A lawyer once stood up in front of Jesus to test Him with a question he already thought he had the answer to: Who is my neighbor? It’s the same question a lot of us are still asking. We’ve just gotten quieter about it.
The Backdrop
The scene is Luke 10:25-37. A religious lawyer, hoping to trap Jesus, asks what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus turns the question back on him: What does the law say? The man answers correctly: Love God with everything you have first and love your neighbor as yourself second. Jesus tells him: Do this, and you will live.
That should have ended it, but the lawyer wanted an exit, so he got technical. Wanting to justify himself, he asked exactly the kind of question a lawyer asks: Where does the fine print say my obligation stops? Who, precisely, is my neighbor?
Jesus didn’t hand him a definition. He handed him a story in Luke 10.
A man is beaten, robbed, and left half dead on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. A priest sees him and crosses to the other side. A Levite, another religious insider who should have known better, does the same. Then a Samaritan, a man from a people the Jews despised, stops. He interrupts his plans to help the injured man. He gets his hands bloody bandaging the wounds. He gives up his own donkey, takes him to an inn, and takes care of him. The next day he took out two denarii (i.e., his money) and gave them to the innkeeper. “Look after him,” he said, “and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.”
Then Jesus asks a question that isn’t the lawyer’s question at all. Not who qualifies as my neighbor, but which of these three proved to be a neighbor? That shift is the whole message. As Dr. Tony Evans has pointed out in his teaching on this parable, the lawyer wanted to locate his neighbor so he could know the boundary of his duty. Jesus reframes it entirely: you don’t go looking for a neighbor to serve. You become the kind of person a neighbor finds. You must prove yourself to be a neighbor through tangible action.
But when they find you, it rarely looks like an opportunity. It looks like an interruption. An inconvenience. Something that costs you your schedule, your comfort, maybe your clean clothes. The priest and the Levite weren’t bad men. They just weren’t postured for it. The Samaritan was, and it cost him something to prove it.
Last week I launched Coach C’s Neighborhood with a simple line: Less Talk. More Walk. This week, that gets put to the test. Talk is deciding, in theory, that you’d help. Walk is stopping on the road when it isn’t convenient.
What Builds That Posture
Here’s the question underneath the question: How does a person actually become someone who stops? Dr. Evans answers that too, in a companion teaching on being doers of the Word and not hearers only. He tells the story of a man who dug a well and struck water but only kept pumping it for a week before he let it be. Within two weeks, the well was dry. An old-timer told him what he should have known: stop pumping, and the channels that feed the water close up. Keep pumping, and they open wider.
Your walk with God works the same way. What you take in daily shapes who you are. Who you are shapes what you notice, and what you notice shapes what you do. A man who hasn’t spent time in the Word that morning can walk right past the person bleeding on his own Jericho road and never see him at all. A man who has is far more likely to stop.
Scripture Anchor
Today’s Family Wins devotional reading is 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11, and it fits this exactly. Paul writes that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night, but believers are children of the light and of the day, not meant to be caught sleeping. We’re told to stay alert and sober, to put on faith and love like armor, and to keep encouraging one another and building each other up.
That’s not a passive posture. That’s readiness. A neighbor, in the end, is what alertness looks like with skin on: a person who was already awake, already dressed for it, when the interruption came.
So, which will it be? Keep scanning the horizon for the convenient neighbor, the one who fits neatly into your schedule, or let the daily discipline of the Word shape you into someone who’s already prepared when the moment finds you, whether or not it’s convenient?
This is exactly what Coach C’s Neighborhood is built for. Five minutes a day with the show isn’t much on its own but pair it with fifteen minutes each morning in the Word, and you start becoming someone different. Not overnight. A little at a time, the way roots go down before anyone ever sees the fruit.
This is how Kingdom Parents are built: Kingdom Husbands, Kingdom Fathers, Kingdom Wives, Kingdom Mothers. Not in a single dramatic decision, but in a thousand small ones, made quietly in the Word long before they’re ever made out loud on the road.
If you haven’t picked up your copy of The Family Wins Devotional, it’s yours, free, no strings attached, at mindwolves.com/tfw. Start tomorrow morning. Keep the water flowing.
Feed the Good Wolf. 🐺