Love People

The 7 Verses Jesus Loved is the name of our series leading up to Easter. My name is René, another one of the pastors here at Twin Lakes Church. And to follow along with my ramblings today, you can use your message notes and there's an outline right in the middle of those. And we've got some more stuff in there that you might want to know about.

Now, I want to just kind of open my heart here as I start the service. Because when I was preparing this week for this message, I noticed that I was... I can't describe it. I was finding that I was having a hard time getting to the text. And it was having a lot of strange emotions surrounding it. And then I realized that the last time I preached on the verse that we're going to be talking about today, the last time was three days after my mother died, about 10 years ago, almost 10 years ago now. And I haven't come back to this specific verse until then.

And I realized that on a subconscious level, this verse was bringing me back to my mother's final days on earth. She passed away. She'd been in declining health due to Alzheimer's disease and then took a turn for the worse. My sister, Heidi, and I had been caring for her in our homes alternately. And then we kept vigil with her at her bedside and she passed peacefully in her sleep.

And then I had to fly home from Oregon and to prepare to preach here. And then something amazing and beautiful and unexpected happened. Immediately following her death, right in the days leading up to the message, I started getting flooded with comments, email, social media, and so on, letters, remember those physical letters. And from people I didn't even know who were telling me how much my mother meant to them.

Would you like me to read some of those comments? Well, too bad because I'm going to. But total strangers were telling me things like this. Years ago when I was a child, when I learned that my mom and dad were splitting up, your mom came over and spent the day playing with me and encouraging me and loving me. I never, ever forgot that. Another wrote this, "My elderly mother was recovering from surgery and for weeks your mother came over to clean her house and to bring her meals." And another wrote, "Her loving smile is what welcomed me into the lobby at Twin Lakes Church when I came so timidly knowing no one." And it went on and on and on. These just piled up.

And I realized that what was happening as I prepared this week to come back to this text was on a subconscious level I was remembering how all those things came in about mom and how struck I was by how mom really lived out the words that we're going to look at today. Words from Jesus about love. Words that not only changed her life but changed really the course of human history.

But before we dive into today's verse, a quick recap is necessary. As you saw two weeks ago now, a man asks Jesus this commandment, this question rather, which commandment is the most important of all the commandments? And it was a tricky question because back in his day, the religious teachers, as you'll recall, had taken the Ten Commandments and had turned them into 613 commandments and had surrounded them with hundreds of fence laws and had surrounded them with thousands of sub-commandments. And so it became impossible for the average person to even know all the commandments in his tradition, let alone keep all the commandments.

And so it became a real controversy which ones are we supposed to actually pay attention to? And maybe you can relate. Maybe you were raised in some form of religion, Christianity or another religion, that had so many rules the way it was presented to you that honestly you never really understood it. Well, what if Jesus Christ was here in front of you and you could ask him, "Could you please take all this and just simplify it?" What do you actually want me to pay attention to? And that's exactly what Jesus does.

He says, "How about if I summarize all of that into just two easily memorizable commands?" Watch this. Jesus replied, "This is the most important. Hero Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength." And here he's quoting one of the seven verses Jesus loved, Deuteronomy 6:5, which he quoted a lot in the Gospels. And then he says, "And the second is this, 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'" Say this with me, "Love your neighbor as yourself." Here he's quoting Leviticus 19:18.

Now this was an obscure verse. The first verse, as we saw two weeks ago, very well known in the Jewish tradition. This one is stuck in a bunch of kind of obscure commands about tattoos and stuff like that. And Jesus plucks this verse out of obscurity and puts it up on a pedestal. Say it again with me, "Love your neighbor as yourself." And then in Matthew's Gospel, he adds this interesting line, "All the law and prophets hang on these two commandments." What he's saying essentially is, "Love God, love people, and all the rest follows." Now I want you to say that with me because I don't want you to forget it. "Love God, love people, all the rest follows."

