so, we're going to start with Matthew 9:35. The heart of a healer. Jesus having the heart of a healer. Matthew 9:35. And Jesus went throughout all the cities and villages, teaching in the synagogues, and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction. And when he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them because they were harassed and helpless like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, "The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few. Therefore, pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his har harvest." Notice Jesus has compassion. He sees people in need of shephering and care and healing and he's urging his disciples to pray for more laborers to help in this task. So that's the first kind of context here. The second is a heart of mercy. Also in Matthew 9 starting in verse 9. Verse 9 says, "As Jesus passed on from there, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth and he said to him, follow me." And he rose and followed him. And as Jesus reclined at table in the house, behold, many tax collectors and sinners came and were reclining with Jesus and his disciples. And when the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, "Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?" But when he heard it, he said, "Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means. I desire mercy, but not sacrifice. For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners." It's an interesting passage. It's a good mixture of Jesus' heart of mercy, his willingness to confront people that are challenging or don't understand what he's trying to teach, right? Another picture of this is John 6:15 where he feeds the 5000 and then it says he flees immediately because he knows that they want to take him by force and make him a king. And he's like, they still don't get it. They don't understand what I'm trying to do. This is a good example of that as well. He talks about this language of new wine skins, right? uh later in this passage he talks about what that means when you can't hold the things that he's trying to teach right this the thing that you have you have to change your paradigm you have to have this understanding of mercy versus sacrifice and works okay so again just the heart of mercy that Jesus demonstrates during his time on earth and then the last passage is just kind of a setup Luke 10:25 through37

Luke 10:25 this is the parable of the good Samaritan And and behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, "Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?" And he said to him, "What is written in the law? How do you read it?" And he answered, "You shall 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 your neighbor as yourself." And Jesus said to him, "You've answered correctly. Do this and you will live." But he desiring to justify himself said to Jesus, "And who is my neighbor?" And Jesus replied, "A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers who stripped him and beat him and departed, leaving him half dead. Now by chance, a priest was going down that road, and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. So likewise, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was, and when he saw him, he had compassion. He went to him, and he bound up his wounds, pouring 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 in-keeper saying take care of him and whatever more you spend I will repay when you come back when I come back. Which of these three do you think prove to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers? He said the one who showed him mercy. And Jesus said to him, you go and do likewise. So it's a close call for me. This parable and the parable of the prodigal son as to which one's my favorite passage in the New Testament. Um but this one is really rich and we're all very familiar with it. So I won't say a lot now, but we will come back to it here in a minute. So the postfall world, excuse me, the impact of the fall. With that as context, then the fall. Let's look at why we have this need for mercy and healing on our world. Travis talked about it last week, right? The introduction of sin to the world in Genesis 3.

So what are some of the impacts? We're going to look at four of them this morning from Tim Keller's book, Ministries of Mercy, which does a really good job of breaking down the impacts of these into four categories. And I'm going to call them sin's work of separation. And the four categories are alienation from self, corruption of the physical world, alienation from God, and the erosion of community. So the first one, sin's work of separation, alienation from self. So we the see this demonstrated two primary ways. The first one is the separation of the body and soul. Body from the soul and the spirit. Separation of the body from the soul and the spirit. Recall in the garden when Adam and Eve first sin, as Travis talked about last week, the first thing you do is hide and cover up their bodies, right? They're naked. They're ashamed for the first time. So in other words, their first response is to now treat their bodies as something distinct from their souls, something they can physically hide from God. And they now see their bodies as something disconnected from their inner being. This idea from there on really took on a lot of forms over time. There's old philosophies, aeticism, gnosticism. In our day would probably be materialism or or dualism would be another word for it. And there's a book called Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions About Life and Sexuality by Nancy Piery, which is really solid. She goes into a lot of great detail about these philosophies and kind of how they developed and how sin I impacts our world. And I'm going to quote her a bunch of times today. So here's here's her description of this. She says, "In the ancient world, excuse me, in the ancient world, virtually all the major isms, Pltonism, Neoplatanism, Gnosticism, Manakiism, Hindu pantheism taught a low view of the material world. In these philosophies, salvation was conceived as a complete break between matter and spirit, a flight from the physical world. And to make that break, adherence adopted a regimen of aeticism to suppress all their bodily urges and desires. Now, conversely, Christianity through scripture teaches us that the body and the soul are integrally united, that humans are embodied souls. And here's a few examples where that happens in scripture where it's really clear. Psalm 63:1 is one example. Psalm 44:25, Proverbs 4:21-22,

