Building a Community that Loves the World [Part One: Loving Our Neighbors]

A Message from the Parable of the Good Samaritan

Sermon by Jamie Wilson @ Coast Vineyard on October 19th, 2008

Some Reasons We Fail to Love When It Matters Most

  1. We think we lack the time.
  2. We think we that we lack the resources.
  3. Fear.

Compassion in Action

  1. Compassion is always a risk.
  2. Compassion is a commitment to care regardless of the cost.
  3. Compassion is a commitment to care regardless of the results.

Build a Church that Loves our Neighbors

  1. We will need a willingness to love people in their place of need rather than our place of comfort.
  2. We will need courage.
  3. We will need Spirit given expectation.

Jamie opened up his sermon acknowledging that our culture is one that “passes by on the other side of the road” in respect to crisis.  We come to the point where we all too often avoid and secretly cringe in the face of friends sharing their problems with us, evaluating if we really have time and energy to deal with what they are dealing with, on top of the pressures that society has already placed on us.  We are already so stretched and our resources so expended, that we fear an overwhelming crisis to which we have no answer or solution for.  But Jamie encouraged us that it is in that “effxiating weakness that we can give God,” if only we would have the courage to walk off the road into the crisis.

Compassion definitely has costs, emotional, phyiscal, financial, etc.  But I would dare to say that compassion and its associates costs are more like investments.  I do not believe that they are just costs, where what we give goes into some void and is never seen again.  Instead I hold onto the idea that our compassion and its emotional, physical and financial costs have great returns even when the outcome is not what we might expect or even hope for.

Jamie closed his sermon acknowledging that our culture is trending towards one where “No one will come to the church without being loved first.”  Or maybe it has always been that way, if you consider what church really is.  When we consider that to love, is to set to achieve what is good for the object of that love, we realize that loving people in their place of need rather than our place of comfort is common sense.  I’m guilty of not looking to God for a Spirit given expectation for the results from investing in the Kingdom with compassion and the costs associated with it.  But it is time to change my vision of compassion and God’s power in respect to that!