This is the way of love- Chris Griffith.

So I would say I'm a part of the New Culture family, extended family. My name is Chris Griffith and I have the pleasure of being alongside my beautiful wife, Sarah, right here. She traveled with me. We pastor a church in Chicago called Rhythm Church and I was so, so glad to be here. I'm so grateful for my wife. I could not do this thing called church planting and pastoring without her. And we're just so grateful to be in New Culture. We're thankful for Abbie and for the relationship and everything we've been able to build and be the kingdom of God together.

I think how many know that it's not just about one church name, but it's about one name and that's the name of Jesus. And so we endeavor to do that. We endeavor to link arms with people who are passionate about the kingdom of God and seeing God's kingdom come to pass here on earth.

We are in a message series. We've been talking. The title of the series is This Is The Way. We're looking at the book of Luke. I think one of the things that this message series has really done for me is help me see how to actually practice and follow Jesus. You see, in a world where things are very chaotic and there's many streams and many different facets or nuances of following God, I just think it's important that we have it laid out clearly and plainly for us, what it looks like to be people that follow the way of Jesus.

So today I would encourage you with the thought: this is the way. We're at Luke chapter 10. Last week we were at the beginning of Luke chapter 10, and this week we're diving into a very popular passage of scripture.

The Question of a Lawyer

On one occasion, an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. Teacher, he asked, what must I do to inherit eternal life? Jesus asked, what is written in the law? How do you read it?

He answered:

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength and all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.

Luke 10:27

Then Jesus said to him:

You have answered correctly. Do this and you will live.

Luke 10:28

But then he wanted to justify himself. So he asked Jesus, and who is my neighbor? That's an important question. We'll be talking about that today.

The Good Samaritan

In reply, Jesus told this story. 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 passed on the other side.

So too, a Levite, when he came to the place, saw him and passed on the other side as well.

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 oil and wine on them. 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 it to the innkeeper. Look after him, he said. And when I return, I will reimburse you for any expense that you may have.

Then Jesus asked, 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 answered, the one who had mercy on him.

Jesus told him, go and do likewise.

The Gospel in Two Phrases

So I want to talk to you from this title, this thought: this is the way to love. This is the way to love.

At the beginning of the passage, they're asking Jesus this question: what does it mean to inherit the kingdom of heaven? What does it mean to get eternal life? What does it mean to be and live with Jesus forever?

Jesus pretty much synthesizes the gospel in one very succinct phrase. The answer comes back to this: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your soul, with all your strength. And then love your neighbor as yourself.

I know that can seem overly simplistic. It can be like, well, that's it? That's all you have to do to follow Jesus? That's all you have? I want to submit to you today that those are the two takeaways.

The gospel can be summed up into two phrases. Love the Lord your God with every fiber of your being, and then love your neighbor as yourself. Both phrases are extremely important. If you are to follow the way of Jesus, you can't just do one. You got to do both.

You can't just say, oh, I'm going to love God and that's all I'm going to do and I'm just going to be alone in my corner. But no, there's something additional that God is asking us to do.

Love the Lord with All Your Heart

Let me dive in to that first phrase. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.

What does it look like? Number one, I think it means this: it means with every fiber of my being, everything that I am must be in alignment, in correlation to God. I heard it said like this: what integrity actually is, is when what we do, what we say, what we think is all in alignment.

And so when I think about what it means to love God with every fiber of my being, it means that if one piece is out of whack, I can't truly be loving God with all my strength, with all my heart, with all my mind, with all my soul.

I think about the passage where it talks about the heart. That out of the heart, every issue of life flows. That at the basic level of who we are, it comes from our heart. Show me a person's heart and I can show you their future. Show me a person's heart and I can tell you: is this person really surrendered to the life of following the way of Jesus?

I think that loving God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength also means that we no longer live for ourselves. That life isn't just so that I can make a name for myself, or that I can be an influencer, or have all these followers or likes on Instagram, or so I can be looked to as a person of notoriety, a person that has status, a person that has things. Life is not about those things.

Life, when we decide to follow Jesus, is no longer for ourselves. What it really means to be a follower of Jesus is we have the posture of a surrendered heart. That our heart is saying: Lord, not my will be done, but your will be done.

I think about Jesus. He's in the garden. He's praying to God. And God, he's knowing he's about to go to the cross, to die for the sins of the world. And what was Jesus's prayer? He said, Father, not my will, but your will be done.

