Luke 10:29-37 But he, willing to justify himself, said to Jesus, And who is my neighbor?… We can help a man only by identifying ourselves with him, getting into his circumstances, getting into him, becoming he If you have a temptation that you want to get the mastery over, the man for you to go to for counsel and relief is the man who has been in your place and gained the victory that you want to gain. The heat man to convert a drunkard is a converted drunkard. The power to appreciate temptation is the prime condition to being able to help others out of temptation. In a certain way it holds that the more bad and awkward situations a good man has been in, the richer may prove his ministry and the more various his apostleship. Almost all the men in the Scripture story that ever proved a great advantage to anybody had at some time been themselves in sad need of succour. The first step God took towards making us become like Him was for Him to become as far as He could like us. If you have any doctrinal perplexity, your resort for assistance will always be to some one whose doctrinal experience has been complicated in the same way. And it is not by any means enough to be able to understand another man's difficulty, burden, temptation; we need to go a little farther and feel it as our own difficulty, burden, temptation, just as the Samaritan not only appreciated his fellow-traveller's distresses, but felt them as his own distresses, and therefore set him on his own beast; and as Christ not only understood our sins, but Himself put Himself behind our sins, underneath them, carried them, and in such a whole-hearted way, as really to suffer the pain and penalty of them. There is always more or less of the vicarious when there is any good done, any release wrought, any redemption effected. (C. H. Parkhurst, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbour?WEB: But he, desiring to justify himself, asked Jesus, "Who is my neighbor?" |
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