Telling the Truth for Women

Jill Briscoe: I'm going to talk about the parable of the Good Samaritan, probably one of the most familiar of the parables of Jesus. Now remember that the parables of Jesus walked the streets of life, his life. When he begins this story in Luke chapter 10, he's talking about a man going down from Jerusalem to Jericho. Those of you who have been to the Holy Land can remember getting in a bus, which is a nice way to do it instead of a donkey, and going from Jericho to Jerusalem. At least that's what we usually do. We do not go from Jerusalem down to Jericho. Jericho is well below sea level; Jerusalem is well above on mountains.

The incredible steepness of that trip from Jerusalem down to Jericho, or from Jericho up to Jerusalem, is something that always amazes the pilgrim as we experience it. Halfway along that road is an inn. It's still there. It's now a modern inn, but it is built on the site of the only inn that's ever been there halfway between Jerusalem and Jericho. It's a wild road. There are lots of rocks. Of course, there are rocks all over the Holy Land; it's made of rock. But there are lots of places to hide. There are lots of places that brigands could hide and steal things from people and attack people.

So when Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan, of the man that went from Jerusalem to Jericho, everybody clicked in. They knew exactly what this was all about because it was an occurrence that happened over and over again, that somebody would be robbed and beaten and maybe even killed on that road. As a teacher myself, I've been really impressed as I've done this study for my own heart's good and then shared it with you, how many illustrations Jesus uses from everyday life. Just down-to-earth illustrations. Illustrations are windows; they let the light into a talk. If you have too many windows, you'll blind people to the frame and to what it's all about. But if you don't have any windows, you'll bore people.

When I look at the way Jesus used illustration and specifically in parable, I have been really encouraged to work harder myself at using illustrations from the streets of life that have walked the streets of my life and your life. That's how we can apply it to our own hearts. So life in the kingdom—and life in the kingdom is what this series is all about when you know the King and you enter the kingdom and you start enjoying the kingdom—involves loving God and loving your neighbor as yourself. Loving God and loving your neighbor as yourself.

Now you can keep a finger in the parable we're going to be looking at, but I want you to turn back to Matthew chapter 25 for a minute. Jesus gives another parable here about the sheep and the goats. He's giving three parables about the consummation of the age, the end times. What he's doing is trying to show people the urgency of kingdom work and of kingdom living. He talks about the Son of Man coming in his glory in verse 31 and all the angels with him, sitting on his throne in heavenly glory, and the judgment of the world beginning with all the nations gathered before him.

He's going to separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep and the goats. He'll put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left. Then he'll say to those on his right, "Come, you who are blessed by my Father, take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry, you gave me something to eat. I was thirsty, you gave me something to drink. I was a stranger, and you invited me in. I needed clothes, and you clothed me. I was sick, and you looked after me. I was in prison, and you came to visit me."

Then the righteous will answer him, "Lord, when did we see you hungry and sick and needing clothing?" et cetera. The King will reply, "I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me." Then he reverses it and says to the ones on his left, "You didn't feed me when I was hungry; you didn't clothe me when I was naked." So what he's doing is he's dividing the sheep from the goats. Sheep and goats don't look that alike, but they do look a little bit alike.

The idea is that people that belong to the kingdom are, in this parable, sheep. A characteristic of a sheep actually is to be a sheepdog in the East. Yes, the Eastern shepherds have sheepdogs, but when a sheep really gets into trouble and gets itself, as stupid sheep will, stuck up on a ledge and the shepherd can't reach him and nobody can reach him, and the sheepdog certainly can't climb up to the ledge, what the shepherd does is he takes the sheep that is always tripping him up—the one that stays close to his heel—and he sends that particular pet sheep, if you wish, after the lost one.