What Jesus is saying is, this is his definition of a successful Christian. This is his definition of a successful life. If you love people and love God well, you're a success. Now I want you to watch something. This is how to understand not just the law and the prophets, but the whole rest of the New Testament. When you look at every single epistle that follows in the New Testament, this is their outline. Once you know this, you will see it everywhere. All of these books of the Bible, they start with about half of them are about how much God loves you and how that evokes love from you. And then they end with, you know, half the chapters of, "Therefore, this is how we love people." You just now know the outline for the whole rest of the New Testament. And it started with Jesus.

Say these lines again out loud with me, "Love God, love people, all the rest follows." This came to define what it means to be a Christian. That's how important these verses were to Jesus. Now, last time we looked at the first section, "Love God," and what it means to love God and how we love God. And this time I want to look at what it means to love people. The whole idea, "Love your neighbor as yourself." This became probably the most beloved quote of Jesus in the whole rest of the New Testament. It's re-quoted and summarized so many times like Galatians 5:14, "For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command to love your neighbor as yourself." Or in Romans 13, "The commandments are summed up in this one command, 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'" Or later in Romans, "Love is the fulfillment of the law." You also see it in 1 John. You also see it in the book of James. It's recapped or summarized in almost every book of the rest of the New Testament. Just look for it. You'll see it everywhere. This became what it meant to be a believer, and this concept changed the whole world.

Because the Romans definitely did not believe this. Look at this carving from...this is from a Roman casket, and I want you to look a little bit more closely at this. The Romans believed in power and domination. Up on top you got the Romans, up here dominating. On the bottom you got the neighbors being dominated. You didn't love your neighbor. You conquered your neighbor. That's what it meant to be a strong, good, successful person.

I was reading a blog last week by an atheist university professor, who's a well-known author, and I quote this because the fact that he is not a Christian in my mind brings credibility to this, because he doesn't have an axe to grind about defending our faith. You'd expect a preacher to say stuff like this, but listen to what this secular historian says. Jesus's teachings on the practice of love, as adopted by his followers, revolutionized our world and helped make Western culture what it is today. From the earliest of times, he says, Christians preached love over hate, service over domination, and the very sense of what it meant to be ethical changed drastically. Christ was believed to have made the ultimate sacrifice, suffering and dying for the sake of others, and his followers were to do the same, to give everything for those in need. This led to the invention of the hospital and the orphanage and direct poverty relief from the church and its members. Right living no longer meant exercising domination, but living in service. This was a radical transformation of society. It truly, as he says, revolutionized the world.

I was reading another famous historian, Tom Holland, not Spiderman Tom Holland, but the historian Tom Holland, and he said it changed the world so much that he said we don't even understand what our world would have looked like without the introduction of this ethic. And I'm a movie buff, so I thought I do know what it would look like. I don't know if you've seen the movie Dune, where just everybody's all about dominating everybody else. That's what it would have looked like if this idea of your neighbor as yourself had not changed the course of history.

But here's my question. Are we slipping back to kind of a pre-Christian, Roman way of looking at our neighbors? Us versus them. It's a zero-sum game. There's winners, there's losers, and our group must dominate and win. I think we are. And it's backed up by research. Scholars from Princeton and Stanford did research along with the Barna group. They pulled their research. Americans were asked, watch this, if they would find it difficult to have a normal conversation, just having a conversation with somebody in a group different from them. Do you get the question? So here's some of the groups on the list. They named Muslims, Mormon, atheist, Democrat, Republican, evangelical, member of the LGBTQ community, and so on.

So if you're not in one of these groups, would you have it difficult to just have a normal conversation with somebody you knew was in one of these groups? Now, the responses really surprised me because a majority of Americans, over 50 percent in every demographic, said, yes, I would find it difficult to have a conversation with any of these groups. This is today, 2025, right? I'm not sure we've become a more tolerant society, but if they were not already in one of these groups, people were like, yeah, I think those people are weird, I would have a hard time talking to them.

Now, get this, which one is the hardest? What would be the most difficult conversation to have among people in these groups right here? If you're not a Democrat or Republican, that's the—you would find it easier to have a conversation with any one of these people rather than somebody from the other political party. What this means is the starkest dividing line between us right now is not race. It's not religion. It's not gender. It's political party.