Psalm 32:3, where it's very distinct right there, saying here are these two things that are completely connected, even though they're distinct parts of who we are as humans. And I have to say this here, and I know this is blasphemous. I disagree with maybe five things that CS Lewis ever said, and this is one of them. He he wrote one time, "You don't have a soul. You are a soul, you have a body. And I just don't think scripture actually supports that. It actually says we're both. That's how we were created. So, apologies, the Lewis family, but uh so with that in mind, uh what are the effects of creating this artificial divide between spirit and soul and body? Well, if we disintegrate the body from the soul, we end up in a situation a lot like some of those we see around us today. Think about the things we hear in our culture. Maybe the easiest one would be would be a concept like gender dysphoria, right? Or some of the other issues surrounding transgenderism where we treat our body as a completely distinct and disconnected entity from our actual humanity. A world where we've created a set of bizarre definitions of basic terms or even an inability to have definitions around those terms. Right? Nancy Piery talks about how this separation of the self from between body and spirit has created its own problems within the feminist movement. For example, she says to protect women's rights, we must be able to say what a woman is. Right? If postmodernism is correct that the body itself is a social construct, then it becomes impossible to argue for rights based on the sheer fact of being female. We can't legally protect a category of people if we can't identify that category of people. Right? That seems pretty basic, but that's because we know God made us in his image, right? And the Genesis story says God actually used dust to create our bodies. So, he used nature as a creative component of our bodies and he didn't make us disembodied flying angels, right? This was his purpose and it was his plan from the beginning. The body and the soul, the spirit were created together by God. So a second way this shows up, a second effect of this alienation is ignoring or minimizing the body. So first the body is separated from the self and then it's minimized. As I just mentioned a minute ago, to ignore the body as a part of our humanity is to simply just deny God's original plan. And beyond that, even minimizing its significance is counter to scripture. Here's another quote from from Love Thy Body. underlying the Bible's sexual morality is a remarkably high view of creation. When Paul argues against sexual immorality, how does he do it? By denigrating sexual pleasure? No. By elevating the body. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ himself? Should I then take the members of Christ and unite them with a prostitute? Never. Paul's rationale for sexual morality is that your body has the dignity of being a member of the body of Christ, the locust of his presence on earth. Paul then says something truly stunning. Your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit. The temple was a sacred space where people went to meet with God. Astonishingly, this passage is saying is that your body is where people will meet God and other people's bodies are where you will see God. That's pretty powerful, very different. We've seen this idea of completely dismissing the significance of the body grow and become more common in recent years. We hear things like, "My body does not define me or I'm not my body. And some people essentially just dismiss any need to take care of their bodies at all. It's become a more prevalent mindset in our culture all the time.