If you're going to be like Jesus, if you're going to follow Jesus, you must take up the posture of surrender and say, whatever happens in life, God, I'm surrendered to you. God, what do you want to do?

I'd say it like this: we cannot live the type of relationship or fellowship with God that just says, OK, I'm just going to go out and do my own thing and hope that God blesses it on the back end.

Our posture and our mindset must change. We must change our perspective and our outlook. Our outlook must be first: God, not my will. Your will be done in my life.

Following Jesus, loving God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength doesn't make us perfect. But following Jesus means that it should change you. That when we are leaned in, when we say, I love God with all my heart, mind, soul, strength, it doesn't mean that you're going to be perfect. It doesn't mean that you're not going to mess up. It doesn't mean that your life never encounters obstacles.

It doesn't mean you don't get frustrated. It doesn't mean any of those things. But what it means is that your life is different.

If any man or woman be in Christ, they are a new creation, a new creature. The old has passed away and the new has come.

2 Corinthians 5:17

When you come into relationship with Jesus, your life should look different.

Love Your Neighbor as Yourself

I'd say it like this: is that we cannot live the type of relationship or fellowship with God that just says, OK, I'm just going to go out and do my own thing and hope that God blesses it on the back end.

Our neighbor is everyone. Right? According to the Thompson Bible Concordance, the definition of neighbor is: any other man or woman, irrespective of nation or religion, with whom we live or whom we chance to meet. Simply put: who is my neighbor? Everyone. Right?

I love that. It's like, you didn't have to use all those fancy words just to say everybody. Who is my neighbor? My neighbor is everyone. People that I haven't even yet to meet. That is my neighbor.

So when I think about this sentiment or this phrase that's being thrown out here, you really have to define who is my neighbor. And our neighbor is everyone.

So when I think about what it means to be like Jesus and to follow the way of Jesus, I think we have to love like Jesus loved and run and live like Jesus lived. Jesus is saying, love everyone.

Now, if we're being honest, I think we can find ourselves in this story of the Good Samaritan when we look at the passage. I think if you look at the passage, you see two men that see a man who has just been beaten and robbed and just is down. And how many times do we, as Christ followers in our everyday life, do what the first two do? Do who would see something, see a problem, see an issue, see someone hurting, and decide to walk on the other side of the road?

I'm guilty of it. I do this all the time. In Chicago, you don't know what's going to happen, so you see somebody on the side of the road, legitimately, and you may just like walk on the other side because you don't want any situations or anything like that.

But how many times do we do that? And so when I'm looking at this, I try not to get too judgmental, but I find myself in these moments of how often am I in a hurry? So in a hurry that I miss what God may be trying to say? How often am I in a hurry that I miss the miracle that God could be trying to bring to pass right in front of my face?

You see, a lot of times as Christians in the church, we pray for God to do these amazing things. God, save this person. Heal this person. God, we need a financial miracle. God, I need a miracle in my relationship. God, I need help at school. God, I need help with getting this job.

We pray all these big prayers and we're praying for miracles and those are amazing. And we believe that God is the God of miracles. But what if God is trying to do a miracle by just getting you to cross the street? What if we're missing the miracle that God is wanting to do right in front of our face?

The True Measure of Loving Your Neighbor

Now, when we think about a neighbor, let's think practically for a second here. Sometimes when we're thinking about a neighbor, we only think about people who are in close proximity to us. My physical geographical neighbor to the left or to the right, or we live in an apartment, or a three flat in Chicago, so my upstairs neighbor, my downstairs neighbor. That's how we kind of think as neighbors.

Maybe it's people in my racial community, people that have the same ethnicity as me. Maybe you think of it as people that are in my same school class, or maybe the same kind of year in school, or maybe it's the same socio-economic bracket we would find ourselves in. That's what we kind of consider a neighbor.

But again, the point is: our neighbor is everyone. I mean, on the other hand, on the far opposite end of the spectrum, maybe we don't view it that way. Maybe we view our neighbor, or people that we should love like Jesus is telling, as people that are far from us. People that are maybe in a third-world country, or maybe people that are on the bad side of town, or maybe people that are super distant from us. And we say, oh, the way that Jesus is calling us to go and love all those people, and then retreat back to where we're from.

But what if God is just calling us to love the people that are around us and in the sphere of influence that we're in? And what if God is saying, neighbor is not just proximity, close or far, but what if God is saying: neighbor is everyone.

