Who is my neighbor john ortberg

I have books that I love right in back of my desk so I can grab them quickly. That part of my bookshelf is maxed out. So what did I do? I tried my best to open a little tiny hole to force another book in there. Our lives are full.

Our lives are busy. Running from one place to another, but Jesus says to be hospitable so gonna force that book in there and make it work! Most people lived on a plot of land that their family had owned for generations and they ate the food that they produced. Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen.

Leave them for the poor and the foreigner. I am the Lord your God. Skip down to verse 18 — Love you neighbor as yourself. How do you do that? Well, he gives two commands: you leave the edges of the field.

Leave them. So that you can be a good neighbor. So that you can love your neighbor as yourself. So you get the picture…. The bigger the field, the bigger the edge. Leave the edges! Intentional margin is the thing that creates capacity for vibrant hospitality. Intentional margin. I chose that word intentionally!

Did you ever have an English teacher that was ruthless about margin around the edge of the paper? They would measure it and if it was a little bit more or a little bit less, they were cracking down on you. How much easier is it to read a piece of paper that has a little bit of margin around it? What if the best parts of your life happen in the margins? What if the most joy that you find takes place in the margins?

Or you will start reaping out to the very corners and the edges. Friends, you might want to write this down. I think this message, if we could summarize it in one succinct phrase, it could be: God is inviting us to live by design, not by default. If you start creating margin in your time, in your finances, in the space that you have and the openness to people around you, it will feel different.

Because our lives are full. So the question is how might we do this? What heart postures are necessary to say God, we want to be people of margin? We want to do that.

What does it take though? A steward is not an owner. A steward is somebody who a wealthy person entrusts with typically a plot of land, back in their day. Repeat after me: My time is not only my time. My money is not only my money. My house is not only my house. If we are apprentices of Jesus, our time, our money, our space is something that we are stewards of, not owners. Could we, just as a community of faith, just say we want to categorically reject the badge of busyness?

That in some way busy makes us important. Some of the most productive people in the world are not the busiest people. Let me say it this way: You are NOT a slave to your calendar.

You are a steward of your time. I get it, you work , but that does leave some room in there to say God, how do you want me to use this time? How do you want me to use this space? What do you want me to do with it?

Love and hurry are fundamentally incompatible. How do you create margin? One two-letter word. It was a simple thing, comparatively, to Jews divide the law into light and weighty laws. And then it starts to quote Deuteronomy You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might. And these words which I command you today shall be upon your heart. You shall teach them thoroughly to your children, and you shall speak of them when you sit in your house and when you walk on the road, when you lie down and when you rise.

This is from the passage Thomas read this morning, Leviticus Jesus answer is the story of the good Samaritan. Perhaps, we should make that person a drug addict, African-American, illegal alien, homeless, atheists, or anyone else we distrust or dislike. It includes enemies. It includes the unworthy, thus Jesus eats with tax-collectors and sinners. It includes the outcast like the Samaritan woman at noon beside a well.

It even includes those caught up in sin like another woman brought to Jesus for his judgment. It, these laws, are structural, so that all the Torah and the Prophets rest Lange and Schaff. At one stroke he [Jesus] did away with any understanding of the service of God that sees it as concerned with the acquiring of merit or with an emphasis on liturgical concerns.

What matters can be summed up in one word: love Morris I know you didn't have to go out of your way and I know how cheap they were, because you didn't bother to take the little green sticker off the cellophane wrapper". To which he said, "Isn't that the beauty of it all. I mean it is just so convenient.

Would you rather that I go somewhere really inconvenient and lose time from my schedule? Do you want me to go somewhere where I have to go to an ATM? Is that something that you want? Something that is inconvenient and costly? It sacrifices. And don't we sacrifice for the things that we really think are most important. And that is what Jesus was trying to get across to this fellow. It's about love of a certain kind, because he came and he said, "What must I be doing to inherit eternal life.

If you pass the test, you get in. If you don't pass the test, sorry. What must I be doing to inherit eternal life? And I say I am glad because we have all flunked the Good Samaritan test. I mean we have all failed. We have failed God and we have failed people. I can think of a flunking moment recently; it's not too dark.

But last fall I was approached by a man in the Panera Bread parking lot just south about a mile here and he asked me for some money. And I said, "No" for all the reasons you say no to somebody who asks you for money, because you think they will misuse it or whatever.

A few minutes later I see him sitting inside the Panera Bread and he kind of gives me a dirty look and I thought, after the fact, why didn't I just go buy him a bagel or ask him if he wanted something to eat.

It just went right over. And I sat down and did my journaling time with my friends and then later on I'm just convicted to death and I open up this little daily bread at home and you know it's the little devotional and it was about helping people in need and the story was about a woman who around the holidays created care packages and put them in her car.

