So we're talking about the law of God and we talked about some preliminary things in the first few classes, but now we're actually diving into like what is the law of God? What does God command? And I'll just remind you of this diagram, hopefully it's helpful, that we have the two great commands, which are, you know them, love of God, love of neighbor, And those are the very heart of the law. Jesus says, on these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. So like the entire teaching of the Bible, when you talk about what does God want of us, just really all goes back to this. There's like, there's no law at all that in some way is not about loving God and loving your neighbor. They all in some way distill into that. And then there's the 10 commands, which elaborate on these two great commands. We talked about the first four being about love of God, primarily, although even as we're not being idolaters, we're also loving our neighbors, right, by setting a good example. And then the latter six are about primarily loving our neighbor, but even that is an expression of love of God. And again, all of the other more specific laws are in some way bound up in these 10, okay? And then all what are called the case law, or we could just say all the nitty gritty specific commands, they all are building on these, which in turn build on those. So that's why I'm taking now two lessons to talk about these two great commands, because you really do need to know. What does it mean to love God and love our neighbor? What does it mean to pursue these things faithfully? And so if you have the handout from last time, I did put a few more out there for love of God. We're just going to pick up where we left off. And I was talking about, you know, the great command, it says, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your might. And I have that diagram I drew there on the handout. Anna Jackson suggested an even better diagram that I think captures even better what I'm trying to get at there, where heart is the innermost part of you. it is your soul, it is your will, your desires, your thoughts, all of these things are part of our heart. And then what's often translated soul, just by force of tradition, really corresponds more to our person, our whole person, that includes both body and soul. And so now we're talking about our, like for example, our tongues. How do we speak? Our bodies, what do we do with our hands and our feet and every part of us? We're supposed to love God with our whole person. And then the last word is translated in English in ESV strength, which is okay, but really it's more about like things in your sphere. And I was talking about last time, there's really like no English word that captures this, like possession sort of gets it. I'll just say things in your sphere. Things that you in some way have responsibility for, power over. You're in an influential position in your job. That's something that God wants you to love him with. You have a house. God wants you to love him with your house. You have a car, whatever. Things in your sphere, God wants you to love him. And I would say also, too, people that you're responsible for. So if you're a husband, you're responsible for your wife. If you're a parent, you're responsible for your kids. You need to love God with those things, with those people. Okay, so that's God's way of saying, love me with all that you are. And now we have to ask, what does it mean to love? But before I launch into that, does anybody have any questions on anything I've said so far? This is just review stuff. Okay, all right, so let's talk about what does it mean to love? And just as a preliminary question, What's our method? If we want to know, what does it mean to love? How should we go about finding that out? The word, thank you, yes. The infallible rule of the interpretation of scripture is scripture itself. So if you want to know what this scripture means, you look at the rest of scripture. We don't get to make up what the words mean. That was the era of liberalism in the late 19th century, as they started changing the meaning of important words like resurrection, and making it mean things it doesn't mean. And so we need to go back to the word. And this is so important because, just think with me for a moment, like when you talk about love in just sort of a general sense, like you're listening on the radio and they're singing about love. What is, in general, what does the word love mean in our culture? I'm not just talking about love songs on the radio. What does the word love mean for most people in America? Yeah. To quote this great Steve Miller band, lovey-dovey, lovey-dovey, lovey-dovey all the time. Okay, yeah. So it's sort of like the warm, fuzzy feelings Feelings of affection. Good. And that's a pretty powerful idea. If you don't have those warm fuzzy feelings, can you really say that you love that person anymore? That's what our culture would want to ask. I also think in our culture today that love has nothing to do about anybody else but yourself. Okay, why do you think that? Just because of everybody wanting to seek out their own happiness. They're not looking to serve another person. They want to be served. And that it is all self-entered and turned toward inside of themselves and not really an outward thing. It's just the way that our culture is behaving now. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, and I think when a lot of people make those marriage vows and they say, I love you, what are they saying? They're saying, I found the person that I think is going to make me happy, right? And so there's affection there, surely, but it's also very self-interested, and I appreciate what you're getting at, yeah. To be accepted by everybody in contrary to what you said, Yeah, good. Acceptance, tolerance. If you love me, you're not going to tell me what I'm doing is wrong. That's a powerful idea and very prevalent. Those are good. And what we're gonna see is that those ideas that you guys have well summarized are actually really bad, right? They're not what God means by love. So let's just look at some of these texts. All I did was just, I said to myself, wow, he says love the Lord your God here in Deuteronomy 6, 5. Let's just look for the word love in the rest of the book of Deuteronomy. and see what we find. And here are some of the things I found. So, Deuteronomy 7, 8 talks about, it's because the Lord loves you. This is why he's giving them the land. It's because the Lord loves you and is keeping the oath that he swore to your fathers that the Lord has brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you. And one of the drawbacks of giving you these handouts for your records is it kind of gives you all the answers too. But like, What does it mean to love here? Well, keeping the oath, promise keeping, right? The fact that God is keeping a vow that he swore basically Wow, 400, 500 years prior, that's what he calls love. And just contrast that with what we just talked about with people feeling great affection. But then when that affection dries up, all of a sudden the promises, you can break those promises. You don't have to be married anymore, even though you made a vow. Yeah, okay, then next one, to do good. So in the same chapter 7.13, he will love you. And now look at these parallel words, bless you, multiply you. He will also bless the fruit of your womb and the fruit of your ground. So how is he specifying love here? What does it mean to love? How does God define his own love here? Just doing good, right? Being abundant. The beneficence of God. The fact that God is, he's not a stingy God. And that like, Sometimes there needs to be tough love, right? Sometimes discipline when God takes away some good gift is actually love because it's serving this higher purpose of showing you your sin. But by and large, Love is, and really even in that temporary withdrawal of good, it's seeking something still greater, right? Your greater good. God wants us to be blessed, to be filled with goodness and delight the delights of this world, the fruit of the womb. In other words, kids, the fruit of the ground. In other words, delicious food. God is, that's part of what it means to love. Then also Deuteronomy 10, 12, what does the Lord require of you? But to fear the Lord, to walk in all his ways, to love him. Look at that, he threw it in there amidst all those other things. To serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul. So again, as you look at those words around Deuteronomy 10, 12, what is this showing us about what God requires of us? What does it mean to love? Oh, I'm sorry, Betty. Yeah, I didn't see. I can answer that question, but to serve and fear him. Good. Which, like, could you define it a little bit more? I think you're on the right track. with our whole persons. Yeah, good. Everything you're putting up there. Yeah, and it involves obedience to his commands. Yeah, and so, you know, Jesus, he says, if you love me, you will keep my commandments. John 14, 15. We realize, really, he's just summarizing Deuteronomy 10, 12, like God's already said this before. Like, this is what love means. And so if you claim to love Jesus, but then you don't keep his commands, you actually don't love Jesus. Right? So, yeah. Yeah, my comment I was thinking earlier about... It's striking me that we're ministering to a culture that has a definition of love. So when we say Jesus loves you, their interpretation of that phrase is he's going to give me everything I want, and he's gonna give me all these blessings, and it has nothing to do with the other half of the equation. Yeah, and did I see your hand too, Paul? Yeah. Also connected with what you were asking a few minutes ago about the culture's view of love is that it's, I think, almost inevitably spontaneous. Whether it's a love for another person, or for pizza, or for a vacation spot. seems to have a component of determining something, determining to love. Yes, this definition here, yeah. Even in the church, so a question, is there a way in which our love for God is or ought to have a spontaneity to it? And then also the other component of being something that we determine. Yeah, great. Yeah, and I think you're really hitting on something super important, that there's this elevation of spontaneity, and that if it isn't spontaneous in our culture, then it isn't genuine. Like, how can you say you really love God when you're here at church because it's your duty and you don't feel like it, right? And they would say, well, you're just going through the motions, say Johnny up here. You're just