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September 9, 2026 | Sam Morris begins a new sermon series titled The Good Neighbor, exploring what it means to love your neighbor well. Through the parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10, he challenges listeners to be willing to serve others selflessly, regardless of inconvenience or difference.
Bellevue Baptist Church Middle School Ministry
Amen, here I am, use me, Lord, here I am, I'm all in. Praise the Lord that we have the opportunity to be used by the Lord, thank you, BJ. That we have the opportunity to be used by the Lord, that he is faithful and he's kind enough to bring us into the plan that he has of salvation and of just his grace and his mercy going to the whole world. Praise the Lord that we get to be a part of that and that he chooses to use us. So if you have a Bible tonight, I want you to raise it up in the air. Let me see them, as we've been doing, come on. Get excited about opening up God's word. I love it. So you can put it in your lap and you can open up to Luke chapter 10. Luke chapter 10 is where we're gonna be tonight. And last week, we finished up our series, More Than Meets the Eye, talking about the goodness of the Lord and how he works in our hearts and how the hearts of believers are changed and they are given power, that they are given boldness, that they are given the ability to carry out the plan that God has because of his Holy Spirit at work in their hearts. And so tonight, we're gonna be starting a new series. Connor mentioned it and it goes so along with the song that we just sang of saying, here I am, Lord, use me, send me, I'm all in, use me for the work of your kingdom. And our series is called The Good Neighbor. The Good Neighbor. There are two super important commandments that we see throughout scripture. And the first one is, love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind and all your strength. And Jesus says, the second is like it and it is to love your as yourself. Love your neighbor as yourself. And so over the next few weeks, we wanna talk about what it really means to love your neighbor and to love your neighbor well, to love your neighbor the way that God would have us to love our neighbor. And so tonight, the question that we wanna answer, each of these weeks, we're gonna answer a question about it. And the question tonight is, who is my neighbor? Who is my neighbor? Of all of the people in the world, of everybody that I come in contact with, who qualifies as my neighbor? Who is it that I need to love the way that Jesus has loved me? And in Luke chapter 10, an expert in the law speaks with Jesus and he asks him this exact question. And so we wanna dig into God's word to see how Jesus answers the question, who is my neighbor? And we're gonna be starting in verse 25 in Luke chapter 10. So if you've got your Bible, read along in your Bible. If you don't have it on your talk sheets, you've got it right there. So verse 25 says this, and behold, a lawyer or an expert in the law stood up to put him to the test. So he stands up to put Jesus to the test. And he says this, teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life? And Jesus responds, he said to him, what is written in the law? How do you read it? And he answered, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind and your neighbor as yourself. And he said to him, you've answered correctly, do this and you will live. So this lawyer, this expert in the law, expert in Jewish law, the law of Moses, is trying to play games with Jesus. So he's trying to put him to the test to see if he's gonna mess up in the things that he says. So he stands up, he goes to put him to the test and he asks him this question. He says, what should I do to inherit eternal life? And I love this about the way that Jesus teaches and I love this about the way that he talks with people. In his typical fashion, Jesus responds to this question with another question. And he says, okay, so you're an expert in the law, what does the law say? What does the law say about how you should inherit eternal life? When you read it, what does it say? So Jesus asked him that and the lawyer responds and he says that it is to love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength and to love your neighbor as yourself. And so Jesus gives him a pat on the back and he