The sheep goes up on that ledge and leads the other one out. It's a characteristic of sheep to care for lost sheep. It's not a characteristic of goats; goats don't bother. Jesus very vividly is saying, "Are you a sheep or are you a goat?" One of the ways you can know that you belong to the King—and people have been asking me through this series, "How can I know? How can I be sure?"—is to look at your life, look at what you do with your time, and ask yourself, "Am I after the lost? Am I caring? Am I feeding the hungry? Am I clothing?" et cetera. Am I loving my neighbor as much as I love my selfish self?

So a characteristic of one who is in the kingdom serving the King is that we care for our neighbor. We care for our neighbor. Now you can turn back to the parable in Luke's gospel, chapter 10, and let's read it together. 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's written in the law?" Jesus replied. "How do you read it?" He said, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, mind, and love your neighbor as yourself."

"You've answered correctly," Jesus replied. "Do this and you will live." But he wanted to justify himself, so he said to Jesus, "So, who's my neighbor?" Jesus tells a parable to drive the point home. A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho. He fell into the hands of robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him, went away, leaving him half dead. A priest happened to be going down the same road. When he saw the man, 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. When he saw him, he took pity on him. So he went to him, bandaged his wounds, poured on oil and wine, put the man on his own donkey, and took him to an inn and took care of him. The next day he took out two silver coins 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 neighbor 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."

So a characteristic of someone who claims to be a sheep—a lost sheep that's been found—a characteristic of somebody that claims to be a Christian, a believer, a member of the body of Christ, is that we will look after the man in the ditch. Now the context of this story is interesting. The previous chapter, Jesus has sent out the 70 to go into every village, heal the sick, and preach the gospel. To care both for the souls of men and their physical needs. One is not divorced from the other. For years and years and years, ever since I became a Christian, there has been a debate in the evangelical church about doing good for people, about caring for their bodies as opposed to caring for their souls.

In a sense, the liberal church, if you wish, has done a wonderful job of caring for people's physical, material needs, while the evangelical wing of the church has done a wonderful job in caring for the souls of men. It was Dr. John Stott that brought the two together as he said, "You cannot divorce one from another." Read the epistle of James and you'll see. "Show me your faith by your works," says James. Works and faith have to go together. Now as many of you know, I serve a relief organization; I serve World Relief. People often ask me, "I don't want to give my money to something that just looks after people's bodies; I just want to give it to missions that just preach the gospel."

Well, let me tell you, if we can keep them alive so you can preach the gospel, that's a good idea. Somebody has got to be alive to be able to hear and respond to the gospel. Just at a very basic bottom line, we often ignore the many, many places in the Scriptures that Jesus addresses the physical, emotional, psychological, material needs of men at the expense of anything else. For the sake of the love of God in our hearts translated into practical, compassionate giving and living. This is why Jesus came, and he makes no apology for it. He says, "You show me a man who is loving his neighbor practically, and I will show you a man who loves God."

How do you know you love God? How you're treating your neighbor would give you a good idea. So as Jesus addresses the issue of loving God that this young man tests him with in the beginning of the parable, he says, "You know, you've got to love God with all your mind and heart and soul and strength and love your neighbor as yourself." Let me just address those three things at the moment, or four things. What does it mean to love him with all your heart? The heart is the seat of the emotions.

Many years ago in open-air work in Liverpool, there was a young preacher called Pastor Case, and he had a heckler. If you're going to do good open-air preaching, you always need a good heckler. In fact, when we did a lot of it in our mission work, if we didn't have a heckler, we used to heckle each other just to get an argument going, just to get interest. Cheeky Charlie was a man who heckled. Somebody asked me what "cheeky" meant yesterday; I didn't realize that wasn't an American word. It's sassy, but not nasty sassy, cute sassy.

Cheeky Charlie was Pastor Case's heckler. One day Pastor Case was preaching, and he said, "You've got to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength." Cheeky Charlie said, "What do you mean, love God with all your heart? What do you mean, Jesus come into your heart? I just passed a butcher's shop. There was a heart hanging on a hook." Now he didn't say heart hanging on a hook; he said 'art 'anging on a 'ook because he was from Liverpool. Pastor Case said, "Charlie, are you married?" "Yeah." "Did you ever do any courting? Dating?" "Sure." "Did you ever take your fiancée down to the River Mersey and sit on a bench down here and look at the moon rising up and look into your fiancée's eyes and say, 'My darling, I love you with all my blood pump'?"

