hands up if you think he could? You’re right. Of course he can’t. So the lawyer must keep God’s law – but he can’t justify himself by keeping the law and he mustn’t keep the law in an effort to justify himself.
What do I mean by that? God tells us to love our neighbour. So we do, because slowly but surely the character of God is appearing in us, and we are kind and compassionate.
But there is another reason why we might show love to someone. We might think we have to do all sorts of good things in order to satisfy God. If that is the reason we’re acting in a loving way, then it isn’t because we really love but because we’re trying to justify ourselves. This is where the lawyer was coming from.
[Slide 12]
He was wondering, ‘How many ticks do I have to get for God to be satisfied with me? How many ticks do I need in order to inherit eternal life?’ But that isn’t how it works. We can’t earn eternal life. We don’t have to collect ticks. We do have to love. But it isn’t to earn eternal life. It’s because we’re following God and seeking to be like him.
[Slide 13]
To conclude. This opening section of the parable of the Good Samaritan shows us three things. It shows that doing is part of our salvation. It shows that ‘doing’ means keeping God’s law. And it shows – perhaps paradoxically – that we cannot justify ourselves by keeping God’s law.
Prayer