says, good job, buddy, you answered correctly. He says, now go and do it. And so let's keep reading. Verse 29, but he, the expert in the law, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, and who is my neighbor? So he asks, what should I do to inherit eternal life? Jesus says, what does the law say? He responds, he says, the law says that I should love God and I should love my neighbor. And Jesus is like, that's great, so you should go do that. And then the lawyer gets a little sassy. He's like, all right then, well then who's my neighbor? Who qualifies? So he says, who is my neighbor? And Jesus replies with a story. He says, a man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho and he fell among robbers who stripped him and beat him and departed, leaving him half dead. And so the first thing I want you to see tonight, there's three people in this story that Jesus tells and the first is the robbed, the robbed. And so the lawyer tries to justify himself. He tries to justify himself, he tries to find a loophole and he asks, who is my neighbor? Who exactly qualifies as the type of person that I should love based on the law? And so you could rephrase his question like this. You could ask it, he's basically saying, who is not my neighbor? According to God's standards, who do I not have to love? You know, who are the people that don't really fit the qualifications of neighbor? They're like lower than that and I don't have to love them. So he's really asking that. And in verse 30, the answer to the selfishly motivated question, Jesus responds by telling a parable. Can anybody, is anybody brave enough to tell me what a parable is? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A story like the prodigal son or the sower sowing seed, it's a story that has a deeper meaning, that there's a deeper lesson behind it. And so Jesus tells this story to communicate a biblical truth or a spiritual truth to this expert in the law. And so he tells a story to communicate a deeper lesson. He begins telling this parable out about a man who went from Jerusalem to Jericho. And so I did some research on it. And at this time, the road from Jerusalem to Jericho was about 18 miles. Have any of y'all walked 18 miles in a day? Oh, okay, come on, you run a marathon? You walked 18 miles at Disney World? Were you there all day long? That doesn't sound like a vacation, that sounds like work, I'm not gonna lie. And so anyways, this guy, he's gonna walk 18 miles and it would have taken most of his day. It would have taken somewhere between five and eight hours to travel that whole distance. And so while he's on his way, he finds himself in what experts would call a bad situation. So the robbers, they come up and they grab him, they take all his stuff, they beat him up and they throw him on the side of the road in bad shape. And I'm gonna be honest with you, this reminded me of a situation that I found myself in in high school. I didn't get robbed, I didn't get beat up, but I did find myself stuck on the side of the road. And so when I was in high school, I lived up in Northwest Indiana. Anybody been to Northwest Indiana? Up near Chicago? Come on, that's what I'm talking about? So if y'all have been there, y'all know what I'm about to say. There is nothing, nothing in Northwest Indiana. There are cornfields, there are cow farms and there's the sky. And that's literally all that's there. And so I decided one day that I was gonna go hang out with one of my friends and it was a 35 minute drive to his house. So I'm planning to leave at like 9.30 at night to drive to his house to go and hang out for a little while. We were gonna watch a movie, we're gonna hang out. And so I leave and I get probably 10 minutes from my house and I look and my gas light is on and I'm running on E. I was afraid to check how many miles I had left on the tank. And so I had two options. I could either turn around and drive five minutes back to the gas station I passed just a little bit ago or to continue going on to my friend's house. And you guys obviously know what I picked. No, I chose to just keep on driving to my friend's house. And so I keep driving to my friend's house and I get about halfway and I completely run out of gas. Done, cars turned off. I'd rolled over to the side of the road. And so I'm sitting on the side of the road at almost 10 o'clock at night.