"Well, no," says Cheeky Charlie. "No, you said, 'I love you with all my heart.'" I'm not talking about the heart as a blood pump, as an organ. I'm talking about the heart as the seat of the emotions, which is what the Bible speaks about. To love him with all your heart—the core of your being—involves your heart, mind, soul, and strength. Now the problem with the heart is we've got a heart problem. We're born with it. Now we've just had another grand-baby, and you know something? I understand my mother a little bit better now because when my babies were born, she used to go absolutely ballistic if I suggested they had a little sinful heart. She was very upset with me. "How could you say that about my grandchild? Look so perfect."

But that little baby is born like you and I were born: with a sinful nature. A bias. A bias to do wrong rather than a bias to do right. What has to happen is you cannot educate that heart; you cannot beat it into submission. You have to have, in a sense, a heart transplant. The heart affects everything we do. "Out of the heart of man," says Jesus, "comes evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, lies, and slander." Does this heart sound like a heart that will go to the mission field? Something has to happen to the heart we're born with if we're ever going to get down in the ditch with the man who needs help.

So bypass surgery isn't going to do it; only a transplant. You know, Ezekiel 36:26 talks about a heart transplant; it talks about the new covenant. In the Old Testament, people tried to love God with that old heart, and it didn't work. But in the New Testament, under the new covenant, Ezekiel promises, "I will give you a new heart. I will put a new spirit in you. I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws." When we receive the heart of Jesus, we find ourselves moved. God will move us. That word is the same as compassion. Compassion is having your stomach tied in knots because of people's need. Compassion moves you into practical, loving action in order to love your neighbor as much as you love your selfish self.

So the great transaction has to take place. Of course, if you're going to have a heart transplant, you need a donor. Quite a few years ago, one of our men's teams from this church went to one of the African countries and came back with two brothers. One of them had incurable kidney disease, and the other came to give one of his kidneys to his brother. Our Christian doctors did that operation and ministered to those two young men. I well remember the young man who had given his kidney to his brother giving testimony in our service here, actually in this chapel. I remember that very well. As I sat there, I thought, "What an incredible sacrifice." Actually, later his brother died, but he gave it anyway, even though it was a last effort to save his brother's life. Perhaps which of us would not do the same?

But have you ever heard anybody say, "You need a heart transplant? Take mine." I haven't. Until I look in the Scriptures and I look at Calvary, and then I see Jesus on the operating table, if you like, shaped like a cross, saying, "Father, take mine." God took the heart of Jesus and offered that heart to a world that only knew what it was to have a heart of stone, to be cold to the needs of others. He took the heart of Jesus Christ and offered it to the world in exchange for its heart of stone. When you receive his nature, then you find yourself moved in ways that you were never moved before. Ways you were never moved before.

Then it's your job to look after that heart and to have this rhythm of work and worship, work and worship in your life. So to love God with all your heart means you have to receive the nature of Jesus. It's another way of saying be converted, be born again, come to faith in him. Loving him with all your soul means looking after that relationship once you have received the heart of Jesus, as it were. Practicing the presence of God in worship and prayer. This will mean time alone, but it will also mean practicing the presence of God when you're not alone, in the crowd, in the busy place, centering down. Having that moment-by-moment relationship with this moment-by-moment Savior. That's what Christianity is all about.

So loving him with all your soul means developing this relationship with the King once you've found him. Loving him with all your mind—what does that bring to mind in Scripture? Immediately to me, it brings Romans 12:1-2 to mind. Don't be conformed, pressed into the mold of this world, but be informed so you can be transformed, those verses tell us. We need to be informed through our mind through the Word; we need to be transformed by the Word that we receive and the instructions that God is going to give us how to love our neighbor as ourselves. We will be transfigured. The word is metamorphosed. We will be like a little bug, if you wish, that turns into a butterfly. Turns into quite a different person. Instead of being selfish, we will be other-oriented. So much so that we will be able to rise above our own stuff and get involved in other people's stuff.