And I will say as someone who grew up in the 80s, this seems kind of at first glance very different from the culture that I grew up in, right? I feel like we often worshiped bodies, right? Fitness and sculpted bodies. There was the Hugh Hefner Playboy culture and o overemphasis on the human form at times. But if you think about kind of how that has progressed and what that morphed into, it was essentially a celebration of what I would say is almost non-human bodies, right? Think about the proliferation of cosmetic surgery and diet pills, the explosion of beauty and fashion industries. And this quote I thought really summed it up well. It's a theologian named Beth Felker Jones. She said, "The cult of the young body, the veneration of the airbrushed media produced body conceals a hatred of real bodies. Cultural practice expresses aversion to the body, right? The real body that God gave us." Thought that was pretty good. I was reminded this as I was reading how as I was reading it, like it's a twisting of the creation story, right? Where God says, "Let us make man in our image." And instead, it's kind of like we're saying, "Hey, we got it from here. We're going to go create this thing that we think's better and different right? It's what we do. A quick side note, was thinking about AI and all this, right? Feels like we're headed for a place where we say we don't even need to be around bodies at all, right? Not even real humans need to be on the other end of the chat that we're on, right? Or the computer that we're accessing. Think about how some of that thinking was exposed a little bit during COVID or the way that we do meetings now or gaming and all those things. They're just such a distinct separation of actual inhuman contact. We're not even trying to pretend anymore something that we're not, but actually getting to a point where we're saying we don't even know what's real, right? We actually want to elevate the artificial above the real, right? But I digress. I don't like thinking about it too much. So thankfully, we saw a transformation in this thinking in the church after the Protestant Reformation. Um there was those isms that we talked about earlier had started to really infest the church and there's a philosopher named Don Welton. He summarizes one of the important impacts of the reformation like this. He said perhaps nothing sets it in contrast to the medieval Christiandom more than the reformation's rejection of its denigration of the body. Within certain moral boundaries the powers of the body were fully celebrated. Once again the old texts were allowed to sing. I will give thanks to thee for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. says the psalmist who continues, "Wonderful are thy works." Right? This is how God made us. This is his creation. It's good. He said it was good, right? He made us a body and a soul. And we should not pretend that it's not the case. So there's the quote that I just read to you. All right. Uh the third then example is how what is the antidote to this? The antidote to this is sometimes so simple we can actually overlook it, right? And that's Christ's incarnation and resurrection. The cure to this separation of self caused by sin is that God from the beginning of time planned to bring restoration through the incarnation of Christ. God becomes man. He takes on flesh. He lives and walks among us in a physical body. Right? He's tempted. He suffers physical and emotional pain and anguish. He's an integrated body and a spirit. That's the way God chose to crush the division and separation caused by sin. And it's not incidental. It's actually essential to what the incarnation was. It's essential to the story of the gospel. Jesus is born of a woman. He eats. He sleeps. He emotes. He touches. He engages. One of the things that he does while he's on earth inhabiting that body is heal people who are possessed, right? Who are not in their right minds. And he restores that integration of their life, right? their spirit and their soul to their body and then he's killed, right? His physical body is actually killed. Does he just escape to heaven on wings like a Red Bull commercial? No. Right? His body is resurrected. His body is resurrected and he goes back to eating and touching and engaging and emoting. Right? And then he ascends to heaven in that same body. This was always the design, the beautiful, perfect design of creation and restoration. And as we're just thinking about across the hall, those guys learning about Islam this morning, I just can't help but see the contrast, right? That's one of the big conflicts between Christianity and Islam is they just can't imagine a God who would come take on flesh. And they would call their, you know, they call their God Allah and they would say he has all these things. They're very similar, but he wouldn't never come to earth, definitely wouldn't have died, definitely wouldn't have been tortured or persecuted, sacrifice himself, right? And yet, that's the thing that we know from scripture is what actually gives the power of the gospel, right? It's Jesus sacrifice, resurrection, the power and hope of the incarnation and the crucifixion and the resurrection. That's the victory over sin and death. So, the next impact of the fall, corruption of the physical world. And we won't spend a lot of time on this because I think it's pretty self-evident. We talked about this last week in the curse in Genesis 3. It's going to be hard to grow food and take care of ourselves. There's pain in childbirth. There's sickness, disease, decay, death. We all see it, right? Eight years ago, I started coaching girls basketball. And one of the things I would took so much pride in was that I could beat every one of my players in sprints. every day. I was It was the fastest thing in the world. I had to I had to fudge it a little bit to make sure it happened, but I always won. And last week I ran before practice with the team and uh I almost beat the one girl who was coming back from a deep thigh bruise and it wasn't even 100% yet. Almost beat her. And I went up and told her, I said, "Hey, Tren, I almost beat you." And she said, "But you didn't." Yeah, that's true. That's true. So, in eight years, my body has decayed, right? And it will continue to decay. And of course, there's obviously more serious things. I don't want to make light of it, right? Feels like almost every week there's someone we know who's diagnosed with a terminal illness or has some sort of crippling unexplained physical attack or they die at much too early in age and there doesn't seem to be good explanation, right? Other than sin, right? And we mourn these things deeply. And why do we do that? We do it because God created this perfect beautiful world and it was good. He said it was good and then it got corrupted. Right? Another quote here. "Indeed, the reason the fall is such a tragedy is precisely because humans have such high value to begin with. When a cheap trinket is broken, we toss it aside without a second thought. But when a priceless work of art is destroyed, we're heartbroken. And the reason sin is so tragic is that it destroys a human being, a priceless masterpiece that reflects the character of the supreme artist." So what is Christ's response, right? What's the response from heaven for this? And that's his work of mercy and healing.

