Aches and Praise Three Hundred & Thirty One

Dear friends,   
 

If you live in the Montreal area, you may have heard that a well-known bakery chain closed their doors abruptly last week. When Karen told me this, I thought that it must have been because of fierce competition. However, this morning I heard a report on the radio that the closure was due to a family feud. Although there is an entertaining game by that name, I am sure that no one enjoys going through a family conflict.  

Those who are familiar with the Bible know that the Jews despised the Samaritans. People who know little about the Word of God may have heard the parable that Jesus told about a man who was attacked by thieves while on his way from Jerusalem to Jericho. The story is found in Luke 10:30-37. A lawyer had asked Jesus what he had to do to inherit eternal life (he was testing Jesus, but phrased the question in such a way that he revealed his ignorance i.e. how can someone do something to inherit eternal life?). After Jesus told the lawyer to love God with all his heart, soul, strength, and mind, the man asked another question: “Who is my neighbour?” 

If we’re honest, many of us have neighbours we don’t like and others we don’t know. In the parable that Jesus told, the person who came to the rescue of the man who had been hurt by robbers was a Samaritan. After hearing Jesus say that a priest and Levite passed by the wounded man, the lawyer would have expected to hear that a Jew stopped to help the injured man. The shock that the lawyer must have felt when Jesus said that it was a Samaritan who had compassion on the man is not recorded in what has come to be known as “the parable of the Good Samaritan,” but it would have been a typical reaction of a Jewish man at that time. 

In our men’s study group on Tuesday night, we looked at the concluding chapters of “Disciplines of a Godly Man” by R. Kent Hughes. In commenting on the interaction between Jesus and a Samaritan woman, Hughes points out something that I hadn’t thought much about before:  Jesus “sat down just as a tired man collapses in a motionless heap after a hard day’s work.” Jesus had been working and helping people since early morning. He could have chosen to ignore anyone else who approached him and taken a rest, but he didn’t. 

The Lord Jesus was returning to Galilee and the apostle John recorded this: “Now He had to go through Samaria” (John 4:4). This wasn’t because the road from Judea went through Samaria on the way to Galilee. The necessity, as the NIV Study Bible puts it, “lay in Jesus’ mission, not in geography.” R. Kent Hughes writes: “Big hearts, the enlarged hearts that God uses, are laboring hearts which, though weary, will willingly be expended as necessary.” The Lord Jesus gave us a tremendous example to follow: He ministered to the woman at the well, even though He was a Jew and she was a Samaritan and even though He was exhausted. May we follow in His steps and look for opportunities to share the truth of God’s Word with everyone. 

Scripture for the weekend: “I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest.”John 4:35b (NIV) 

Thought for the weekend: “We often miss opportunity because it’s dressed in overalls and looks like work.” – Thomas Edison (quoted in “Giving It All Away … and Getting It All Back Again” by David Green with Bill High)
 
 
By His grace, 
 
 

Steve               


^