Grace Thoughts

Guest (Male): Hello friends, welcome to Grace Thoughts, the radio ministry of Grace Connection Church with Pastor Tim Kelley. Grace Thoughts has been dedicated to preaching a clear Gospel of grace for over 20 years. Here is Pastor Kelley.

Tim Kelley: We are wrapping up our Discovering God series. It is again my prayer—we started the series on Mother's Day and end it on Father's Day—that hearts and minds have been expanded and challenged to think clearly and biblically. Think biblically, not necessarily religiously. Sometimes, though not always, there is a great difference between clear biblical thinking and religious thinking.

The goal of this series has been for these truths to become our core thoughts, our initial reaction when we think about God, instead of our unbiblical, man-made reaction based upon experience, upbringing, or religious concepts. What is the first impulse you have when you think about God? What are your first thoughts? We can see through this series, taking the parables and stories of the Gospels and framing them in the culture, a recurring theme has been grace, or extravagant grace.

Quoting A.W. Tozer, one of my favorite authors from yesteryear: "Without doubt the mightiest thought the mind can entertain is the thought of God. God will conform to the image of the one that created it and will be based or pure, cruel or kind, according to the moral state of mind from which it emerges. A God begotten in the shadows of a fallen heart will quite naturally be no true likeness to the true God."

Kenneth Bailey, a fellow and resource I like to use, said every interpreter is influenced by his or her country's culture, history, economics, politics, and military. The authors of the Gospels have given us the parables of Jesus in the first-century setting. To strip away those settings is to substitute them with our own. That is an important statement because when we read the parable of the Good Samaritan, most of us could recite that story.

If I look at that story and frame it in my 2015 American Western culture, I can glean from that story and even appreciate that parable, but it loses something because we translate it differently. We see through a different lens. I took a man back in the '80s. I went to Honduras and we met this young man. We brought him back to the United States. I think it was a suitcase—no, I am kidding, he was legal.

We got him back to the United States and for his first time in the States, first time out of Tegucigalpa, he was walking around and asked, "What do you call this place?" I said, "It's called Publix." He couldn't believe that there were no machine guns guarding anything and that people were just walking around picking things off the grocery store shelf. That wasn't his frame of reference. He had never seen that. That wasn't what he filtered things through.

When we read these stories, understand Jesus is talking to people living in this particular culture and they have a norm. Just like we have an American culture, they had this ancient peasant Palestinian culture. This is an intriguing thing: that culture outside of the main cities of that area hasn't changed much. Gender roles, family roles, and customs haven't changed much.

For us to read these stories, we have the ability to take them back and actually put ourselves in the frame of reference or using the lens that the first-century listeners actually heard. We can get glimpses of that through our English rendering, but we don't really get the full picture unless we are able to apply other resources to it. With that said, I am going to go to Luke chapter 10.

Luke chapter 10 says: "And behold, a lawyer stood up and put him to the test saying, 'Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?'" Remember that question, we will go back to it. "And he said to him, 'What is written in the law? How do you read it?' And he answered, 'You shall love the Lord God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.' And he said to him, 'You have answered correctly. Do this and you will live.'"

He, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, "Who is my neighbor?" Jesus replied, "A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell amongst robbers and stripped him and beat him and departed him, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road and when he saw him, he passed by the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, he passed by on the other side.

A Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was, and when he saw him, he had compassion. He went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he set him on his own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him. And the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper saying, 'Take care of him and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.'"

Jesus then asks, "Which of these three do you think proved to be the neighbor to the man who fell amongst the robbers?" The lawyer responded, "The one who showed mercy." And Jesus said to him, "You go and do likewise." Now, I am going to be referring back to some of those verses. In that culture, a teacher sits, and that is exactly what is happening here. The student shows respect for the teacher by standing.

In this case, the lawyer stands, but he is not standing because he thinks Jesus has something to actually teach him. He is standing because he wants to get Jesus off guard so he can trap him in trick questions and discredit him amongst the listeners that happen to be there. He poses the question, "Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?" Let's think about that for a minute.

I have been the recipient of a couple of inheritances when I lost my mom and dad and my wife's mom. We were recipients of two inheritances. I didn't work for anything that my father gave me. He just left his estate to me and my brother and my sister. I didn't do anything for what Barbara Steines, Peg's mom, left us. I just was a recipient. An inheritance is something I don't earn; it is given to me.

He does something. He mixes up two words here that really don't go together in the same sentence: "What shall I do to inherit eternal life?" If inheritance is a gift, can I do anything for a gift? Do my kids earn their Christmas gifts? No, I give my kids Christmas gifts because I love my children, whether they're naughty or nice. Already you see some religious confusion here.

It shows how people filter their thoughts about God through law and grace. "Let me earn it. Give me something I can earn. Give me something I can pat myself on the back for and say I've done this or I've been good or religious or moral or ethical or consistent." What can I do to inherit eternal life? Throughout the parables, Jesus is painting a picture consistently and repetitively about this extravagant grace.

The answer obviously is you can't do anything. Jesus poses the questions to the man about keeping the law. The man answers, "Love God and your neighbors and you shall inherit eternal life." So far so good. Again, trying to trap Jesus. But then he says, "But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, 'Who is my neighbor?'" Keyword there: attempting to justify himself.

What do I do to inherit eternal life? Self-effort. How do I justify myself? How do I find justification without grace? What do I do? Jesus' answer should be, or the answer he was expecting, was probably something like: act like me. Go to the temple. Be religious. Give of your tithes. Be righteous. Be moral. Be sort of like me. We'll start a righteousness club.

Or be perfect just like us. That is what we want, right? We want an elite group where we can say we have attained it. We have found God's favor, blessing, and sunshine on us by what we do, how we act, how we perform, how we speak, and how we mold in. Because once we get to that place, then it is easier to look down our noses at people.

Now Jesus embarks into this parable. We won't speak long today, but maybe half hour or less. To his Jewish lawyers and listeners, what he is about to say here is mind-blowing. We hear the story and we rehearse it well and we probably recite it to the kids, but the people hearing this had steam coming out of their ears. They are thinking, "Are you kidding me? Are you really saying what I think you're saying?"

This is so absolutely against everything we believe, everything in our culture, everything against the norm. "Jesus, are you really telling us this?" Think about the Gospels written 30 or 35 years after the death of Christ. They were recounted. The apostles went back and recounted the different teachings and the stories of Christ. Thirty years later, they remembered this story. You tell me a story, I might not remember it by the time I get home.

They remembered this story. Thirty years later they remembered it enough that they could write it down in detail. Why do you think they were so good at remembering? Because what they heard was mind-boggling. What they heard was astounding and it stuck out like a sore thumb. They all knew this was something we have never heard before. These are the things that Jesus taught. We won't ever forget them because they weren't normal or cultural; they were against the grain.

You don't forget things like that. This was likely a Jewish man on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. This is about a 17-mile journey. It's a well-worn path. It was a common road historically that went between Jerusalem and Jericho. It was traveled often. Getting mugged was sort of normal. That lines up with our culture a little bit. People are still getting mugged today. They were taken advantage of on the road because there were vast empty areas of space between locations.

It wasn't like I was driving to Ybor City yesterday for Sadie's recital and there was just a parking lot of cars. We had some girls come back from Maine. I asked, "Do you realize there are more people in Pinellas County than Maine?" There are more moose in Maine than Pinellas County, but that is a true statement. There are more people in this county than the state of Maine. You don't have to travel far to see people here. Go outside; they're everywhere. These roads were deserted.