going through the motions and like that's not real love. And actually God's saying, actually that is love. That's the kind of thing I love, is when you are honoring me out of integrity, right? Because you're keeping my commands. Even if you feel cruddy at the moment and you don't feel like doing it, yeah. Well, and the other thing is that love is not a feeling. It is an act, is a deed. It is an obedience. When Tony and I were in our marriage council, premarital counseling, our pastor said to us, it's not the question, do you love each other? It's, will you love each other? It's an action. It's a waking up every day with purpose to love another, no matter what you receive in return. Yeah, no, that's exactly right. And it's actually quite liberating when you're not feeling it, right? I can actually still love my spouse or my family member or co-worker or whatever. Even when I'm really honestly struggling with a lot of bitter, nasty emotions on the inside, I can still love them. I need to put those emotions to death, right? But yeah, like emotions, they're bad in the driver's seat. But they do follow from this kind of good resolve. And we should be encouraged that when we resolve to love, that very often what flows from that is the appropriate emotions. It may be a ways later, but yeah. I always laugh when someone in the family asks, well, what do you want to do this weekend? Well, what I want to do is what I want to do. What we need to do is do different things. I don't want to do the dishes. I don't want to cut the grass. But I do, out of love of the household and other things, I do so semi-cheerfully. But I've never met anyone say, I want to do laundry today. No one says that. And yet, even the fact that you're choosing that shows that you do want it. more than your own personal desires. There's a deeper desire at work there, which is the desire to be integrous, to follow Christ, to not be a sloth. Good. Yeah, and then the other one I had here was really just developing the previous one, but he says, you shall therefore love the Lord your God, Okay, and keep his charge, his statutes, his rules, and his commandments. Always, that's Deuteronomy 11.1. So, you know, paraphrasing the previous one. But again, for God, love is a choice. You're choosing to love. That's why, you know, there's a separate word in Hebrew, but the word steadfast love is how it comes into English in the ESV is, you know, I'm gonna be a covenant-keeping person, or God's gonna be, he's a covenant-keeping God. He's resolved to keep his covenant, even when he doesn't feel, even when we don't feel like it, and in God's case, even when greatly provoked, he will keep on steadfastly loving us. So yeah, as you think about scripture, are there other dimensions that you can think of that maybe I've left out here about what it means to love? We've talked about some good things. Yeah, Mike. There was a, I forget exactly where it is, there's a section in Calvin's Institutes where he talks about love for fellow man and kind of takes what we've been talking about together. It's an obligation. We should we definitely need to love our fellow man. Yeah, but he said it can't be A sterile, you know, I'm just keeping the law toward you good and ignoring you it's more of He did the work the words he used were something to the effect that we need to cultivate warmth of feeling and compassion for our fellow man, including our enemies. Yeah, and I think that's a direct outflow of this modifier of the command. You shall love him with all your heart. What's part of our heart? Our affections. And so we should be, like you said, not just going through the motions, doing it because I'm supposed to, and I'm a faithful person kind of thing, but we should be wanting to love God more in the affective kind of sense, the affectionate kind of sense, and praying for those good emotions. After all, it's a lot easier to choose life and to choose God when we are filled with affection for Him, right? And that's a part of us that He wants to offer. Yeah, let me just, if you flip on the back, I want to meditate just for a moment on the word all. So we've talked about love the Lord with your soul or your heart, person and possessions. And then he says, for each of those with all, with all of those things. And that shows that this is a preeminent love, that he deserves our highest loyalty. And I'll just remind you of Deuteronomy 13, where it talks about, if a loved one, even your own like beloved brother, even your own wife, apostatizes and goes against the law of the Lord and blasphemes the name of God, does something that really is a capital punishment in Israel, that this is a test. Will you love that person and kind of allow them to keep on doing those grievous things? or will you love God more than them? And it even says that you are to be the first one, you're the one to cast the first stone. And so, you know, in the terms of New Testament kind of decision-making, Jesus puts it like this, Matthew 10, 37, whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me. Whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Whom do you love more, your family or God, and when we say all that we are, we're saying God gets something that really belongs to nobody else except Him. To no one else are we to give everything that we