Now, I believe that if you do not love your neighbor, you cannot truly love God. Look at this verse from 1 John:

Beloved, let us love one another. For love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.

1 John 4:7-8

If you do not love your neighbor, you cannot truly love God. You cannot say, man, I love God. I'm so on fire. I'm so passionate. I want to do everything that God's called me to do. But you're not willing to cross the street. If we are not willing to love those that are around us, those that are far, near, whatever. If we're not willing to love everyone, we cannot truly love God.

In this love, it is not that we have loved God, but that he has loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation of our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.

1 John 4:10-11

Here's a good one:

No one has ever seen God. If we love one another, then God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.

1 John 4:12

The point to the two phrases is that love your neighbor as yourself isn't just a throw-in. It's not just the end of a sentence: oh, you know, and love your neighbor as yourself. No, it's so important to actually loving God that when we love God and then we love our neighbor, it actually means that God's love is being personified. That the person of Jesus is visiting people through the love of God that's shed abroad in our hearts.

Love as the Answer

In this divided world we live in, because we know that this world is divided over just anything. We can divide ourselves over anything. You want to start a fight? Go on Facebook and state an opinion. You started a fight. You started World War 3.

So when I think about that, I think about how divided our world is and how easy it is to be just so combative and divisive. And I think about this and the reality is that loving your neighbor as yourself isn't just some fleshly plan, or some cool idea that you can just do in your own ability or own strength.

In order for us to love and show the love of Christ to our neighbor, those that are different from us, those that we have so many differences from, those that we are divided from, we can't do it on our own. We can't do it in our own strength. And so that's why he's saying that the hope is that we may live through him.

Like I said, if any man is in Christ, any woman is in Christ, they are a new creature, they're a new creation and we live through Jesus.

2 Corinthians 5:17

Verse 13 says:

By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us his spirit.

1 John 4:13

If you are going to love like Jesus loves, if you're going to love your neighbor as yourself, you are going to have to abide in Christ. You're going to have to understand that this is not a work of the flesh. This is a work of the spirit. Only by the spirit of God can you love people who look different than you. Only by the spirit of God can you love people who are opposed or have different views than you.

Yet and still, these things are very drastic. These things can be huge. But again, the commandment is not to only love those who look like you, who vote like you, who talk like you, who listen to the same music as you, who dress like you, who go to the same school as you.

The commandment is to love your neighbor. And that's everybody.

So as we close, I just had three really quick thoughts based on the passage. And then we're going to sing a little bit and respond.

The first thing is this: if we're going to follow the commandment to love God, that means we have to love everyone. Our neighbor is everyone. It's every single person. It's the person that you're frustrated with. It's the person that hurts you. It's the person that blasts you on Facebook. It's the person that you see and feelings boil up inside of you. It's everyone.

And again, like I said, this is not just something you can do and just try to power through and like, oh, I guess I'll love that person. I guess I'll help that person. This isn't one of those things.

The second thought is that if we're going to love our neighbor, love is a work of the spirit. We're going to have to take the posture that this is going to take God for us to truly love our neighbor. We're going to have to take the posture that says: not by my might, not by my power, but by your spirit, God. By your spirit. That's how I'm going to love people. That's how I'm going to love people who hurt me. That's how I'm going to not live in bitterness or walk in unforgiveness. It's by choosing to love a person like myself.

And then the last thought is just this: we can truly love our neighbor because he first loved us.

So putting everything together: we talked about loving the Lord your God with all your soul, all your mind, all your strength, and then love your neighbor as yourself.

When I began to read that, one of the things that got impressed on my heart was that many people struggle with this idea of how do I love these people like I said? Maybe they've done something to me. How do I like forgive? How do I move on? How do I press forward? How do I do this commandment? Because this isn't a suggestion. It's a commandment. How do I do this, God? How does this walk out practically?

And it brought me back to that verse. And reading on first pass, like I said, it didn't seem like it's just a throw-in. Like love your neighbor by yourself. But I really do think it's profound that when we think about what it means to love our neighbor as ourself, it literally means to like take that other person and put them in our shoes. Think about it for a second. God, we can love our neighbor because God first loved us. Think about what we were. Think about when we were dead in our sin. Think about when we were far from God. Think about when we were not walking with God. Think about our lives.

And I think about if I'm truly going to love my neighbor, I'm going to have to give that person as much leeway as I give myself. And that's hard. That's tough, right? I've been hurt. People have done me wrong. And I'm honest. I'll be honest with you today, you know. There's a couple people if I saw on the street today, we, you know, we pray and lay hands on them today for sure. Emphasis on laying hands.