In John Stot's book, The Incomparable Christ, he puts it this way. He says, "Jesus not only announced the coming of the kingdom, but demonstrated its arrival by his works of compassion and power." And what did that look like? Well, if you think about it, right, we have a pretty small section of our Bibles that is actually the life of Christ, right? That's that's kind of it out of our whole Bible. But in that section, there are 71 accounts and many of them are verses several verses long of miracles, 37 different miracles that Jesus performed on his earth on while he was on earth. And 44 of those 71 passages are talking about physical healing, blindness, deafness, raising people from the dead. There's another 10 that have to do with food, right? Water into wine, feeding people. So that's a lot of stress and importance on the restoration of the physical body. Again, the thing that was destroyed, the decay that was destroyed by sin. So Jesus is very interested in this. And there are a lot of dramatic healings that we see, right? people who are crying out for mercy because they have chronic painful, physically painful, socially painful diseases. They're separated from others. And why is this so important? I like what Os Guinness says about this. He writes about the verse in John 11:35 when Jesus comes to Lazarus's tomb and it says Jesus wept, right? The shortest verse in the Bible. And he says the Greek word describing Jesus emotion when he first shows up at that tomb is one of anger. It says he's deeply moved, right? He says the word is actually one of anger. And he says Jesus is outraged. Why? Because evil is not normal. The world was created good and beautiful, but now he'd entered his father's world that had become ruined and broken. And his reaction, he was furious. Jesus wept at the pain and sorrow caused by this enemy invasion that had devastated God's beautiful creation. So with that in mind, that that's the picture, right? What's the implication of that response from Jesus and by his work on earth? Ultimately, it's that we are never meant to accept death as a natural condition. Right? This isn't the way God made it to start with. It's still the enemy of creation, but it's a conquered enemy. Amen? We know it's been conquered. Paul actually says in 1 Corinthians 15:26, it's the last death is the last enemy to be destroyed. So Jesus is doing that work. He's modeling that work on earth by healing and raising people from the dead during his time here on earth. So what does that mean for us as Christians then? What's how do we further Christ's work and how has that happened over time? Well, we know first of all Jesus calls us to do this. If you look at uh Matthew 25:37,