are, only to God. In all other respects, we're dividing our energies and attentions and everything about us. You're caring for your spouse, but you're also caring for your kids, and you're caring for your friends, But God, in the midst of all those things, we're giving it all to Him. Everything is an offering to Him. So, yeah. Let me just ask some of these application questions to see if this triggers any thoughts for you as we think about living this out. So, you know, if this is true, if this is what God's calling us to, asking ourselves, is there any part of our lives that you have not offered to God? This is sinful autonomy. I love George McDonald's definition of sin. The essence of sin is, I am my own. So, anytime we're not offering any piece of ourselves to God, we're holding something back and saying, I just want to do this. that is not offering our whole selves to Him. Is there anything that you are, it should be the word are there, are offering your loyalty to over God? In other words, when it's a, it's not just sort of like I'm carving this out as a secular little realm of my life, but it's also like I am deliberately choosing this thing over God, where like God says don't do it, this person or this idol says do it, and we choose that. That is, that's a loyalty choice there. And then yeah, loving God with each of these different dimensions, I wanted to ask, so like as you think about each of these different dimensions, that we're supposed to love God and all of those dimensions, can you think of some applications like in terms of like, when it talks about loving God with our heart, In other words, all the inner faculties of who we are. What are some implications of that? That we are to love God with our heart. Yeah. implications of that are that we're told in the scriptures that our heart is fickle. And so we can have lots of challenges with things taking priority in our heart over him because of just our waywardness, our sinfulness, and our brokenness. So those are the... This is gonna be a hard one. I mean, they're all hard, right? But yeah, I mean, basically, we can't excuse anything in our hearts, just because nobody may see it at the moment. Like on the sheet there, I was thinking about, well, you may be really bitter towards this person, but as far as you think you're doing, you're not showing that bitterness, right? Or you may be having these really lustful thoughts, but nobody sees, so that's okay. Well, no. Not if we're to love God with all our heart. And you know, Jesus calling the Pharisees whitewashed tombs, right? They're whitewashed, so like, in terms of outward stuff, maybe these two spheres, there's at least an appearance of faithfulness to God. But what's on the inside? Graves, right? Like, tombs. It's death, right? There's no genuine love for God. There's all kinds of pride. All kinds of like, hey, look at me, I'm so good. And so like, this is a real challenge for us, right? To keep it real on the inner level. To not excuse any part of us when only God sees. I think this is a really hard, hard thing, yeah. Would you say it's almost 100% that's all gonna work itself out though? Yeah, I think that's a wise statement. Out of the heart, the mouth speaks. So, you may think you can keep it on the inside, but the nature of sin is like the parable of the camel in the tent, where the camel, it's really cold outside, the camel just says, hey, can I stick my nose in the tent? And then all of a sudden, it's the head. And all of a sudden, the whole camel's in the tent, right? And that's the way it is with sin, right? You give it an inch, it takes a mile. So you make little concessions or little mini treaties with sin. Like, well, I'll allow this, but I won't let it go any further than that. That's incredibly unwise and incredibly self-deceived. It will continue to take over. Thanks. So I want to add also, I think there's the positive aspect of why we are doing what we're doing for obedience to the Lord. It's not just, yeah, everything was said was true, but you know, our heart's desperately wicked. Our heart's deceitful. But you have the other side too, as Christians who have been pulled out of darkness, translated into God's light. Why are we doing what we do? And our heart should be fixed on Jesus. And do you genuinely love God? That's right. Yeah, that's right. And is that the heartbeat of why you're doing what you're doing? And so we're always asking ourselves, right? We're always examining our hearts. Like that's a scriptural command to examine ourselves and see what is really going on. Like what's really firing the engine on the inside? Is it actually love for Christ? Or is it pride, a lot of pride mixed in, or fear of what other people will say? So yeah, like we really need the Holy Spirit for this. Yeah. Just a thought off of that is that it's really funny how Easily we can Be dishonest like in our prayer our prayer life about ourselves like we just with anyone you love You want them to see the best side of you you try to hide the bad stuff? But God alone is the only one that we can show everything to and you don't have to be afraid of being honest and And we can admit that, yeah, I want this bad thing. And ask him for his grace to make you more Christ-like, to get rid of that bad affection. We can do that. He's the only