Years and years ago, I wrote a little poem about a bug. "Wouldn't it be lovely if a bug could stay always warm inside its silk cocoon, protected all its days? Alone in dark oblivion, no need to fly the skies. Let's face it: God's rebellious world's no place for butterflies. Now God, he made these little bugs and placed within his life so growth, the natural evidence, brings strain and stress and strife. For as she grows, the cozy case becomes a prison strong. The bug now knows she must break out; to stay a bug is wrong. At last, the struggle over, the butterfly is free to fly God's earth, upheld by him in matchless symmetry. Cries watching man: 'In God's great world, a miracle is this! From crumpled bug to butterfly, God's metamorphosis.'"

What happens is you find yourself flying. You find yourself not behaving like a bug, preserving yourself in a prison of selfishness, but you find yourself flying around God's earth, upheld by his power, a different person altogether. I remember as a teenager, one of my teachers stopping in the middle of a French class—I've no idea what I was doing, but I wasn't doing what I should have been doing—and saying, "Jill Briscoe, you are the most selfish girl I have ever met in the whole of my teaching career." I flushed. Everyone was horrified. But I knew it was true, but I didn't know what to do about it.

Of course, it wasn't until I received that compassionate heart of Jesus that I found the power to do anything about it. To stop behaving like a bug and start flying like a butterfly. It all has to do with the mind. Loving God with all your mind means if you're not going to be pressed into the mold of the world—and what is that mold? Self is the heart of it. If you're not going to be pressed into that mold, then you're going to have to inform your mind. Garbage in, garbage out; truth in, truth out. As you're informed, you'll find yourself being transformed, transfigured, metamorphosed. Loving God with all your mind means you are in the Bible and the Bible is in you. You are memorizing it, you are reading it, you are letting it flow over you, you are meditating on it. That's being informed, because God will inform you then and direct you in the daily doings of your Nazareth living so that you will begin to see the man in the ditch.

So what we think we are, the quality of our lives is related to the quality of our thinking. Giving up our body involves our mind, and that's reasonable, Romans tells us. It doesn't matter how young you are or old you are, I'm very encouraged. Gary Collins has written a wonderful book on the mind. He talks about our brain cells. I didn't want to read this chapter because I was frightened of what I'd find out. However, he tells us you and I are born with more brain cells than the stars in the sky. Did you know that? That little baby that's just been born lying there, that little baby has more brain cells than the stars in the sky. What an incredible thing! Don't you think?

Now that's the good news. This is the bad news. We lose—every one of us, are you ready?—100,000 cells a day that are never replaced. It's the only organ in the body that does not replace itself. 100,000! Now that's the problem, right? That's a big problem! Except you realize it doesn't make a whit of difference because you can live till a hundred and it won't make any difference when you have as many as the stars in the sky. What's so wonderful is that you can go on informing that brain of yours until the day you die in order not to be conformed, pressed into the mold of the world, but to have his mindset. What is his mindset? His mindset is the mindset of the Good Samaritan.

So loving God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength is what we'll address next. Loving God with all your strength has to do with lifting people out of the ditch. We love God with all our strength when we put out energy in loving, compassionate acts of service for those who cannot help themselves. So how will I and you know if we love God? If we're a sheep and not a goat? Well, if I love other people as much as I love my selfish self. I know that's irritating some of you because I keep saying it. Because we are so self-saturated. "Isn't it good to look after yourself, Jill?"

If you walk into our bookstore, you will see—if you ask our book ladies what's the bestseller—it will be a self-help book. It will be a self-help book. It will not be an "other-help" book. The section on missions is minimal; the section on self-help absorbs most of the bookstore and the authors' work in this country specifically. So let me just read you something that's really quite funny. Erma Bombeck: "During the last year, I've dissected my marriage, examined my motives for buying, interpreted my fantasies, come to grips with midlife, found inner peace outer flab, charted my astrological stars, become my best and only friend. I have brought order to my life, meditated, given up guilt, adjusted to the new morality, and spent every living hour understanding me, interpreting me, and loving me. And you know what? I'm bored to death of me."