Now, watch this. If you dig down into the data, the single group that has the hardest time having normal conversations with people different than them, evangelical Christians. In fact, not only do evangelicals have the hardest timing of a normal conversation with an atheist, a Muslim, people of different sexual orientation or whatever political party, but 28 percent of evangelicals say they have a hard time having a normal conversation with other evangelical Christians. As John Ortberg puts it, "The followers of the most inclusive men in history have become the most exclusive people in American society." Now, to be fair, this reality is happening in every single group right now in our cultural moment. If you're progressive, those progressives aren't progressive enough. If you're conservative, those conservatives aren't conservative enough.

It's kind of like my cousin Dieter says, "Well, it looks like it's just you and me now, and I'm not so sure about you." Right? And this kind of polarizing mindset was at work in Jesus' day too, and that's why I've just been establishing the emotional context for a question a religious teacher came up to Jesus and asked. He said, "Yeah, love your neighbor." Totally agree, Jesus. But Luke 10:29, wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, "And who is my neighbor? Like, tell me who I really have to love, because there's some people I really don't want to love."

Now, you can't really understand the question this guy is asking unless you also look at the context of Leviticus 19:18, the verse Jesus is quoting. So this was written over a thousand years before Jesus. It's part of the Torah, the Old Testament. Look at the verses that surround it. Watch this. "Do not go about spreading slander among your people, your people. Do not hate a fellow Israelite in your heart. Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbor as yourself." So a lot of people were like, "Sure, I'll love my neighbor, my neighbors that are exactly like me, because it says, 'Your people, fellow Israelite, your people.'" Everybody else that can hate, apparently, because that's the context of the verse.

But if you skip 25 verses, that's a lot of verses, toward the end of this chapter, look at what it says. It says, "When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. When the foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born, love them as you love yourself." So a minority of people in Jesus' day are saying, "Yeah, but, but, but, but look at the broader context." Same chapter, it includes everybody in that command. And so there's this big debate among religious people 2,000 years ago in the day of Jesus. "So love your neighbor, great, that's in the Bible, but does 'love your neighbor' mean, you know, my tribe? Or just love your neighbor mean to people in these other tribes that happen to be my neighbors?" Big debate. This guy wants to know. I mean, that's a very good question.

And I love what Jesus does next. Jesus doesn't answer the question, which is just classic Jesus. He tells a story, a story you've heard before. It says, "Jesus replied with a story." And here's the story he tells. "A Jewish man was traveling from Jerusalem down to Jericho." Now, I want you to picture what they would have pictured when he says that because I've had the opportunity to travel in that part of Israel. And here's what much of it looks like even today. Very desolate. There's about a 3,600-foot elevation drop in just 17 miles. So it's very steep, very dangerous. Can you imagine an ambush happening in canyons like this? Well, that's exactly what happens here.

Jesus says, "Picture a man hiking there, and he was attacked by bandits, and they stripped him of his clothes, beat him up, and left him half dead beside the road." Now, a priest happened to be going down the same road. Priests were the, in those days, were the men who made sacrifices for the sins of the people at the temple in Jerusalem. So this is a man who has dedicated his life to serving God at the temple, a holy man. And when he saw the man, and Jesus' listeners are going, "Yay, the man is saved," he passed by on the other side. Oh well, you know, maybe he had urgent business for God somewhere. Or maybe he thought the man was about to die, and if you touched a dead body, you'd be ceremonially unclean in their regulations. Or maybe he thought it was a trap. Don't know why. But he walks on.

So too a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him. Now Levites were a special tribe in ancient Israel. They functioned as like the temple staff. They oversaw construction. They oversaw maintenance. They organized the worship. They were the administrators. And they were all related. Levites were all in one family. They all had the same last name. They were like the Spurlocks of Twin Lakes Church. And he also passed by on the other side.