dark out, and I don't have any service, and I'm just thinking, I don't know what I'm going to do. I don't know how I'm going to get to my friend's house. I'm late. He was expecting me 10 minutes ago. And so all of a sudden, like an angel sent from the Lord, I see this bright shining light coming down the road. And instead of an angel, it is a rusty old Ford F-150 driven by a farmer who lived down the road. And so he pulls up next to me and he goes, son, you all right? And I was like, I'm okay, but I could use some gas. I don't know if you're able to help me. He said, son, it's your lucky day. I got a gas can in the bed of the truck. And so he goes over there and he fills up my gas tank and he sends me on my way and I make it all the way to my friend's house and we're good. We make it all the way, all is well. But the reality is I was super scared and super helpless as a teenager who had really just started driving and I didn't have cell service, couldn't call anybody. I couldn't just make any gas appear. There was nothing that I could do at that moment. So he came and he helped me. And you know, I think that's probably how this man felt to an even greater degree in the story that Jesus is telling. He was robbed, he was beaten, and he was left on the side of the road to die. And what I want you to do is I want you to imagine if you were in his shoes. Imagine that that was you, that you were helpless and hopeless and you were afraid and you didn't know how you were going to get yourself out of the situation you were in. Imagine how that would feel. Imagine if you needed that kind of encouragement. How would you feel if somebody stopped and helped you? Yeah, you'd feel really good. You'd feel super grateful. I know I felt super grateful when the farmer stopped and helped me. I needed that. I felt so cared for and I felt so loved. And I think so often we think about ourselves, we think about the next thing that we need to do. You know, I'm sure that farmer had other things to do late on a Friday night, right? But he had the kindness to stop and to help me. And you never know what somebody's going through. You know, he didn't know what my situation was. You know, this guy in this story, he was going through a real rough spot. But sometimes the things that people go through are not as obvious. Sometimes you can't tell. And so the question of who is really my neighbor, that's to justify just walking past somebody and to say, I'm more worried about what I need to do. I'm more worried about the stuff that I want to do rather than how can I serve the person who's right next to me. Matthew 7.12 says that we should do to others as we would have them do to us. It's the golden rule. Do to others what you would want them to do to you. And if you were someone who is in need, what would you want someone like you to do for you? If you were me, what would you want the farmer to do? Would you want him to just drive by or would you want him to stop and help top off your gas tank? Yeah, you'd want some help. Absolutely. And so we should go and we should do that for the people who we have the opportunity to serve. And so in these next few verses, I want to point out the next people that Jesus points out and it is the religious. So there's the robbed and now the religious. So let's read in verse 31 and following. Verse 31 says, now by chance a priest was going down that road. And when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. So likewise, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. And so Jesus continues the parable and he tells of two men who instead of stopping to help, they decide to pass the man by as he's laying on the side of the road. And the first of the two is a priest, right? It's a priest. He's a teacher, a teacher of the law in the temple. And he sees the man lying on the side of the road. And instead of going to help, he crosses all the way to the other side of the road and he walks past him, not stopping to help. Shortly after that, a Levite comes by. This is a servant in the temple. The Levites had different kinds of jobs that they would do in the temple. And so he's a servant in the temple and he does the same thing. He sees the man, he steps all the way to the other side of the road, and he walks right on past. And so these two men were servants of God in the temple. They were scholars of the law. They were teachers of the law. They served God in the temple. That was their job. And so you would expect them to have the kind of attitude that Jesus would be commending, right? That he would be saying, these guys are doing the right thing. Do they do the right thing? No, they walk right on past. They don't help him. And I'll be honest, that would be the kind of person that I would want to pass by. If I was thinking of the kind of top of the list of people that would drive by me and I'm in a bad situation, I'm thinking priest, doctor, my mom. It's like, those are the people that I would want to come by because I know they would help, right? But they don't. And so something you need to know about these guys is because they worked in the temple, there's this thing called ritual cleansing and ritual uncleanliness. That was something that they had to worry about in the temple. And so if they like touched something dead or they were involved in some kind of thing like that, they would have to go through this process of being cleansed again before they could resume their temple duties. And so these guys, we don't know 100% of their motivation as to why, but