I meet women all over the world who are bored, and they have never spent so much time self-helping themselves. Because people don't realize that it's as you lose yourself, you find yourself. You want to heal? Help somebody else to heal. That's going to take strength. Now many people say to me, actually more and more so I don't know what I'm looking like, "Who helps you, Jill? You just give out and give out and run all over the world and give and give and give. Where do you get your input and help?" Sometimes, many times, they say it sort of rather accusingly, as if they know I'm not getting any help. I haven't quite figured this out.

Well, one of my wonderful verses that I have in my Bible is Proverbs 11:25, and this is what it says: "He who refreshes others will himself be refreshed." He that refreshes others will himself—where do I get my energy from you? You give out and you receive back. Yes, physically you're tired, but in every other way, you receive back. A generous man will himself be blessed, for he shares his food with the poor. Proverbs 22:9. You give, and it comes back to you.

We're going to have a wonderful young lady come as our guest speaker to our leadership conference in September; her name is Catherine. She's either 29 or 30; I can't quite figure her age out. But I met her when she was 24. She's a leader in a favorite organization of mine, Operation Mobilization. At 24 years of age, she's a Cambridge graduate; she's brilliant. She was an English major; she loves all children's literature but also classic literature as well. She's great. She lives in Russia; she just got married last year. She ministers as a leader with her husband over all the teams that are across Central Asia and Russia specifically.

She told me—I saw her between Christmas and New Year in Holland—she said, "You know, Jill, I was going downtown Moscow and there was this poor old lady leaning against a wall and she was crying. I went up to her and I said in my bad Russian, 'Can I help you? What is wrong?' She said, 'I am just so hungry. I haven't eaten for two or three weeks; I'm just so hungry because there's no food and she doesn't have enough money to buy it.'" Her eyes filled with tears, Catherine's eyes, and she said, "So naturally in the world, I took her back with me and we shared our meal with her that night and we piled up her little basket and sent her back."

Then she said, "The next day, we had eight of our team come for Christmas." They live in a little tiny flat—two rooms, tiny—but she invited these eight young missionary young people, all single, to come and spend Christmas with her, and they shared their meager food with those people. You should have seen this girl. I'm just thinking in my mind of her bright eyes and just a young girl, but she puts her arms around the people in the ditch, whether it be the old lady that doesn't have any food or the eight young people a little homesick at Christmas time giving their lives for the Lord. You should have seen her sparkle—energy, dynamic as she even recounted the joy. He that refreshes others shall themselves be refreshed.

So you say, "Jill, I'm to love my neighbor as myself, and just who is my neighbor?" Jesus answered simply: "The man in the ditch." Who is that? You, along with the young Sadducee, may ask. The person in the ditch is the one robbed of the hope of heaven, or robbed by another woman of her husband, or the child robbed of her mother by her mother's boss, or the college kid robbed of his opportunity by the recession, or the teenager robbed of her virginity by her high school date, or the person in the ditch is the woman robbed of her reputation by gossip, or the old person robbed of their health by disease. There are plenty of people in the ditch but not ever enough Good Samaritans to go around. So being a Good Samaritan means getting down off your evangelical donkey and getting yourself into the ditch.

Now we've got a lot of excuses. What about the priest? Are we a priest? Are we a Pharisee? "No, no," we say immediately, indignant. Why didn't he get off his donkey and get in the ditch? Well, he was too busy running to Bible studies in the temple. He didn't have time. Anyway, the man had got himself into this trouble; the man could get himself out. Now before we condemn the Pharisee, remember that in each of us there is a Pharisee. I wrote a poem once about the Pharisee in me.

