Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: The Bible reading is from Luke 10:25 37.
On one occasion, an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. Teacher, he asked, what must I do to inherit eternal life?
What is written in the law? He replied, how do you read it? He answered, 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 love your neighbor as yourself.
You have answered correctly. Jesus replied, do this and you will live.
But he wanted to justify himself. So he asked Jesus, and who is my neighbor?
In reply, Jesus said, a man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead.
A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he he passed by on the other side.
So too a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side.
But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was. And when he saw him, he took pity on him.
He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him.
The next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper. Look after him, he said, and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.
Which of these three do you think was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of robbers? The expert in the law replied, the one who had mercy on him. Jesus told him, go and do likewise.
[00:01:48] Speaker B: Thanks, Mavis.
It's a well known reading, isn't it? A good Samaritan. But also it's important to highlight the question there asked, what must I do to inherit eternal life?
And they have a bit of a dialogue. But I love what is stated there. What is the greatest commandment? And he doesn't hesitate.
He says, love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment.
The second is, like it, love your neighbor as yourself. All of the law and the prophets hang on these two commands.
So he didn't say, well, these are two nice ideas to do, you know, to love God and to love your neighbors. He said, all of the law and the prophets hang on these two commands.
Everything God has ever said hangs on loving God and loving others.
When a group of about 20 pastors in Denver, Canada, got together with the mayor of their town, they asked the mayor what can we do best to serve our city?
How can we serve? And they kind of had in mind, maybe there'll be some initiatives that the mayor will tell us to be part of or how we can help serve in that way.
And the mayor told them most of our city's biggest challenges.
Loneliness, which I thought we sang about this morning, all the people said, amen.
Loneliness. Aging neighbours with no support, at risk. Kids run down neighbourhoods, you know, they would be drastically reduced if we could just figure out a way of becoming great neighbors.
The room fell silent for this room full of pastors as they realized the mayor was essentially inviting them to do one simple thing.
Get their people to actually obey Jesus, command to love their neighbors, their literal neighbors. They thought, at least let's start there. What does it mean for us to actually listen to what Jesus says and love our actual neighbors? And so this movement sparked and became a book written by J.
Pathank and Dave Ranjan. I think that's his name. It's called the Art of Neighboring, if you want to check it out. It's called Building Genuine Relationship Outside a Right outside our door. And this was something I explored in my previous church at Citywide Baptists in Hobart when I was the associate pastor there. Matt Garvin, who's now our mission director, brought that one along. And that's something that now, in the last few years, we've been exploring at Newstead as well. What does it mean to be good neighbours?
So if this is at the center of our Christian life and we need to ask the honest question, if loving our neighbors is central, why is it so hard? Why do we find it such a hard thing to do?
And that's where I want to begin with this first question here. Identify and overcome the barriers.
Last year at Newstead, we did this series we did over four weeks, and I'm kind of trying to cram it into one, so forgive me if I go a little long, but it's really important that we break down. What's the barriers and what are we going to. How do we face this?
And we looked at some of those, what the barriers were for, loving our neighbours. And three things kind of came about and I think they're kind of universal.
The first barrier is our time constraint.
You know, we're busy, we're tired, we're stretched.
Technology has connected the whole world, but we're disconnected to the people right out front of our door.
A line I read from the Art of Neighbouring, it has a reading plan on the Bible app. If you do Those it said we become unknowing slaves to our circumstances rather than co authors of our lives alongside God.
We become slaves to our circumstances rather than co living alongside God.
Meaning we have good intentions but we just don't have margin to do the things that we know we should or want to do.
The second barrier is our fear and anxiety.
We fear the awkwardness that might happen if we go to someone's door or connecting with our neighbours. Fear of rejection that they may not want what I have to offer or fear of not knowing what to say when you get there.
Our neighbour over the back, they've since moved on, but I wanted to go and say hello and greet them. I think I had something to share with them.
And as I came to their door it was open. The door was open and I knocked and no answer. And I was kind of looking in and not knowing, like do I go in or not or are they okay? Like I'm knocking, should I go and see if they need help? Like why is the door wide open? As I poked my head in and it'd been a good minute or two, the neighbour came round the corner and I don't know what they thought I was doing there, but it was an awkward moment.
But anyway I communicated what I wanted to communicate.
It was an awkward moment and easy for me to let that experience shape my next time. Isn't it like, oh, I don't want that to happen again.
It makes us hesitate, the fear makes us retreat from wanting to do things like that again.