this is the uh the end of the I think it's called the parable of the goats if I remember right. Matthew 25:37 he says then the righteous will answer him saying Lord when did we see you hungry and feed you or thirsty and give you drink and when did we see a str you a stranger and welcome you or naked and clothe you and when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you and the king will answer them truly I say to you as you did to one of the least of these my brothers you did it to me right this is just kind of another way to tell retell the good Samaritan story the love of our human beings is equated with how we love God, right? It couldn't be a lot more clear than that. And the good news is historically we've seen the church carry this command out in a lot of ways. The vast majority of hospitals and orphanages and medical clinics, nursing programs, hospice services, those were founded around the world by Christians, often by missionaries and usually church denominations that intentionally did that work as part of their missionary work. And this was true in Christianity from the very early stages. The call to action was taken very seriously and it made Christians stand out from the culture around them. We have a lot of sources that talk about this. One good one is a a book called Medicine and Healthcare and Early Christianity by a guy named Gary Fernrint. And because I know there's medical providers in the room, I have not read this book. Not going to pretend like I know anything about it other than this is really good stuff that I've seen other places too. So this is the best way to to describe it. Here he says "Philanthropy among the Greeks did not take the form of private charity or of a personal concern for those in need such as orphans or widows or the sick. There was no religious or ethical impulse for almsgiving. In contrast with the emphasis in Judaism on God as particularly concerned for the welfare of the poor, the Greek and Roman gods showed little pity on them. Indeed, they showed greater regard for the powerful who could offer them sacrifices." And then he goes on to say that "in the Roman world, human worth was not intrinsic, but something that had to be earned by practicing the virtues expected of educated people. Jews and Christians believed that human worth was predicated on the fact that each person was created in the image and likeness of God", which for Christians was directly stated in that Matthew 25 passage we just read. The classical concept of philanthropy like the Greeks and the Romans benefited the community at large, not individuals and certainly not individuals whom society would consider the least. Although all physicians were likely to endeavor to do no harm in the practice of their craft, Christian physicians were certainly more likely to help the poor than were their pagan counterparts and to oppose abortion and exposure of unwanted infants and older individuals. This is because Christian physicians were to be guided by compassion and agapeic love. The kind of love that serves without asking anything in return. Compassion requires an intuitive identification with the pain and suffering of another person. And such agapeic love is rooted in the self-giving incarnational redemptive love of God in Jesus. And here's a line he adds at the end that I really like. "Christians were to care for all those in need, not just their own. So well did the early Christians care for all those in need that certain emperors complained that the Christians were exposing the government's deficiencies in the care of the populace." How great would that be, right? If governments and NGOs's and charities were like, "Guys, we got to get this together. The church is doing a way better job than us, right? It's a powerful challenge." That would be something else. So we need to carry that that mission on. Third impact of the fall, alienation from God. So we talked about the first two, the separation. We talked about the decay and death of nature and and our bodies. And the third is the alienation from God. And the first thing I would say like say here is that Adam and Eve chose God's knowledge over knowing God. I heard this from um my son's pastor when he was going to school in Phoenix. I loved it. That's how he described it. He said, "Adam, he chose the knowledge God had over the knowledge of God." Right? And I think that's such a great description because it encompasses what I think is often a danger, frankly, in circles like ours, even at a church like FCBC. We can choose the love of information and knowledge and theology over the actual person of Christ. I had a good friend who I really respect tell me one time that he was disappointed when he went to seminary and found out there were people who loved the Bible more than they loved Jesus. Pretty powerful. Pretty powerful. Adam and Eve, you think about it, they're intimately connected with God. They're walking in the garden with him every day. They have his full attention and care. They're the only two people on earth, right? And then they get the choice to say, "Do you want to have this relationship continue or would you like to know all the things that God knows, right? That's how Eve is tempted by Satan." And they by the serpent, immediately choose more knowledge. And this is kind of the story from the beginning. We've chosen that over and over and over. We've chosen something else besides God. And what we need is a restoration of that relationship that gets separated. that separation that happened when we chose something else. And again, this is something that separates us from a lot of the other religions in the world, right? That actual real relationship with the living God.