"One day I found within my heart someone who'd been there from the start: a prudish person self-appointed, self-sufficient, self-anointed. Though I a true disciple be, I've met the Pharisee in me. He passes people every day who've lost their innocence somewhere. He says a prayer for those poor fools for breaking his religious rules. No time for mercy now, says he; at Bible study I must be. I know the Lord rebukes my guest in scathing words at God's behest. He tells me, heed his words of strife and realize he saps your life. He hates to share my heart, you see, with him—the Pharisee in me. And why should he, the God of grace, be forced to live here face to face with him who hung him up to die against an angry, anguished sky? Who pierced his feet and crowned his head, who laughed and left him very dead? Forgive me, Lord, I beg of thee; deal with the Pharisee in me." Because you and I can be just as much a Pharisee as the man who saw the man in the ditch and passed on by.

Well, maybe that's not our excuse. Maybe the excuse is "We're a Levite; it's not my gift," he says. The Levite was a man of letters. The Levite was a scribe; he just wrote it up. He just wrote it up. He would be thinking as he looked at the man in the ditch, "Who is responsible for this poor fellow? The temple guards? How will we rectify this? Is there enough money in the temple offering to send somebody back to do something with this? Who is responsible for this man? Is the state responsible? Is the church responsible? It's a good debate; I'll ask my fellow Levites when I get back home to Jerusalem."

And you know, not only have I discovered the Pharisee in me, but I have also discovered the Levite in me. I was literally sitting on an airplane writing in a Bible study book about this parable when the guy next to me, a nice respectable young businessman, said, "What are you doing? You look as though you're writing a book." And I said, "Well, I am, actually." And he laughed, and I laughed. And I said, "I really am." And so he said, "You are?" And I said, "Yes, I am." He said, "You're an author?" I said, "Yes." He said, "What are you writing about?" I said, "The man in the ditch."

He said, "What man in the ditch?" So I sort of explained a bit, and then I just sort of cut him off and went back because I had to finish that chapter by the time I got back. I was busy writing it up. A little voice said to me, "Here's the man in the ditch." I was literally too busy writing about him to see him. So I put my book away and attended to him, and he truly was a man in the ditch. His wife had just left him; needed somebody to get their arms around him and lift him out. So you can be a Pharisee, you can be a Levite. It's very, very easy to do.

Or you can be a Samaritan. Someone who cares for the Jew. That was the twist in Jesus' story. The Jew was in the ditch. The Samaritan, who hated Jews and the Jews hated Samaritans, got off his donkey and got down in the ditch and cared for him. Somebody who is so unlike him. Somebody that he just didn't understand. Somebody who is very prejudiced about. Jesus had such a heart for people like that. He was always with the tax collectors and sinners. He was always with the lepers. He was always with the outcasts of society. And so should we be.

You know, this heart of compassion that we can grow—or allow God to grow in us—doesn't worry itself about being too busy attending Bible study to attend to the needs of the neighbors. Compassion doesn't ask, "How much will it cost me?" He didn't say, "How much is it going to cost me to put this man in the inn?" And he didn't look at his old donkey—how do we know the donkey was young?—and say, "If I put this big fat man"—how do we know if he was a big fat man?—"if I put this big fat man on my poor old donkey, I'm not going to have a donkey left by the time I get him to the inn. Then how am I going to buy another donkey? How do we know he was rich? How do we know he could afford it?" We don't. We don't know any of those details.

Compassion puts the man on his own donkey and walks to the inn. I was reminded of that when we took a young man into our home for about two years. He was just a young businessman who lost his job and then couldn't find another one. And he was out of work for nearly two years—was not for the hope of trying, I assure you. And in the end, what happened was I was practically faced with a choice. I could let that young man have my donkey and I could walk, which really meant giving him my car and hitching lifts myself, or I couldn't.