The third barrier is prejudice or misconceptions.
Sometimes the barrier is within ourselves.
We make assumptions, we judge, we avoid people who are different to us.
There's this interesting story in Luke 9:51 we read a simple, almost seems pointless story, easy to read over, of Jesus being rejected from traveling through Samaria. And James and John, they're mad that these people would tell Jesus that he can't come through this path.
And so they say, hey, let's pray and ask God to call down fire on these people, this Sumerian town, this village. Well, Jesus rebukes them. And then a few paragraphs later we're told the story that we read, the Good Samaritan.
A story designed to break down prejudice. A story designed to show that love crosses boundaries.
And so the Good Samaritan is actually Jesus answer to our barriers to these barriers that we face.
As we pointed out, the lawyer asked Jesus what must I do to inherit eternal life now it's the wrong really kind of question, but he's asking for rules. He wants to know what the checklist is that he should follow that will get him in the door.
Instead, Jesus gives a story, a story where religious people walk right past the man in need.
But it is the outsider, the Samaritan, the one that James and John wanted to call fire on just before.
They're the ones that become the heroes of the story.
Because the Samaritan, he slows down, he doesn't have no space or no margin.
He sees, he feels compassion, he acts, he follows up.
And Jesus finishes with saying, so go and do likewise.
When I was in Hobart, our neighbour beside us had an electric gate.
And I found it very intimidating because I had this in mind. And I was like, well, I want to go say hello, but I don't know how to get past his gate.
So I prayed. I was like, well, Lord, you say you can take away the barriers, so take away the barriers.
Two weeks later, at 3am, I was awakened by all these sirens and lights and wondered what was going on. And it turns out that someone had lit my neighbour's bin on fire and had burnt down his fence.
And I thought, oops, I really need to be careful what I pray.
Suddenly it was very easy to access. I didn't have to worry about the electric gate anymore. I could wander straight through and I could say hello. I mean, I could talk to my neighbour over the back fence, but if I wanted to go and say hello, that way I couldn't. So now I had easy and a reason to go over and say, hey, are you okay? What's going on?
And together we actually worked on the fence. He actually, in the time I was there, never finished the fence. So we managed to keep having that way of chatting.
But if I'm honest, through that interaction I also learned about his wife who was dying of cancer and was able to talk a little bit about that. But in honesty, I didn't lean into the opportunity as well as I could have. I allowed my schedule and my business to still kind of take me away from really walking with him in that.
But God used that moment to teach me something that neighbouring isn't just a nice idea, it is a command to go and do so. If there are barriers, how do we move from just understanding that this is something we need to actually do to to something that we live out and that's making neighbouring our lifestyle.
To answer that, I want to take us to Acts 2, 42, 47, which is at the heart of this series that we're doing about how the picture of the early church and how they grew through showing the great Commandment. In Acts 2:42, it says they devoted themselves to the apostles teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.
So we see four practices there. And it's things that we kind of practice here on a Sunday morning, isn't it? We're teaching, we're having fellowship together, we're breaking bread, we're praying.
These are the four practices.
And then we read on through the passage. The fruit of these practices. They were filled with awe. The community was filled with awe. They shared what they had. They met in homes. This is the early church. They, they ate together with glad and sincere hearts. They enjoyed the favor of all people.
And the Lord added their number daily.
Their actions matched their beliefs.
The word there are met in their homes is a Greek word called oikos.
Oikos doesn't just mean a house. It means the household. It means the extended family.
It means close friends and natural relational networks.
The early church didn't grow through events or programs. It grew through the Oikos, through the household of hospitality, willing to break bread with one another.
A little bit about what you guys are doing tonight, it sounds we're having a meal together. That's a great example of an oikos home, a home of hospitality before COVID Again, a story. Back in Hobart, we planned to do like a street barbie. We planned to do something like tonight where we just wanted to gather around near the playground that was on our street and have a barbecue together.
We created this Facebook page that was to help us connect and to make it happen.
And then the lockdown hit, so we never actually got to our barbecue.
But what happened instead was this Facebook page group became a lifeline.
People checked in on each other. We shared what needs we had.
We shared meals, we shared life.
There were small acts of connection that created a culture of care across our street.
And so that's the thing. Neighbouring is not a short term thing, it's a long term commitment. It's not an event, it's not a program. It's a lifestyle. It's how do we look outside of ourselves and into our street.
I often like to say that at weddings that faith is like a marriage.
