"A Parable About Love (And Our Lack of It) (Luke 10:25-37)

Welcome to the Reformed University Fellowship at UNCW Podcast! Each week, we will post the messages from our RUF Large Group meetings at UNCW. This spring, we’re looking at the parables of Jesus from the New Testament book of Luke.This week's sermon is on the familiar Parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10. Through this parable, Jesus shows us that we cannot separate our love for God and our love for others, because all those whom God rescues by his mercy, he enlists in his mercy-bringing mission to the world. Therefore, a lack of love for our neighbor is not a small matter of imperfect Christian practice. It may be an indication of something much more serious: that we have fundamentally misunderstood the heart of God, or have not yet truly received his rescuing, transforming grace. “Attachment masquerades as love. It says, “I will love this person (because I need something from them).” Or, “I’ll love you if you’ll love me back. I’ll love you, but only if you will be the way I want.” This isn’t the fullness of love. Instead there is attachment—there is clinging and fear. True love allows, honors, and appreciates; attachment grasps, demands, needs, and aims to possess.”- Brené Brown“It is one of the evils of rapid diffusion of news that the sorrows of all the world come to us every morning. I think each village was meant to feel pity for it’s own sick and poor whom it can help and I doubt if it is the duty of any private person to fix his mind on ills which he cannot help. (This may even become an escape from the works of charity we really can do to those we know). A great many people do now seem think that the mere state of being worried is in itself meritorious. I don’t think it is. We must, if it so happens, give our lives for others: but even while we’re doing it, I think we’re meant to enjoy Our Lord and, in Him, our friends, our food, our sleep, your jokes, and the birds song and the frosty sunrise.”  - C.S. Lewis“The outcome, as it were, of God loving us is that we should also love God and love one another ... God has not merely loved us in order that we might be forgiven and saved from hell and thus be rescued from the punishment of sin. God's whole work in us was designed to produce a certain type of person. He has set out to produce a new race, a new generation, and we are all to be modeled on the pattern of our Lord Jesus Christ. He is the firstborn among many brethren' (Rom 8:29); we have been 'created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them' (Eph 2:10).” -D. Martin Lloyd-Jones