But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was. And when he saw him, he took pity on him. And I want you to pause the story right there, because I see here three ways the story defines what it means to love your neighbor, and what the Samaritan just did then may be the hardest of all. Number one, I need to stop. I need to stop and not just keep walking. Now look, there's no indication in this story that the priests of the Levite were bad people. In fact, I would argue they were probably good people. I mean, they devoted their lives to ministry. But here's the problem. Good people can always find good reasons to keep walking.

I mean, I know it's true for me. If I'm honest, how about you? I asked myself this week when I was working on this, "What keeps me from stopping?" And for my own life, I came up with three reasons maybe you can relate. First, an unbalanced schedule, right? Like for years, I've been needing to have a couple on our street, a particular couple, over to our house for dinner, you know, to make friends as neighbors. I mean, we're friendly with them, but we've been saying, "Let's have them over. Let's deepen our friendship." And we still haven't done it. Why not? I'm too busy.

And you and I need to ask whether our schedule...I'm not busy with bad things or even like neutral things. I mean, I feel like I'm busy with good things, but I'm too busy to love my neighbor. That's too busy. And if that's too busy, if you're in that same spot, then you and me together, we need to recalibrate our schedules because Jesus says this is a priority. Second, for me, uncontrolled media. And what I mean by this is when you look at your phone or something for news, social media, the way algorithms work, as you probably know, is the news feed funnels to you more and more negative stories about groups you already dislike because you click on those stories because they make you mad and outraged. And that means that this negative bias creates suspicion in you about your neighbors.

And you start to stereotype them and you justify not loving them. In fact, you justify loathing them. And then for me, third, an undernourished spirit. And what I mean by this is I can get so drained by life that I feel like, "Oh, I don't have the strength to stop and, you know, listen to someone's tale of woe or whatever. It's terrible, but it's because I'm undernourished in my spirit myself." And if you find that's true for you, you and I have to together decide nobody's going to do this for you. But you've got to decide if loving my neighbor is a priority, I have to intentionally nourish my spirit. How do I do that? In worship, in creation, recreation, time with positive friends, gratitude. And when I do that, what that does is it fuels me up to reach out. Make sense?

Now don't miss this detail. Remember Jesus says a Jewish man was traveling and a Samaritan stopped to take pity on him. In Jesus' day, these two groups hated each other. Let me switch channels to the history channel for just a second. 700 years before Jesus, Assyrians attacked Israel and they took about 30,000 of the leading Jewish people captive back to Assyria and they resettled Israel with foreigners from all around the empire who ended up intermarrying with the poor few Jewish people still there. And what happened is over the next two centuries, they became regarded as a new ethnic group, the Samaritans.

And when the Jewish captives returned, Samaritans weren't seen as truly ethnically Jewish, so they were ostracized. In fact, they weren't even allowed to worship in the rebuilt Jerusalem temple. And so the Samaritan said, "Fine, we'll build our own temple. Your own temple, start your own religion." So now they're seen as heretics and it just escalated from there. One night when Jesus was around 10 years old, now this isn't in the Bible, but we know this from history, when Jesus would have been about 10 years old, Samaritan terrorists infiltrated the Jerusalem temple, the holiest place, and they scattered human bones around, pieces of dead people because they knew that would desecrate the temple and all worship would have to stop until it could be ritually purified, and that took a long time.

But they were getting revenge for a few years earlier when Jewish soldiers had attacked and burned down the Samaritan's temple. So I mean, between these two groups, there's a racial divide, there's a political divide, there's a religious divide. It just went on and on and on. In the first century, Josephus, the Jewish historian, tells us that the Samaritans, there were bands of brigands who would attack Jewish people that were going to Jerusalem. And in response, there were Jewish vigilantes that would go and burn down Samaritan villages. I mean, lots of violent cycles of trauma and hatred for centuries, seven centuries, by the time Jesus tells a story.