So, I won't belabor this point, but Christ's work of mercy and healing is pretty clear when it comes to restoring that separation, right? Restoring that relationship and and bridging that separation. Jesus calls his disciples right his whole time on earth he's making continual efforts to connect with the souls he comes in contact with to talk about living water right things that are beyond this world to connect with them and restore relationship his disciples inviting people to live in his kingdom saying I'm bringing my kingdom to Earth right this is all about the mercy and healing and restoring of that relationship and then it comes our part the work of glorifying and exalting God. So again, I don't want to spend a lot of time on this, but I do want to just say this. I'm only putting it in here because it's so important. So we won't talk about a lot, but it's so important. I think it's primary and essential to the way that we live in our world. We've talked a lot with our youth in the past few months about evangelism, how we share the gospel with others, and what's the best way to connect with them. And one of the big things we keep coming back to and reminding them of and reminding ourselves of is we don't win souls to Christ. We don't restore broken sinners to right relationship with God. We don't do it through our perfect words or our clever doctrinal articulation or emotional manipulation. God calls people to himself, right? And our job is to point people to him. We are to worship and honor and glorify the God of the universe, the savior of the world. And if I could say it, point the affections of all peoples to the all-satisfying person of Jesus Christ. There's a reason. That's our mission statement, right? That's really it in a nutshell. Our job is to glorify and exalt God to tell others about this great God that we love and serve and let the Holy Spirit do the work. Our job is to point them to him. He's the author. He's the finisher. He's the all-sufficient one. We just got to tell the world about him. Really is what it comes down to. All right, and the fourth effect, the erosion of community. The erosion of community. And the big point here is sin always, always, always, always, always divides us. It always does. I love that when Jesus is asked this question about what's the greatest commandment, right? And he says, he takes the 10 and he boils them down to two, right? And he says, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and then your neighbor as yourself." And I have the chance every other week or so, I would teach a class at an organization called the Launchpad at Centennial High School. And we actually went through the ten commandments the other day at this class, and we talked about what is it that each of these commandments has in common. And if you really think about it, all of those 10 and these two in particular are about community and unity, right? Unity and that God and the God we worship together and community and the way we interact with each other. So they all thematically work. And all we have to do to look and see how sin tries to destroy that is look at the first actions of humans right after sin. Right? What's Adam's response when God confronts him about eating the forbidden fruit? She made me do it. Right? First thing he said, his first instinct, there are two people on the planet. His first instinct when he does something wrong is to say, "Well, I'm not with her." Right? It's crazy. Flip forward one chapter, right? So, community's already been destroyed there in some way, right? One chapter, Cain and Abel bring an offering to God. God accepts Abel's. Cain's rejected by God. Cain's pride is rooted. and he kills his brother. Guys, we're one family into the history of the world. We're four people in, right? And this is already what's happening. We've had a husband blaming his wife for his own disobedience. We've had a son kill his only brother because his pride is wounded. If that doesn't spell out how quickly sin divides us, I don't know what does.

It's certainly not the model of the Trinity, right? not the model of unity that we see in the person of God. So Christ's work of mercy and healing, he brings mercy and healing to the other.

Let me go back one step here real quick. No, we'll we'll skip it. Never mind. Um Christ's example bring healing and mercy to the other. One significant way we see this is Jesus goes beyond the ordinary circles of family and community to provide healing and hope and mercy. John Sto quotes um Dr. Frank Davey and says this. "Jesus reversed the social priorities of his day by demonstrating and teaching special concern for the poor, the disabled, the outcast, the underprivileged. Such people had no claim to attention until Jesus became their champion. One cannot imagine Hypocrates showing much interest in a prostitute in trouble, a blind beggar, the slave of a soldier of the occupying power, a psychotic foreigner clearly with no money, an old woman with a chronic spinal condition. Jesus not only did so, he expected his followers to do the same." So in the text of the gospels, we see Jesus touching and healing lepers. He's healing family members of religious leaders who are plotting to destroy him. He's caring for the Samaritan woman, right? the is the enemy of of the Jews, healing a man who's literally part of a group that's coming with soldiers to arrest him and offering forgiveness and eternal life to a convicted criminal moments away from dying, who's never going to be able to do anything to earn anything or or repay anything to the world. In other words, Jesus takes the other extreme. Cain and Adam are willing to sell out their own families, right? They can't even be counted on to stay in communion with their own families. Sin has torn apart the very basic, the most basic fabric of relationships.