And so, you know, I mean, yeah, I get it. I get it. But guys, this isn't a suggestion. This isn't just, hey, love them if it's convenient for you, or love them, you know, if they didn't do anything wrong or if it's not justified. But actually love them as yourself.

And so I just think it's a good opportunity to respond to the command of God. As we look at what it means to be a good neighbor, what it means to be and follow the way of Jesus. I think about this church and I think about the influence that you have in the city and on this campus.

What would it look like for you to love your neighbor around you? What would it look like for you to share the love of Christ? So many people in this world want to go out and I'm not trying to make anybody feel bad. But some people want to go out on the street corner and yell at people, tell them everything they've done in their life. But I don't think that's the way of Jesus. I think the way of Jesus is to love our neighbor as ourselves. The way of Jesus is that by the goodness of God, it will draw people to repent. It will draw people to the heart of God.

When we decide to say, God, I'm going to love that person. God, I'm not going to ignore that person. God, I'm not going to walk away from the situation that you may have lined up for me to just be the thing that helps this person.

I'm not trying to tell you that you need to be the next every time you see somebody on the side of the road that that's supposed to be you to stop. I'm not trying to say any of that stuff. But I'm just trying to ask you the question: what if God is calling you to love your neighbor as yourself?

So as we close today, I think it's just a great opportunity like I said. I just feel a special sense in the room that maybe in this moment you hear the message and you hear the words that I'm saying and they jive and everything is cool. But maybe there is a person right now that you just, it's hard to love them. Maybe there is a situation where God is calling you past your flesh and calling you into supernatural love for that person.

I just think this is a great moment to respond and to allow God to say: like, say to God, like, God, not my will, but your will. Not my preferences, but your preferences. Not my human love, but your love.

And so we're going to stand. I'm going to pray, and then I'd just like to love us to sing just a little bit of this song. Super simple song. And like I said, I feel like this is the moment to respond to God. And so what we're going to do is, as we sing, I'm just going to stand down here at the front. And if you need prayer, we'd love to pray for you. And we'd love to just, whatever situation it is, maybe it's a really bad situation. Somebody, you know, has done something so unexplainable, so like, we'd love to pray with you.

Because I believe that there is no situation that God can heal. There is no situation that God can restore. And God is faithful. And God is saying in this moment: my way is better. My way is better than holding the bread. My way is better than letting bitterness be the thing that rules and controls your life. Be ruled and controlled by the love of God.

So I'm going to stop talking. We're going to sing. And I'll be up here in the front if you would want prayer today. God, we thank you so much right now. We pray the prayer of God. Lord, let us love like Jesus loved. Let us love our neighbor as ourselves. Let us love God with all our soul, mind, and strength.

But God, I'm thankful for this moment where I think you're calling people to lay down a fence. I think you're calling people to lay down bitterness. I think you're calling people to lay down things that have held us back from being all that you created us to lead God. Here's what I love about God. Is that maybe in this moment, this isn't the right moment. And maybe you're going to go from this place. But let this be a seed that God has planted in your heart in your life.

Maybe you need to sit on this. Maybe you need to process. Maybe you need to all the things. But here's what I believe. The scriptures say that now unto him who is able to do far more than you ask or think or imagine. God is big enough to heal your broken heart. God is big enough to help you show you how to be a good neighbor. God is strong enough to bear the weight of your disappointment. And so I just believe that in this moment, maybe this isn't the moment for you. But let us see a seed that you begin to cultivate and water. And maybe, just maybe, you'll see something on the other side.

And so God, we pray right now for every single person in this room and the sound of my voice, that healing is in this room right now. That over situations, over disappointments, over anger, over bitterness, over unforgiveness, God, show us how to live in your love. God, show us how to be a good neighbor. Show us how to love those around us. Show us not how to just come in and walk in and try to do this thing without you. But show us the path forward with you.

Show us how to lean not to our own understanding, but to trust in you, God. Follow you, acknowledge you. And we believe that you will direct our paths. God, I pray for someone in this room who maybe feels like they are hopeless. That they will never overcome the darkness. But God, I'm so grateful that light does its best work in darkness. That you do your best work when the situation seems like it's helpless. God, we surrender. We say, God, not our will. It sure will be done. In Jesus' mighty name. Everyone said, amen.