So you have to understand this to understand when Jesus says, "Then a Samaritan came by," everybody's expecting them to say, "And he beat him up and killed him and robbed him of what little he had left." Because the Samaritans were that seen as that evil, right? That opposite, that other, if they would have gasped when Jesus says he took pity on him. Imagine whatever group you think has the biggest divide now. If it's a political divide, apparently, as the stats show us, Jesus is like saying, "So a magga republican is lying on the ground and a queer trans-progressive activist comes by and is the only one who helps the guy." And if that just made you go, "That's exactly the point!" Times a thousand is what the impact would have been for Jesus's original audience.

But you see, that is part of the point he's making, is that to love my neighbor, I need to be willing to break through barriers. I need to be willing to break through barriers, which are being put up everywhere in our society today. That doesn't mean compromising your convictions. It means loving people, you know, into a relationship with God. When Jesus, somebody said, when Jesus said, "Love your neighbor," Jesus means even if they don't worship like you, vote like you, look like you, think like you, live like you, no exceptions. Amen? And that was not very excited. Amen?

Now, loving your neighbor does not mean you have to worship like them. Jesus isn't endorsing everything the Samaritans believed. It doesn't mean you have to act like them or justify them. Jesus isn't justifying the violence, the desecration of the temple by the Samaritans. Is He? It doesn't mean you have to approve of the way they vote or think. It just means love. And that means if you want to be a follower of Jesus, you have to develop meaningful loving relationships across all these barriers because that's what Jesus did.

Now, sometimes there's another barrier. Somebody said this week, "Well, I don't have a problem with this, but my biggest barrier is I'm just socially awkward. I feel shy. I don't know what to say." And that's totally legit. I get it. And we all have different personalities. When Jesus says, "Love your neighbor," He's not saying, "Change your personality into an extrovert," if you're not. But it means that He has wired you to still show love in your way through a smile, through a gift, through service, like what happens next in the story.

The Samaritan went to him, bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. And some of you are like, "What? Is He making a salad?" In those days, this was part of the first aid kit, right? And a septic and so on. And then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him. So now he just used his own first aid kit on the guy. Now he's paying for a room and then an inn. The next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper. So a denarius was about a day's wage. So now he's giving his own money. "Look after him," he said, "and when I return, I'll reimburse you for any extra expense you may have." So now he's opening up a tab. That's a costly intervention. But isn't that part of the point? To love my neighbor, I need to pay a price.

Loving your neighbor, there's always a price to pay. You know, maybe the way you love your neighbor is you bring them cookies you bake. That costs you something, right? Or maybe that you grab something when you shop at the store, the grocery store, that you know that they like. You leave them, leave a forum on the front porch with a little note. That's going to cost you something. Maybe you help with their yard work. That's going to cost you time. Maybe you just listen to them, and that's going to cost you time too. Now that's individually. When we as a church say we want to be known as a church that loves our neighbors. And by the way, raise your hand if you'd like us to be known. When people think of Twin Lakes Church, would you love for one of the first things they just kind of need your think is that's a church that loves their neighbors? Can I see a show of hands? Me too.

But when we say that, that's costly. And it's getting more costly these days. Let me give you an example. Here at TLC, we serve hundreds of families every week at our People's Pantry on Wednesdays. We find that almost all the people we help are either working multiple jobs or they're senior citizens, and free food helps them to have money left over to pay their other bills. This is all done by an amazing team of volunteers led by Robin Spurlock, and we also offer prayer to anybody who asks for it. But part of the source of our food supply is now uncertain. It's unstable because of different current events. Second Harvest Food Bank doesn't have its usual reliable sources of funding, but that doesn't have to stop us. It just means we step up more.

And you and I, if we want to love our neighbors in this way, we provide food. And we can provide specifically bags of rice, canned veggies, soups, beans. I put a whole list on the back of your bulletin of exactly what it is that our food bank needs. My wife Lori, just as part of a habit, gets some extra things on this list when she goes shopping. And then when she comes to church on Sunday, she brings her little shopping bags with cans that she got for Second Harvest and puts them in the barrels that are in the lobby. But when we say we want to love our neighbors, well, that's kind of a demanding part of our faith, isn't it?