And Jesus says, "I'm going to go the other way. I'm going to go relate to and heal and touch the untouchables, the outcasts of society, my opponents, the undeserving in the eyes of the world of healing and mercy." So there's a great phrase that I heard that embodies this and it's dangerous unselfishness, right? Jesus talks about the field being ripe for harvest and I think in this particular example it's a it's this particular area is very ripe for harvest dangerous unselfishness.

I don't know there's been a better time to exercise dangerous unselfishness or be countercultural in our world than in a culture that's so obviously broken. Obviously broken. And this phrase dangerous unselfishness comes from a speech called the mountaintop speech that um Dr. Martin Luther King gave the night before he was shot and killed. And it's a pretty famous speech. I want to share a part of it here in a minute. It's about the good Samaritan. But I want to set up a little context first just to put this in context and understanding both where we are in our culture and where we were very recently in our culture as we think about this concept of dangerous unselfishness. His father, Martin Luther King, Senior, obviously, uh, wrote a book called Strength to Love. And in that, he wrote about a distressing incident that occurred in the South in the 1950s. A carrying several young black basketball players when it was in an accident, and three of the young men were severely injured, and one of the others immediately called an ambulance. But when it arrived, the ambulance driver, who was white, stated without shame or apology that it was not his policy to help Negroes, and he drove off. A passing automobile did stop and the driver, a white man, graciously offered to take the injur injured men to the nearest hospital. But when they arrived there, the doctor on duty beligerly announced, "This hospital is for white folk only. Take these boys to the hospital for colored people." That hospital was 50 miles away. And by the time the driver got them there, it was too late. One of the players was already dead and the other two men died shortly thereafter. And commenting on this, Martin Luther King, Senior, wrote, "Probably all three could have been saved if they'd been given immediate treatment. This happened in the Bible belt, where those involved would no doubt say they were church attending Christians." So that's some of the context as Martin Luther King Jr. gives this speech. It's only 15 or years or so removed from that and we're only 70 or so years removed from that. So here's what he says. He says, "Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness."

One day a man came to Jesus and he wanted to raise some questions about some vital matters in life. At points he wants to trick Jesus and show him that he knew a little more than Jesus knew and through this throw him off base. Now, that question easily could have ended up in a philosophical and theological debate, but Jesus immediately pulled that question from midair and placed it on a dangerous curve between Jerusalem and Jericho. And he talked about a certain man who fell among thieves. And then he goes on to describe the story. And he says, "Now, you know, we use our imagination a great deal to try and determine why the priest and the Levite didn't stop. At times we might say they were busy going to uh church meetings, an ecclesiastical gathering, and they had to get on down to Jerusalem so they wouldn't be late for their meeting. Other times we might speculate there was a religious law that one who was engaged in religious ceremonials was not to touch a human body 24 hours before the ceremony. And every now and then maybe we begin to wonder whether they were not going down to Jericho to organize a Jericho Road Improvement Association. That's a possibility. Maybe they felt it was better to deal with the problem from the causal route rather than get bogged down with an individual effort. But I'm going to tell you what my imagination tells me. It's possible these men were afraid.

You see, the Jericho road is a dangerous road. And I remember when Mrs. King and I were first in Jerusalem. We rented a car and drove from Jerusalem down to Jericho. And as soon as we got on that road, I said to my wife, I can see why Jesus used this as a setting for his parable. It's a winding, meandering road. It's really conducive for ambushing. You start out in Jerusalem 1,200 feet above sea level and by the time you get to Jericho, 15 or 20 minutes later, you're 2200 feet below sea level. It's a dangerous road and it came to be known as the bloody pass. And you know, it's possible the priest and the Levite looked over at that man on the ground and wondered if the robbers were still around. It's possible they felt the man on the ground was merely faking and he was acting like he'd been robbed and hurt in order to seize them over there, lure them for quick and easy seizure. And so the first question the Levite asked was, "If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me? But the good Samaritan came by and he reversed the question. "If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?" Dangerous unselfishness. We've seen this demonstrated throughout history. People that have served in leper colonies, right? Touched the untouchables, lived with outcasts in society.