I think part of it, the reason that they walked by was they didn't want to become ritually unclean and have to go through the process of getting, you know, clean again before they could resume their temple duties. They were afraid of getting their hands dirty. It was inconvenient for them to stop, right? And so it reminded me of something that happened to me a few years ago. A few years ago, my dad asked me to help with a little car repair at the house. And I'll be honest, it had been a long day. I had worked all day. I was tired. It was hot outside. I had already gone home. I had already taken a shower. I put on nice, comfortable, clean clothes. I was, I was ready to go to bed. I had taken my contacts out and put my glasses on. I was, I was checked out. I was done. No more work for the day. And my dad's like, hey, dude, I really, I need some help with this. I could probably do it myself, but I just need an extra hand. I need somebody to hold the flashlight. And so I need some help. Will you come help me? And the last thing I wanted to do at that moment was to work on a car. I would have done anything else, but working on a car was the last thing I wanted to do. And so I could come up with all of those excuses. I was clean. I had had a shower. It had been a long day. Dad, couldn't we just do it tomorrow? I don't want to get all sweaty. I don't want to get all dirty. I just, I don't want to do it, right? I could come up with a million excuses as to why I didn't want to do it, but I went anyway. And was it hot? Yes. Did my clothes get dirty? Yes. Was I even more tired after? Yes. But let me tell you, my dad really, really appreciated that I came and helped him. And we had really good conversation that night. We had the opportunity to just spend some time together. Now, if I had made the excuses and I had followed through with that and not gone, my dad probably would have laid out there in the driveway and worked on the car till midnight all by himself and not had any help. But I went and it was so worth it. And here's the truth about this section. It's so easy for us to look at the man who was robbed. And it's so easy for us to look at the religious people and the Levite and the priest and say, oh, you know, that's not me. Like I'm, I'm the good guy in this story. You know, we're going to get to the good Samaritan in a minute. It's easy for us to say, I'm the good Samaritan. And the truth is we are not the good Samaritan. We are the priest and the Levite. We are the priest and the Levite. We so often come up with excuses as to why we can't serve the people who God has placed in our path to serve. We, we time after time come up with excuses like I don't have time. I'm too busy. They're different from me. What if somebody saw me hanging out with them? Would they think that I'm weird? Maybe, maybe they would think that I'm not a Christian because I'm hanging out with somebody who doesn't believe in Jesus. We come up with so many excuses as to why we can't encourage and love and serve the people who God puts in our path. If we spent all the time and energy that we spend making up excuses, actually going and serving the people who we have an opportunity to serve, I think this world would look a whole lot different because we spend so much time and energy doing that. It would look radically different. Imagine what our middle school ministry would look like if each and every one of you and me and BJ and Connor and Gavin and all of us took
time and energy out of our day and we would serve the people around us. Then we would stop being selfish and stop making the excuses and we would serve the people around us and look for opportunities to help people. Imagine what it would look like. And here's the truth of it, people are messy. You're messy and I'm messy. And when you deal with people, when you help people, when you serve people, you're gonna get a little messy. That's just the way it works. You work in a garden, your hands are gonna get dirty. You serve people, there's things about it that are just messy. And if you're not willing to get your hands dirty, you're not gonna be able to serve the people around you. It requires you to get your hands dirty, but that is what God has called us to do. You will never love your neighbor if you keep looking for reasons not to. You will never love your neighbor if you keep looking for reasons not to. If you keep looking for excuses, you keep looking for reasons not to serve your neighbor, you will find them. And so we have to ask God to work on our hearts, to change us, to have the motivation and the desire to serve our neighbor and not cross to the other side of the road and pass them by. We can come up with any excuse that we can put our minds to, to not serve our neighbor. So are you going to get your hands dirty or are you gonna keep making excuses? The last person that Jesus talks about in this story is the really good neighbor, and this is the good part. This is the encouraging part. This is where the story turns around for this poor guy who's laying on the side of the road. So let's read starting in verse 33. But a Samaritan, but a Samaritan as he journeyed came to where he was. And when he saw him, he had compassion. He went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he set him on his own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him. And the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper saying, take care of him and whatever more you spend I will repay when I come back. And then Jesus