Like she would get a plastic baggie and inside would be crackers and cookies and an apple and string cheese that was individually wrapped so it would keep a nice long time. She stopped at a red light and someone knocked on her window and she would just, "Here you go.

Here is something for you. We have mini care packages in our cars; 2 or 3 in mine about 7 or 8 in hers and she says, "We are ready now. The story gets worse. Besides breaking in to one of those bags when I got hungry, we at the end of the year took a little weekend trip. It was the last Sunday. We were gone from here.

We were just going down to D. We were just getting away for a couple of days. We have never driven through Georgetown; so we drive though Georgetown and it is a pretty neat place and we drive by this Episcopal Church.

It's about in the morning and out in front on the steps are about 4 or 5 homeless guys and I am thinking to myself, boy oh boy oh boy; talking about taking advantage of a captive audience you know, people coming out of church right there on the step, but then I also thought they were pretty smart.

But we are driving by and Ellen says, "Hey, we've got four bags left and there are about four guys right there. I am like, "What is wrong with you? So finally at her urging I stopped and she walks across the street with these bags and these guys are looking at her like what's this lady doing.

She hands them each a bag and they are smiling and she says, "Merry Christmas" and she goes on her way. I asked her about it and she said that was fun. She is a good samaritan.

So it's a good thing that the question is, "What must I be doing to inherit eternal life? Because we have all failed the test haven't we? We have all failed to love God fully. We have all failed to love our neighbor fully and in Luke's gospel he keeps these things together very tightly.

If you look at the other gospels Matthew and Mark you see the great commandments. The scribes come up and they say "What's the greatest commandment in the law?

I think they are namely four and I get them from the text. What motivated the Levite and the priest to not stop and help? Perhaps the answer is within us. Look within. Time, Fear, Ignorance, and Judgmentalism. And we judge people as undeserving of unconditional love.

Who were these two men who passed by the poor man lying in the dirt and blood? Or even a lawyer, like the man to whom He was speaking? He picked the two top layers of Jewish society, the priest and the Levite.

The most important functions in a theocracy as Israel was intended to be were the priest and Levite. The priests were the very people who served in the temple. These were the sons of Aaron. They offered the sacrifices, they burned the incense, they worked in the very presence of God. The Levites were there to serve the priests and assist them. Here, Jesus picks the top religious positions and posts in Jewish life and He uses them as examples.

Why did they do that? I can just imagine that their excuse for not stopping was because it was time for them to be in the temple and they were in a hurry because they were behind schedule as it was. It is extremely important that we learn to ask ourselves a question, how can I lovingly serve those around me if I am too busy? What do you say?

Even committing to the missional communities starting next week takes time. If I love God supremely, my time is His time; my calendar is His schedule and He dictates the agenda. Those who have shared this morning have all said there was a degree of trepidation, a little bit of fear on the inside. Of course there is.

There is a concern about how people will receive us. And there is a cost involved. You will have to divest in order to invest in others. Fear is always a concern. Here were these two men were probably afraid if they stopped and took time with him that they might be attacked themselves.

What if…? Once again, I want to ask, if you were that man lying there would you want someone to take the time out of their busy schedules to help you, even if it meant they might be late or miss work altogether that day?

How do you love your neighbor? By loving them as you love yourself. How do you know if you do that? Ignorance is always an obstacle to making disciples and living on mission. Do you know how much you need to know in order to disciple someone?

Just a little bit more than they do. I want to spend a little more time on this one. I think this is a huge obstacle and I see it squarely in this parable. Another reason for the unneighborly actions of the priest and Levite was because they judged this man to have received what he deserved.

They judged him a sinner. He had disobeyed God somewhere and God was bringing judgment upon him. They wanted to have nothing to do with him or this punishment from God. That was the theology of that day. I believe this is a major issue plaguing us right here. There are still religious prejudices within our hearts that says something very similar to the judgmentalism of the priest and Levite.

In other words, if you alleviate the consequences the person will never learn from their mistakes. Hear me. There is some truth in that, but there is also some religious prejudice. Are we or are we not supposed to judge sinners? We judge that they need our Savior. We are to discern their fruit and know this person needs Jesus just like I need Jesus.

We do not judge that they are not worthy to be loved. Never judge someone as being unworthy to be loved by God or by you. But we should be able to tolerate the sinner. He was too holy. But yet they were attracted to His love and acceptance of them. Our lives ought to be open to every kind of sinner there is. You better be careful because Jesus has little compassion for hypocrites. Remember, this is about eternal life. This is larger than being on mission for Jesus.

I want to deal with this because there is religious bigotry in all of us, including me. We have to first acknowledge it before we can let God deal with it.

I want you to turn to 1 Corinthians 5 and look at verses In this passage, Paul is correcting a misinterpretation of what he said to them on an earlier occasion.