And also as part of feeding other people, we want to build the Hope Center because the portables where we've got the people's pantry now are falling to pieces. That also costs us something. Groundbreaking, Lord willing, is right around Easter, but that has a price tag too, doesn't it? What I'm saying is loving your neighbor doesn't just mean getting the feels. Aw, I love them. It means actually paying the price. And then Jesus says, "Now, which of these three would you say was a neighbor to the man who was attacked by bandits?" Do you see? Jesus is changing the question because the man asked, "Who's my neighbor?" And Jesus is saying, "Now, which of these three acted like a neighbor?" He's like, "I'm not going to be drawn into a debate about who's my neighbor and what would those verses in Leviticus 19 say? I'm going to ask you a straightforward question. Which of these guys was the neighbor?"

And look at the man's response. He can't even say Samaritan, the one who showed mercy. And then Jesus said, "Yes." And he doesn't say, "Now, go and feel guilty about it." Jesus, "Nobody wants you to feel guilty. I don't want you to walk out of here feeling guilty." That's counterproductive. He doesn't say, "Now, go and ponder this." He says, "Now, just go and do it." You know the way Jesus uses it, Good Samaritan is not describing heroic behavior. It's just describing normal Christian behavior. It's just who we are.

Now, don't miss this. It's who we are because that's how God first loved us. Look at this outline again. God did this for us in the Christian gospel. He stopped when we were lost in our sins and trespasses. He broke through every barrier of the barriers of time and space and sin and unholyness to reach us according to the gospels. And He did indeed pay a price, the greatest price. Jesus Christ laid down His life for us and then rose again. And when you let that capture your imagination, when you soak in the fact that, "God loved me this way," what it does is it changes your own self-perception, that you realize you're cherished, you're cherished with all your faults and idiosyncrasies and eccentricities. You're cherished by the God of the universe. And so that love is going to overflow.

Somebody once said, "Loved people, love people." Jesus said, "Love your neighbor as you love yourself." And you can love yourself when you realize how much God loves you. And then you ask yourself, "For whom do I need to stop?" And probably there's one person that God is putting out of your mind right now. "What barrier do I need to break through?" Maybe there's a group of people that you've been justifying loathing. That's your barrier. "What price is Jesus asking me to pay? For whom do I need to stop? What barrier do I need to break through? What price is Jesus asking me to pay?"

I'll wrap up with this. I started by mentioning that the last time I taught on this verse was just a few days after Mom passed away. I'll never forget when I filled out the obituary form from the mortuary, and many of you have been through this. There's all kinds of information you have to fill out. And one of the questions on the form was, "Did the deceased accomplish anything notable, i.e., military decorations, graduate degrees, etc.? And at first I thought, "Well, I guess I'm going to leave that blank because she had no degrees, no awards." But then I thought, "Yeah, she accomplished something pretty notable. She was sacrificially loving. She influenced hundreds of people just through her hospitality.

And you know what she did? She made our house a place where all the single moms and divorced moms and kids without dads or moms would feel welcome. And she made me and my little sister have a sense that we were loved by her absolutely, thoroughly, unconditionally, and completely. And you know what that did? That helped us both to understand what unconditional love means. When we heard later that God loves us unconditionally, she loved so well. And in the end, that's what matters most. Jesus taught this. You say it with me, "Love God, love people, all the rest follows." Let's pray together. Would you bow your head with me?

With your head bowed, I'd like to prompt you to think of a neighbor, a literal neighbor. And now pray, "Heavenly Father, help me to stop and not to walk past." Would that neighbor has a need? Help me not to be too busy to stop. And now think of a type of neighbor that you have a hard time loving, maybe on the other side politically or culturally. Can you pray, "Lord, give me the strength to break through those barriers and love them." And finally, can you pray, "God, I want to commit to help pay the price for the healing of my neighbors, whether it's a meal or a conversation or time or helping provide food as a church." And Lord, together we pray, would you please help make Twin Lakes Church be known mostly as people who really love God and really love people and really know they are loved because you first loved us. And it's in Jesus' name we pray. Amen.