turns back to the expert in the law and he says this, which of these three do you think proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among robbers? He said, the one who showed mercy. And Jesus said to him, you go and do likewise. After the priest and Levite passed by, if I were the man who had been robbed, I would have been hopeless. I would have been like, I'm tapping out. It's done. It's over. That's wraps. Curtains, bro. There's no hope left. Nobody's coming to help. Nobody's coming to save me. That's where I would have been. Two people walk by and cross to the other side of the road, not wanting to help me. I would, I'd be so discouraged. But Jesus throws a little curveball in this parable. Like I said earlier, you would have expected the priest and the Levite to help, but instead a Samaritan man who is on a journey comes up and finds where the robbed man was lying. And instead of passing him by, he sees him and he has compassion on him and he stops to help. He bandages him up. He puts the guy on his donkey. He takes him to the inn. He pays to get a room at the inn. He takes care of him. And the next day he wakes up and he pays the innkeeper to keep taking care of him. And he even says, all right, here's the deal. I'm going to leave. I'll be back. Whatever money you have to spend taking care of him, I'll pay you back for that too when I come back. That's radical care for his neighbor. That is what it looks like to be a good neighbor. And the Samaritan man, he was willing to have his entire journey interrupted. He was, he was on the way. He had somewhere to go and he was willing to stop and to take care of this man and spend money to take care of him, to help somebody in need. And the priest, like I said, and the Levite were the number one and the number two draft picks for the type of people who would serve a guy like this. The Samaritan man was not, he was not even top 10. The reality is Jews hated Samaritans and Samaritans hated Jews. And so there was, it's funny even that he's called the good Samaritan in this story because at this time a Jew would have said, I don't believe there's even such a thing as a good Samaritan. They're all bad. They hated them just for being Samaritans. And so from a cultural perspective and a social perspective, it didn't make any sense for a Samaritan man to be stopping to help this guy on the side of the road. He was completely different from him, had nothing in common with him. His journey was being interrupted. He had places to go. It cost him so much, but he chose to stop and to help him because he was a good neighbor. Because he cared for somebody who had an opportunity to serve. You okay? You all right? Okay. Back in high school, I ended up one day, um, showing up to school. This was shortly after I had started driving. I showed up to school, pulled into the parking lot, and there was an upperclassman who had a really, really recognizable pickup truck. And so he is sitting in his normal spot, but when I pulled into my spot, I noticed that he was laying on the ground by his truck and he was working on, on his tire. Turns out he had a flat tire. And so I looked at him and I was like, I probably should help him. He was really struggling with, with his flat tire. I was like, I probably should help him. And I look at my watch and I'm already like five minutes late to class. I'm like, ooh, well, I gotta go. So I, I, I, I cut my losses and I said, I'll just give a little prayer for him. So I pray for him real quick as I'm walking in. I meet my buddy who's just inside. He's late for class too. And he was like, you see, you see, you see the guy out there? He was dealing, he had trouble with his car. He was like, I, I, I said a little prayer for him. You ready to go to class? I was like, Hey, I did the same thing. Uh, so we go on to class, we walk in, we're late. Our teacher's like, what are you guys doing? Why are you late? We're like, ah, it's traffic, man. So sorry. Uh, but we're, we're here. And obviously that excuse doesn't fly when we're living in Northwest Indiana where there is no traffic. So anyways, so we get to class and we realized that somebody's missing. And so there was this guy. And for the sake of the story, we're going to call him Steve. So Steve, uh, he was a little bit, it was a little weird. I'm gonna be honest. He was a little bit of a weird guy. He was a little awkward. He kept to himself. Uh, he, he dressed a little different than everybody else. Um, he liked things that most of the other guys in our class just didn't really care about that much. He listened to music we didn't listen to. And so he was kind of just on the outskirts of the friend group. And I don't condone that at all. We should have brought him in. We should have cared for him. Right. But he was, he was a little strange. And so we realized that he wasn't there. So we finished up our first period class. We go to our second period class and halfway through our second period class. Guess who walks in? Steve. Steve walks in covered head to toe in sweat and grease and road grime because for the last hour and a half, he had been out in the parking lot helping the upperclassmen change his tire. And we were all like, Oh man, you know, we're such great people. We're such good servants. We're such good friends. And we had passed him by and we had overlooked Steve all those days because we thought he was weird. And he was the one that went and helped the upperclassmen with his tire. We didn't expect him to serve. We didn't expect him to