And that's where the rubber meets the road. And I had a bit of struggle about that, putting that man on my donkey, if you really want to know, because I have a Pharisee in me and I have a Levite. "Let him find his own donkey. Got himself into this mess; he can get himself out of this mess," et cetera, et cetera. "It's not good to enable him." Well, compassion doesn't ask any of those questions. Compassion does it anyway. Compassion doesn't say, "What if he doesn't appreciate me lifting him out of the ditch?" A drowning man will fight the person that comes to save him. "I don't need that. I'm putting myself out for this person; what if he doesn't appreciate me?"

I always remember Dr. David Cauling, a good friend of ours, who worked among lepers in the Sudan on these floating islands. He and his wife lived on these floating islands that people live on, on this huge lake in the middle of Africa. And they didn't have any medical care. He was one doctor for a million people. And when he came to speak at one of our missions festivals, I had a coffee for him in my home, and one lady said, "Do they appreciate the sacrifice you've made, Dr. Cauling?" And he said, "No, they don't." And she said, "Well, that must be very hard." And he said, "Yeah, it's not easy. It's not easy." And she said, "Well, why don't they?" And he said, "Well, they're of another faith and they believe that I'm doing this to get points with Allah, so why should they thank me?" He said, "I've never been thanked once for any operation, for anything I've ever done for them."

But compassion doesn't say, "Will I get appreciated?" Compassion gets in the ditch. And what we have to do is come where they are, lift them out, pay for their recovery, and follow through. Four things—and I don't have time to develop them. You have to get where they are. You have to open your home and heart, invite that neighbor in for that cup of tea, and just go where they are. Live it, feel it, put yourself out. And then you have to pay for the recovery. You have to stay in the inn; you have to look after them. You have to follow through. Don't just dump them on somebody else's responsibility bed. Check up on them.

And then, of course, if we do get off our high horses and get in the ditch, we will know that refreshing that comes when you refresh others. It will come back to you, but that should not be your motive. That's just the perks of being a Good Samaritan and helping the helpless. Now as I finish, I want to read you something from one of my favorite young people—still only in his early 30s—an OM missionary. These OM missionaries are some of my favorite people. They are in the hardest places, in the hardship places all over the world. That's their thing. They're young; most of them are single. This young man has been everywhere, done that, and got how many t-shirts? Specifically, he serves on one of the gospel ships, the Doulos and the Logos, that have a book exhibition in the base and sail into places that missionaries are not allowed, and get out there and just sell Bibles and Christian literature in the hardest places.

This is what he says. This is his testimony. He's a Good Samaritan. "I clowned for AIDS children in Romania. I did open-airs during political rallies in South Africa. I shared my testimony with a Russian new ager. I got lost in the souks of Dubai. I preached in the slums of Sri Lanka, had a day out in Malaysia. I sang to orphans at Mother Teresa's orphanage. I went to the opera in Odessa. I prayed over Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Egypt from just one mountain. I gave out tracts at a Thai water buffalo race. I chipped rust from the ship in dock at Cape Town. I sang praises to God, Paul and Silas style, at 2 a.m. in a Turkish prison for my faith.

"I have been a cog in the Doulos ministry. I've shared my home with people from Albania to Zimbabwe. I've experienced discipleship, hardship, friendship, workmanship, leadership, worship, fellowship, stewardship, and worship on God's ship, the Doulos. Be nice to have another life." So do you love God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength? And do you love your neighbor as you love your selfish self? Let's pray.

Dear Lord, we need to make so very sure that we are indeed your sheep and not your goats. And Lord, it's pretty easy to find out if we look at our lives—what we do with our time and energy and money, who we pray for, where we get involved. Help us to make sure that we belong to the King. And Lord, if we do, help us not to be ashamed when you come and you ask us, "Who did you clothe that was naked? Who did you visit in prison? Who did you feed that was hungry?" Lord, help us develop our relationship with you in such a way that it spills over in loving, practical service to the man and the woman and the boy and the girl and the child in the ditch. Show us what it means to come where they are, to get off our high horse, to humble ourselves, to get our arms around the problem, and to pay the consequences of our involvement. Make us Good Samaritans. We ask it for the kingdom's sake and the glory of the King. Amen.