one, really, that we can have a perfect love relationship with, at least in this life. Yeah, he sees it all. No need to hide from him. But I think you're right. There can be a lot of self-deception. And I think that's where, you know, Proverbs 4 talks about guarding the heart for from it flow the wellsprings of life. Like you may take really good care of your car and of your house. It's all swept clean and stuff. Do you take that good care of your heart? Like when there's a leak, and a pipe, you're like, hey, I better fix this or I'm gonna like have major damage to my home. Okay, you've got this sinful affection living inside of you, this lust that hasn't been tamed, this, I don't know, this bitterness that has been welling up within you. Are you just gonna let that thing create mold and you know, garbage in your home, in your life? No, and so I think, Yeah, like all the Puritans really get this, right? They really, really get the heart as the key. And really, I hope you know that like every sermon I am aiming directly at your hearts. I may talk about other things because these are all outworkings of the heart. What do you do with your wallet? What do you do with your relationships, whatever. But really, if this isn't right, it's all out of whack. It's not going to be good. So that's why God begins there. All right, well obviously loving God with all that we are is gonna be something that'd be a lifelong quest. And there's a lot of ins and outs of this, so that's why we'll be talking about in future classes specific laws about how to love God. But this is at least an overview here. Maybe in the last 15 minutes we can turn to love of neighbor, unless there are any other questions or thoughts? Okay, well let's start talking at least about this wonderful command, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. And I hope you see from all the references there how often it recurs. I was kind of surprised as I was prepping this. I was like, wow, this really does come up a lot. It keeps saying it. James 2 verse 8 calls this the royal law. And this is key to our lives, loving our neighbor as ourselves. And I like how Jesus rephrases it in Matthew 7. So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them. And as you think about that one, which is sometimes called the golden rule, whatever you would have others do to you, do that to others. How does that help explain the first statement of this law, which is, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. What's that mean, to love your neighbor as yourself? What are we supposed to be trying to understand in order to, yeah. One way that I've heard that stated is that you're supposed to love your neighbor as yourself, as if you were him. Good, yeah. Which I think is very helpful. Yeah, excellent. Imagining what's it like to be this other person and then what would What would I want others to do to me if that were me? And I think that basically it's another way of describing empathy. This requires tremendous imagination. You have to imagine, what's it like to be this person? And as guys, we're just unbelievably clueless when it comes to this with ladies, right? It's like, we just cannot imagine, what is it like to be them? And so, as a result, we're clueless. And, you know, there's like funny stories about guys getting their wives shotguns for Christmas or something, because they just have no imagination, right? And so, yeah, you have to think about what's it like to be them? What would they want? Yeah, yeah. you know, loving our neighbor as ourselves, as well as what Cherie said, is we know we love ourselves very well. Yeah. We're very aware of how we please ourselves, take, you know, take in the food we want, wear the clothes we want, whatever it is. We're very aware of those things that we love ourselves, about ourselves, for ourselves, and loving someone else with that mindset, getting that out onto another is is our work, right? So. Yeah. And I like how you put it, because, you know, there's an assumption here that your love for yourself is functioning properly. And in our brokenness, we can actually develop self-loathing. And this doesn't function right. But I like what you brought out. It's like, you know, we clothe ourselves, we feed ourselves. In other words, inside of us, there's this thing called hunger or feeling cold, or feeling lonely. And what happens when we have those things that we're feeling? We immediately and automatically go and figure out how to fix those problems. And I think what Jesus is pointing out here is like you need to not just be thinking about your own needs, but the needs of others. Yeah, David? Yeah, confessing sins to others can be like really hard to do. And if you are willing to do that, it can make other people more comfortable confessing to you as well. So other people say, oh, I didn't know, I thought I was the only one struggling in this area. So it can be a way to love them by confessing too. I think that's great. And that kind of openness. willingness to share even that we have needs is helpful to our neighbor to know how, to help you love them, help them love you, yeah. I think one area in this day and age that we often fall short is not steel manning people's arguments, meaning fully understanding them and reciting it back, we straw man, and we get mad