He answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’[a]; and, ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’”
Luke 10:27
We are all familiar with the story of the good Samaritan but few ever asked why Jesus put forward that story in the first place. Here’s what happened; “On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?
At first, this sounded like a good bible scholar who was really interested in God’s word so Jesus referred him to the bible and asked him what the law had to say about this question. Interestingly, the man knew the answer and replied Jesus with two scriptures from the old testament. Putting them together, he said “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’[a]; and, ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’[b]” Jesus replied simply, “Do this and you will live.”
The conversation could have ended at this point but the bible says that this man wishing to justify himself asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbour?” In order to answer this, Jesus told him the parable of the good Samaritan which we will begin to examine from tomorrow. Notice, however the motivation of this young lawyer, the Bible says he wanted to justify himself.
How did this man try to justify himself? Notice the scripture he quoted had two parts (love the lord and love your neighbour). Somehow this man didn’t say anything about loving God because he assumed that he had that covered. His desire for Jesus to define “neighbour” suggests he wanted to limit who qualified for his love. The truth however, is that this man didn’t even love God in the first place. John says that “Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen” (1 John 4:20).
Unfortunately, this man was too blinded by his ambition to justify himself that he missed the word of God. The truth is that like this man, we are constantly trying to justify ourselves too. We do this in many ways but one way is that we sometimes read or hear the word of God and immediately think of a few people within our circle who could have benefitted instead of internalising it first for a transformative work in our lives. Another way is by making judgements about people based on their outward appearance and simply concluding we are better than them. Perhaps the most terrible one is when we expect the other party in a dispute to be the first to apologise because we are strongly convinced that we are right and they are wrong. This list goes on but generally includes not allowing God’s word to prevail over us in any situation.
Have you noticed any sign of self-justification in your life lately? It’s time to pray about it.
Dear Lord, I pray that I will not to be blinded by my self justification, so that I don’t miss out on what you are saying to me. Amen.
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