Kingdom Kindness
Dr. Robert Gorrell
Part of 50 Days of Kindness
September 29, 2024

An expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” 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 he said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.”

But wanting to vindicate himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” —Luke 10:25-29

We are living in what Arthur Brooks in his book Love Your Enemies calls “a culture of

.”

Brooks warns that we are in a time where we

our opponents and believe we have the right to destroy them because they believe differently than us.

On the first Sunday of our series we learned about the Hebrew word for kindness:

.

Last Sunday Pastor Brandon made the important distinction that kindness is much more than just being

. Niceness is about being . You can do it without even being kind.

Kindness is focused on the needs of the

.

This week we are going to look at that ‘other’ and the kind of radical

kindness Jesus calls us to show.

Jews and Samaritans

each other.

The parable of the Good Samaritan turns all the

. Two religious professionals neglect a fellow Jew who was almost beaten to death, while a Samaritan was “moved with ” to help him.

“If your audience construes abnormal things as normal and vice versa, you have to make your vision apparent by shock; to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind, you draw large and startling figures.” —Flannery O’Connor

Jesus

us with the “Good” Samaritan. But that’s not all Jesus intends. He doesn’t merely shock us. He wants to us what living the life of kingdom kindness is like.

Luke writes that the religious expert “stood up to test Jesus” with a question. What must he do to inherit eternal life? I think this is an

and real question.

When Jesus asks him what the Scriptures say, the expert in the law quotes the two “greatest commands” — Deuteronomy 6:5 about the love of

, and Leviticus 19:18 about love of .

Knowing the good isn’t good enough without

the good. If you want to truly live, if you want to inherit eternal life, said Jesus, show to your neighbor.

In telling the story of the Good Samaritan, Jesus flips the man’s question. The right question is not, “who is my neighbor?” Rather, the right question is, “who

like a neighbor?”

“The priest and the Levite ask, ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’ But then the Good Samaritan came by, and he reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’” —Martin Luther King, Jr.

Action Steps

Sunday, Day 37:

at someone you don’t know.

Monday, Day 36: Say hello to a

.

Tuesday, Day 35: Give someone your “good”

.

Wednesday, Day 34: Feed someone who is

.

Thursday, Day 33: Call someone and

them.

Friday, Day 32: Ask someone for

.

Saturday, Day 31: Show a stranger

kindness.

My additional notes:

”.