The cross is like the ring, you know, the commitment that Christ makes to us.
The resurrection is the certificate. It's a date that we can look back and say that's when that happened, like we can with our wedding day.
But if you're saying you're married, you actually also have experience, don't you? The journey the lifelong journey that you have for Maria and I, it's the last 13 years of knowing that that's what marriage life has looked like.
And so it is with our Christian walk as well.
It's an experience that we have with Jesus and we grow in love and through our relationship in him, which that love is a choice, isn't it? And Jesus calls us to love sacrificially. He's our example of that.
But we know that we can't sustain this lifestyle on our own and we would struggle to do that. We need a kingdom shaped heart. And that's my third point, is that we need to seek the kingdom first. A disciplined life in Christ.
Jesus tells us in the story of Luke. If you look through Luke, there's the parable of the rich fool.
A man, he's trying to create these bigger barns to store more and more wealth.
He says, take life easy, eat, drink and be merry. And God says, you fool, but tonight your life will be demanded from you.
Then Jesus says, this is what it will be like for anyone who stores up things for themselves but is not rich towards God.
And so we're not to worry, not to let go of worry. Jesus continues in Luke 12:22 25, he says, then Jesus said to the disciples, therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or what your body, or about your body, that's what you will wear. For life is more than food and your body more than clothes. Consider the ravens. They do not sow or reap. They have no storeroom or barn, yet God feeds them. And how much more valuable are you than birds?
Who of you, by worrying, can add a single hour to your life?
Since you cannot do these little things, why do you worry about the rest?
He also goes on in verse 27 to say about the wildflowers as well.
Interesting thing here is ravens were birds that were considered unclean in the Jewish system, yet God feeds them. Wildflowers grow in harsh conditions, yet God clothes them with beauty.
When I was at uni, I only lived off youth allowance. And I remember choosing, do I focus all my time on my study or do I continue to seek first the kingdom and to go to Bible study and have fellowship and teaching and breaking of bread and prayer.
And through that choice, God provided what I needed.
Not always what I wanted, but he provided what I needed.
And so we need to seek first the kingdom.
In Luke 12:30 it says, for the pagan world runs after all such things, and your Father knows that you need them, but seek his kingdom. And all these things will be given to you as well.
His kingdom, it's hard sometimes to define, but it's God's rule in our life.
It's our present reality, it's our future hope.
It's a transforming power.
It's our call to multiply mission, our mission to multiply disciples.
And to do this we need to have a life with eternity in our perspective.
Life with eternal perspective. Jesus says again, following on in verse 34, for where your treasure is there, there your heart is also.
He's not against our possessions, he's against the possessions possessing us.
Worry diminishes when we trust in God's eternal promises and what is making in our life that greatest treasure.
See, yeah, like I said, worry diminishes when we trust God's eternal promises and make him our great treasure and not the things around us.
Can I encourage you maybe to do some homework today when you do get home?
Look over your worldly possessions, what you've accumulated, what really is a blessing from God. And I honestly praise God for it. Praise God for the things that he has given you that are a real blessing in your life, that you use.
But what is also been the storehouse? What are the things that we've stored up that we can't really take with us when we go into eternity? What are we going to leave behind? Do I really need to hold on to that?
Then maybe write a list of what are the heavenly ones, the kingdom experiences that you have, that you really treasure and want to tell people about those kingdom experiences.
And can I urge you to cultivate a habit of storing up those heavenly treasures, those experiences working in the kingdom for him.
And now we come to the heart of the invitation. And this is for us as a collective, as a church, to be in mission for him. It's to live out this collective mission of love.
It says in Acts 46, again, meeting in their homes, meaning their orcas, their households being hubs of hospitality and belonging and mission. It says every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes, in their oikos, and ate together with glad and sincere hearts.
We can do the same.
Now I've been focusing on loving our neighbour, but consider to consider our literal neighbours around us.
As I mentioned, oikos also means family members, means work colleagues. It means parents at our school that we connect with whoever is God is showing us to be a person of peace.
For me, that's a word that I don't have really time to unpack fully Here. But I like the little acronyms or phrases of A person of peace is someone who likes you, listens to you and serves you.
I remember having this moment when I was at the soccer ground watching my daughter play soccer and the fellow beside me started chatting and I told him I was a pastor, which is usually a moment that kills conversation or creates it.
And he actually went on kind of defending the church and kind of was talking about how we've lost the values in our society that the church really helps hold up.