when they do it to us, you know, in a sense like, So much of our discourse today, we don't show love to others, but we characterize their thought patterns and call them something, a name or something like that without fully understanding and loving maybe where they're coming from and loving them enough the respect to articulate their position accurately before taking it apart. Yeah. And these are both really excellent examples of like, would you like it if another person did this to you kind of thing? And again, like all you have to do is imagine what would it be like to be on the receiving end to know, yeah, this is pretty obviously not love. Yeah. David. So Charisse was right. You know, the golden rule, treat others as as if you were them. So for example, if you're a handyman and you have a neighbor who's an 85 year old grandma, her roof has a hole in it. You may think, well, I'm handy. She'd love some power tools. You know, that's not helping her. You need to help her as she, as if you were her, right? Exactly. Putting yourself in her place. Yeah. And I don't know if Ryan can attest to this, but there was a time out at the base with the government workers, with the DEI or whatever, they came up with something called the Platinum Rule. They were improving upon the Golden Rule, if that's possible. If you were to treat others as they wanted to be treated. So it was an argument for tolerance of all types of things, if you can imagine. So they improved upon the Bible. Yeah, thank you for bringing that up because you know that that I think nicely shows that this rule can be distorted right and You know think about a child Do they want to be disciplined for disobeying their parents? Almost all of them would probably say no at the time right, but later on they'll look back and say oh Wow, thank you for like holding me to that. I was really bad and you constantly called me to and did things that I didn't like at the time, but that were genuinely good. And I think part of what, you know, when Montgomery and I were doing the series on 1 Corinthians 13, one thing that that series kind of crystallized for myself is that there has to be an objective definition of good in order to, you know, have this. And so if it is objectively not good for a person to be in a same-sex relationship, like that's not the way God made the world, then it is actually loving to do this very carefully and with appropriate timing and a sense of the weight of what you're doing, but to say, no, that's not right, and to call them out of that. And again, that takes tremendous tact, and it takes a tremendous amount of imagination. What does that look like? But the fact that you're doing it just in the abstract, they may not feel loved by it. But it is love, right? Just the way, for example, the prophets are tremendously loving on God's part, even while they are just vehement castigations of their sin, right? That was really loving of God to call them out on it, because they're basically walking towards the end of the cliff, about to fall off, and God's saying, you must turn now. Yeah, did I see a hand over here? Okay. Yeah. Well, let's talk about who is my neighbor. And there's actually a part of the Bible that answers this very question. When one of the Jewish listeners to Jesus asks this question, who is my neighbor? Jesus tells the parable of the good Samaritan. And it's, you know, who is my neighbor? And the answer is, there was a Samaritan man who saw this wounded Jewish man lying on the side of the road, and he took care of him. So what does that show about who is our neighbor? Whom are we to love as ourselves? I struggle with this one. So I'm just at the grocery store, filling up the car with groceries for the week, leave the store, and pass a lady on the side with a sign that says, you know, please help me feed my family. I don't know how to handle that. Yeah, great, great question. Yeah, and it's obviously very similar. It's not a large step from the Good Samaritan parable to that, right? And That's a tough one. I don't know that there's a clean answer to that, but I do think that asking ourselves what would be most loving to that person is going to take you in the right direction. This is just sharing for my own part. I'm not saying this is the only way to apply this command in this instance, but In those instances, I've passed out cards to people, inviting them to church and saying, I know you're going through a lot of hard things. I'm a pastor, I'd be glad to talk with you and we have people at church who could talk with you and hear about your needs and who could possibly help you, thinking of the deacons, right? And in that way, because I know that so often handouts are used, they're not actually love in the sense that like, Very often handouts are being used for all the addictions that have landed them in that place in the first place. I don't want to enable that kind of sin. And I just have no way of knowing from the person sitting there, maybe they won't use it for that. There's just no way to know. But what I do know is that with the limited resources I have, there are not just the deacons, but lots of really good organizations that help people get back on their feet. in a way that's not enabling helplessness. That's not what I want to do, right? And so there's the