And Jesus said the fields ripe for harvest. And I don't think we could argue that's not the case now, right? how many people are on the fringes that we can reach. So let's look at the command of scripture to us. First, ask God for his mercy and his healing in your life. Right? When he says, "I desire mercy, not sacrifice." Right? Make sure that we're asking God for our own healing and our own work in our lives to be healed and be able to be a vessel. Right? I'm reminded just a couple weeks ago of Caden Crabtree being up here, one of the young men in our body, talking about just with humility, his battle with sin and his restoration to God and to his community through the sexual integrity ministry here at the church. He knew he needed help and he was met with mercy and healing both from God and from his his brothers here at the church. That's powerful. Ask God to show you before as you're trying to do this work, what do I need? How do I need to be healed? Right? If he says he came for the the sick, not the well. Right? For those who are in need, not those who are satisfied that they're righteous, we need to make sure we're in the right frame of mind.

Second, ask and look for those in need of mercy and healing. This one seems pretty basic, too, but sometimes the most simple things are the ones we need to be reminded of most. Honestly, we're so lucky to have and blessed to have rich teaching, right, and seasoned saints and spiritual maturity and wise counsel at a place like FCBC. We might forget to do some of these things in the comfort of our security and our stability, right? That can be a hypnotic drug sometimes. We can rest in it and luxuriate in it and forget that there are real needs and real pain and real suffering in the world. Not all of us, but some of us that may be something that we that we struggle with. So, be obedient. exercise dangerous unselfishness. That's the term that Martin Luther King Jr. used.

I want to add one more thought here. How many of you guys have seen the movie A Christmas Story? Okay. Remember when Schwarz and Flick get in the big contest of bravado and ends up in a triple dog dare? This is going to feel like it was a triple dog dare, but I swear it wasn't. It was just a really good way to rephrase this. I think I'm going to be the first person to quote Tim Keller, Martin Luther King Jr., and John MacArthur in a sermon.

Maybe. All right. "Forget trying to decide who qualifies for you to love them and demonstrate love without qualification." That's John MacArthur's summary of the Good Samaritan. That's really good. That's a microcosm of what Jesus tried to do the whole time he was on Earth, right? So, how often do we see someone in need pushed to the brink physically, spiritually, marginalized, and outcast and figure out ways to rationalize not helping them? Right? My challenge to me and to us today is when we hear the Holy Spirit to respond.

My old youth pastor used to tell me, "If you don't respond to the Holy Spirit long enough, you won't hear him after a while. It's not because he's not talking. It's because you've learned how to tune him out." So let's be obedient. I'm going to close with one quote here. Just an example of the impact that Christians can have on the world.

The opportunity for impact by living this out. This is from a letter or epistle to Dagnus. I recommend you read it. It's from 200 B 200 AD. This is just one quote from it. It says, "Christians love those who hate them just as the soul loves the body and all its members despite the body's hatred. It is by the soul enclosed within the body that the body is held together. And similarly, it is by the Christians detained in the world as in a prison that the world is held together. The soul, although immortal, has a mortal dwelling place. And Christians also live for a time amidst perishable things. While awaiting the freedom from change and decay that will be theirs in heaven. As the soul benefits from the deprivation of food and drink, so Christians flourish under persecution. Such is the Christian's lofty and divinely appointed function from which he is not permitted to excuse himself." It's really good charge.

So, in a minute, we're going to take communion here. And as we do that, we'll get to celebrate in a very real way two of those things being restored. Our alienation from each other and our alienation from God. Right? This is what he commanded us to do. We get to do it together. We're commanded to do it together. and it's a reminder of his sacrifice for us. Let's pray.

Lord, thank you for your word. Thank you for the truth that you give us. Help us to listen in our hearts and our spirits. Help us to be reminded of the beautiful creation you made us and to live out the way that you called us to live, and then to look around the world and see who else can be offered life and hope by the words and the hope and the peace that you've given us through the incarnation, the crucifixion, the resurrection, the power that comes with that. We say this in your name. Amen.