And so I was like, well, he likes me, he's listening to me, but he hasn't served me yet. And then at the end he said, oh, if your daughter ever needs a lift or anything, I'm more than happy to help. I was like, ah, he's a person of peace. He's someone that maybe I need to have these conversations with.
So who are the ones that God's connected you with that you could be that household of hospitality, belonging and mission to. And this is so the last thing I want to leave you with is this kind of bless strategy. And this is maybe something for if you're in a life group or in a Bible study group you might want to take note of and talk about this week is this blessed strategy. It's a simple but powerful way for us to be this Oikos family on mission. And so first off, we begin with prayer. Can we be praying for neighbors by name? Or maybe it's those people of peace in our life that we go, oh, I think I need to be more aware of what God's doing in their life.
So we're praying that God would show us a way forward or show us who he wants us to connect with, to be this loving neighbour.
We need to listen, we need to ask questions, hear their story, hear more about their life. The people that God's laying on your heart, maybe it's right to ask them to a meal together to build trust.
Talking over a meal does far more than probably listening to me here preach because you get to hear from each other and you get to share what's really on your heart and what God's doing in your life.
So we eat together.
The S is we serve. We look for small ways, practical ways that we can help one another.
And finally we share our story. Share your story when the time comes, right. Share what Jesus means to you. Your neighbor says, what did you do over the weekend?
I was at church on Sunday and this preacher told me I should love my neighbors or what it is that the message from this message today has really captured your heart. Say, oh, I was really excited about what they said about this, or I really love listening to this song or what it looks like. It doesn't have to be a four point message, but just simply what God is getting your attention with and what stories are right to share in that moment.
And so this is how, as ordinary Christians, we can share in becoming a neighbourhood oikos. Or what we're looking at at Newstead is how do we become neighbourhood chaplains?
Begin with prayer, Listen, eat together, serve, share your story. It's something that we're going to be exploring more of. But I was part of a group looking across Launceston about loneliness and how we can have initiatives to engage. I guess it's a little bit like the 20 pastors getting together and saying, how can we serve? And one of the ideas is, well, how do we just be good neighborhood chaplains? How do we invest and train people to do these things? And to be honest, it's not too difficult, but it's something that we do need to be intentional about, you know, have the margin for overcome our fears and any misconceptions because we live in a world that for many feel unseen, they feel unsupported, they feel alone, a little bit like as we connected with and shared over communion.
But God has a place, his people, he's placed his people in every street, in every block and every Oikos.
And we're called to be neighbourhood chaplains, or witnesses, if you prefer the term witnesses of Christ, his love in action on these streets.
So imagine if every Christian greeted their neighbours, listened deeply, offered help, shared a meal and lived the kingdom shaped love that we are called to do.
I think our neighborhoods would be transformed, don't you?
So can I encourage you to start simply this week? Greet a neighbour, maybe you don't know well, ask how they're going, particularly as it gets a bit colder, you know, as comfort grows. Invite them for a coffee or a catch up, whatever that looks like. Listen to their story and offer support where you can.
Each small act reflects the love of Christ in practical ways.
Let us commit to being instruments of God's love, transforming our neighbourhoods into spaces of hope and belonging.
Together we can embody the call to love our neighbors as ourselves with courage and compassion.
So let's go forth, reflecting the light of Jesus in a world that desperately needs it. Would you say Amen to that?
Let me pray.
Heavenly Father, we come before you today with hearts full of gratitude and anticipation.
We thank you for your call you have placed on our lives of these faithful men and women who want to answer this challenge to serve as neighbourhood chaplains or households of hospitality.
We ask that you would fill them with your holy spirit, equipping them with wisdom, compassion and courage as they go out to their communities.
Lord, we commission them today to be your hands and feet in every neighbourhood they serve.
May they be instruments of your peace, bringing comfort to the hurting, hope to the weary and love to the lost.
Give them the ability to listen deeply, to understand the needs of those they meet.
To speak your truth with kindness and grace.
Empower them to walk alongside others in their moments of joy and in sorrow, always pointing them towards the light of your love and the hope found in Jesus Christ.
Father, we pray that you would protect this church as they step into challenging situations and bring light into the darkest place.
May your presence be evident in their words, their actions and their prayers.
Bless their efforts, Lord, and multiply their impact so that they may be in their neighborhoods, so everyone in their neighborhoods will come to know you.
We commission them today knowing that you go before us, alongside us and behind us, guiding our steps and strengthening our hearts. We pray these things in Jesus name. Amen.