book, I already shared about this in a sermon once, but like when helping hurts, a lot of times the sort of immediate, here's five bucks, hurts because it actually is continuing the cycle. You're never gonna get that person out from off of the side of the store, right? Whereas some of these other avenues of love do have more of the potential to do that, yeah. Thanks. So, one of the things that has always impressed me from Good Samaritan is that he took the person hurt to someone who could help. Yeah, that's great. Thank you for that. And was that relationship. It wasn't that he felt the burden himself to have to be the one to actually do all the care. So I think it gets to your point, Pastor, that there may be some immediate need and care that we need to do, but it comes back to the heart. Are we just doing it to assuage guilt on our side, or are we really caring for that person and wanting them to get to a place where they can be helped? I know as a church, you know, the diaconate, If people come, they immediately are given something, so that we don't turn them away and say, be well and warm and well-fed. This is something that can help you immediately, but we need you to also want to actually truly be whole. Yeah, and here are some steps that if you want to really get out of this problem, we can help you. We can help you to make those steps, yeah. I think one of the things about the parable, too, is that we're not told what the Samaritan, agenda was for that day, but he disrupted his entire day to help this man who was an obvious need because he was wounded and semi-conscious. It was obvious. It wasn't like, is he just, is it a scam? I think one thing we can take from that is to allow ourselves to be inconvenienced, because we don't like to be inconvenienced at all. Sometimes God takes over your day, puts a situation like that in front of you, and it's a serious thing. It's a test, and it's a part of your sanctification. Yeah, thank you for that. And I think, again, that shows whether you've given your life to the Lordship of God. Things in your sphere included your plan for today, right? And you're offering that time to God when you give that to some need that you weren't expecting to meet. One thing I also find liberating about the parable of the good Samaritan, and that's why I put it here, whomever God puts in your path, is that like in the present time where you have like instant news hitting you from all over the world, and there are disasters going on all over the place, and they're horrific disasters. I mean like children starving, you know, wars and bombs and, you know, terrible earthquakes and tsunamis and all this kinds of stuff. And, you know, if you start reading all this news, you're just like, ah, how am I supposed to love all of these people? And I think that like, God does give us a, like a hierarchy, a way in which we are more bound to certain people than to others. And so the hierarchy is probably something like, The people you've made vows to, namely your spouse, and here we make vows that we would love and care for our children, they're the people you must... If you give away the children's food to the beggar, Now you're not loving the neighbor that God's put right next to you in your own home, and you're feeling at one higher duty for this other duty. And then of course, we've made commitments to each other, being part of a church family, right? So we need to look out for the household of God. Galatians 6 says, do good to all, but especially those of the household of faith, right? And then, you know, there's our everyday neighbors, the people that are around us, that we see, the co-workers, the people at Kroger, the people who you just see in your daily walk. And then there's like all the rest of the people in the world. And should we care about, for example, our Christians in impoverished countries? And should we give gifts like to Operation Christmas Child, right, to care for them? For sure we should. And yet there's like a, we need to understand the context and we shouldn't feel guilt If, for example, our neighbor is very far away, we know of their needs, but we are not meeting everybody's needs. It's our neighbor, it's the person next to you that he calls us to love. Like, we're not the Holy Spirit. Well, once again, I haven't, I just remain perennially behind here, but that's okay. Keep that hand up for next time. and we'll return to loving our neighbor. Obviously, these are huge topics, and we just all have so far to go, so let's ask God's help. Lord, thank you for giving such just extremely clear commands to us. about what we're supposed to do as your image bearers. It really does boil down to loving you with all that we are and loving our neighbor as ourselves. And we pray that you would help us to love as you love, to love in the real way that you give us in the word, not the way our culture talks about love. And we pray that you would help us to have discernment as very often this is not easy to know what we're supposed to do. Even some of the examples just given, what does love look like in these times? Help us to know and to keep focused on what would really bless this other person in the deepest, truest sense. Lord, you're the great one who shows love. Help us to love like you do. And we pray in Jesus' name, amen.