do something like that, but he did because he cared because he was a good neighbor to that upperclassman. Just like Steve, the Samaritan was the least expected person to help in this situation. But his heart was right. His heart was right. He didn't make excuses. He saw the opportunity that God put in his path. He put it right in front of him and he chose to help. And just as Jesus said, he was the one that proved to be a good neighbor. The lawyer's original question was what? What was his original question? Who is my neighbor, right? Who is my neighbor? And Jesus flips the question on its head and he asked a different one. He said, I'm not making justification for who your neighbor is and who your neighbor isn't. The question I have for you is, are you a neighbor? Are you a good neighbor? Are you somebody that loves the people who are around you? Are you somebody that follows in Christ's example of humility and of love and of service and goes out of your way to serve somebody who's in need? Are you laying aside your own journey, letting it be interrupted so that you can serve somebody? Are you making sacrifices of your time and your energy and money so that you can help somebody that you come in contact with? Are you willing to be judged by somebody or judged by the people around you because
or loving and serving somebody who's different from you. The answer to the question, who is my neighbor? Is that everyone is your neighbor, everyone. No matter how different they are, no matter if you think they are too far gone or not, no matter what the cost is for serving them, everyone is your neighbor and there is no exception. Jesus doesn't care about the question, who is your neighbor? His question, the one that he cares about for you and for me is, are you a good neighbor? Are you the kind of person who proves to be a neighbor to someone in need? And so for the believers in the room, I ask you that question. Are you a good neighbor? Are you willing to be interrupted and inconvenienced by the opportunity to serve somebody and to love somebody and to point them to Jesus? Are your plans too important? Is your journey to Jericho too important? Or are you willing to be interrupted? Are you willing to see the people on the road and not cross to the other side? On your sports teams, in your classrooms, at the lunch table, are you willing to go and to love somebody and serve them and be the kind of person who they need? People need to be encouraged. They need help. They need to be prayed for. They need a friend. And you guys can be that friend. Is your heart willing to do that? And I'm willing to bet that each and every one of us in here has at least one person that they know that they could be a better neighbor to today and this week. And so on your talk sheets, there's a question at the bottom and it says, who is my neighbor? And there's a blank. And what I want you to do is I want you to take that talk sheet and I want you to write a name. I want you to write a name of somebody that this week you can serve and you can love and you can be a better neighbor to. And I want you to take that sheet home and I want you to pray and I want you to ask the Lord to give you an opportunity to serve that person this week. Each and every one of us can be a better neighbor to somebody this week. And if you're not a believer in the room, you're somebody who has never confessed your sins, you've never believed in Jesus, the reality is you are more like the broken man on the side of the road who got robbed. You are helpless, you're hopeless, and you need somebody to come and help you. And that person is Jesus. Jesus, He didn't cross to the other side of the road. He loved us enough to stop to see us, to have compassion on us and to give His life so that we could be saved, so that we could have new life in Him. And so if you haven't done that, you haven't confessed your sins, you haven't believed in Jesus, you haven't been saved from the side of the road, I wanna give you that opportunity tonight. And when we start this song, as we sing in worship, I want you to come and find me or one of our leaders or Connor, and we wanna talk to you about what it means to follow Jesus, what it means to be saved and forgiven from your sins, so that you can have a changed heart, so that you can be made new and that you can have the opportunity to grow in Christ to be more like Him and that you too can be a good neighbor to somebody. Let me pray for us and then we're gonna worship. Lord, thank you so much for your word. Lord, thank you so much that you loved us enough to give us your grace and your mercy. Lord, thank you that you didn't pass to the other side of the road, that you gave us an opportunity to be saved. Lord, I pray that we would follow in the example that you've set for us of humility and service. God, I pray that we would prove to be good neighbors. Lord, help us to see the people in our life that need help, that need you, and that we would be bold to share the good news of the gospel, that we'd be bold to go and to help somebody, even if they're different from us. Lord, that we would love people the way that you love them. Help us to love you first and foremost and to love our neighbor as ourself. God, help us not be like the priest and the Levite who step to the other side because we're afraid to get our hands dirty or be inconvenienced. God, help us to love you. Help us to love our neighbor. Lord, be with us as we worship. It's in Jesus' name we pray, amen. Y'all stand, let's worship.