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Hey, Bible nerds. This is Dr. Manny Arango and I'm your host for the Bible Department podcast powered by Arma. This podcast follows a Bible reading plan we created to help you read the entire Bible in a year. You can head to the show notes or thebibledepartment.com to download our reading plan and join the Journey family. We are in Luke chapter 10, 11, 12 and 13 today. Again, not gonna give you like in depth teaching on all four of those chapters. Gonna like cover some context clues, some nerdy nuggets, a timeless truth. It's gonna be a big overview. So if you need to read the reading for today, then go ahead and read Luke chapter 10 all the way to chapter 13. You can pause this podcast and go read. I'll be right here when you get back. One of the parables. This section is going to have a ton of parables in it. In one of the parables that is just so Luke is a parable of the Good Samaritan. It starts in chapter 10, verse 25, and it says on one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test. Jesus said, what must I do to inherit eternal life? What is written in the law? Jesus replied, how do you read it? So they're having this dialogue and he gives the right answer. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your strength and all, all your mind. And love your neighbor as yourself. You have answered correctly. Jesus said, do this and you will live. But he wanted to justify himself. So he asked Jesus, and who is my neighbor? Which actually was the whole point of all of this. Who is my neighbor? Because, Jesus, you're healing people that we don't really agree with. Like you're doing a bunch of stuff. Like you, you have inaugurated this inside out kingdom. And this person who Jesus is talking to would be an insider, a traditional insider that is probably feeling pushed to the outskirts and not happy about everyone who's kind of being let in. So he has a question like, okay, who is my neighbor? I hear you, Jesus. Like, I, I know what the law says, but we don't define our neighbors as the same person. And so Jesus breaks out into this parable. He says, a man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him, went away, leaving him half dead. A priest happened to be going down the same road, but the priest didn't do anything. A Levite going down the same road didn't do anything, but a Samaritan came where the man was, when he saw him, took pity on him. And of course, Jesus then said the verse 36, which of these do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell in the hands of robbers? The expert in the law can't even say the word Samaritan. This is a context clue. He said, the one who had mercy on him. The one who had mercy on him, he can't even bring himself to say the word Samaritan. So who are the Samaritans? It's funny, I feel like I keep. I. I, like, I just. I keep making, like, racial references, but it's just kind of the world we live in, you know, I've been dreaming about planting a church for a long time, and I have a dear friends of me and Tia who, like, are on that journey with us, and they're like, yeah, we're going to go with you wherever it is that you guys plant a church. And so we've been kind of thinking through some cities, and that couple, the guy's name is Jesse, and the in the wife's name is Sarah. Well, Jesse's white and Sarah's black. And so I was thinking about, like, Huntsville, Alabama, like, Jackson, Mississippi. And like, I was just kind of thinking about. About some. Some, like, pretty, you know, Deep south kind of vibes. And Jesse was like, dude, like, if there's one thing that racist people hate more than black people, it's like, white people who are, like, in interracial marriages. Like, dude, like. Like, I don't know if I feel safe in Jackson, Mississippi. And I'm like, you know what? That is so fair. And Jesse's words actually give us context for who the Samaritans are. If there's one thing that racist people hate more than the race of people that they hate, it's people from their race who marry people from the race of people that they hate. Jesse's words are very, very right. So who are the Samaritans? That's a great question. And why do the Jews see them as such outsiders? Why do the Jews hate this group of people so much? Why is there so much animosity? Well, if you remember way back in the Old Testament, there are two nations that overthrow the people of Israel. The first is Babylon, and they go into exile. Okay, and what happens is Babylon comes into Israel and takes the best and the brightest and brings them back to Babylon. Well, that's not how the Assyrians did exile. When the Assyrians exiled you, they left the least existence in the poorest of your people group. In your country and then they took your people and scattered them across their empire and then they took random people from all over their empire and dumped them in your country. And so Samaritans are the product of mixed race intermarriages for centuries. Samaritans are people who are the result or the product of their Jewish great great great grandparents being left in the land. And instead of only marrying other Jews, they married people that the Assyrians had taken from all over the empire and dumped in the land of Israel. Jews, full blooded Jews would call Samaritan half breeds. They would call Samaritans all kinds of things that are just wicked and vile in the same way we can see in American history, racists in this country are not just evil and mean towards the race of people that they don't like, but they believe that their own race should be pure, that the, that the blood should remain pure. This was at the core of the issue between Jews and Samaritans, that Samaritans were Jewish but not Jewish enough. And so they represent an outsider. They represent people who are not really on the inside. They're not given access to the temple the same way that a Jew would be given access to the temple, which means they're not given access to God. They're not given access to participate in all of the Jewish festivals and what it means to actually be a festival, full blooded, full bred Jewish person. And right in the middle of this tension, the teacher of the law says, so who's my neighbor? And Jesus breaks out into the story about a Samaritan. This would have been jaw dropping that a priest and a Levite are not the heroes of the story, but that a half breed, half blood Samaritan that we hate, that they are the hero of the story. This is so jarring for the man who's listening to this that he can't even bring himself to say the word Samaritan. He just says the one who had mercy on him. And this is our context clue for the day. Next, chapter 11, we get into Jesus's teaching on prayer. Jesus doesn't say if you pray, he says when you pray. First thing that I want us to note is this, that Jesus had such a habit of praying. This is 11, verse 1. That Jesus had such a habit of praying that he doesn't have to sit his disciples down and say, hey, we're going to do a sermon series on prayer. This is what happened. When he finished, one of the disciples said to him, lord, teach us to pray. And so Jesus teaches them how to pray on our armor platform. I do a full breakdown of this prayer. Okay. There's a course, about a two hour course on our platform called our prayer course. And I do a breakdown of this prayer. So I'm not going to go into depth, but no, the first thing that we need to know is that we're praying not to a judge, not to a cosmic God who's far away, but to our Father. So Jesus says, my job as the Son is to connect you not just to me, but that I become the connection. And through me you find connection to the Father. Jesus then is going to give some really, like, I would say, like key insight on how the kingdom of darkness works. In chapter 10, verse 17, Jesus knew their thoughts and said to them, any kingdom divided against itself will be ruined and a house divided against itself will fall. If Satan is divided against himself, how can his kingdom stand? Which, wow. So we're saying that the kingdom of Satan is not divided. It's not divided. That the reason that the enemy can have so much power against you and I as believers is because the enemy's kingdom is not divided at all. And this is why Jesus said, my prayer is that you would be one. That Christian unity is actually a big, big deal. Because if we are trying to establish God's kingdom and we're divided and we're trying to fight against a kingdom that's not divided, it's not a matter of whether or not God is strong or whether or not Jesus is mighty. It's really a matter of whether or not we have decided to fight and stand in unity with one another. And if you're a Christian anywhere, I don't care if you're a Catholic, a Methodist, a Lutheran, if you're a believer, we are family. And this is something that I think is really, really hard, especially in a world that is becoming more and more polarized by algorithms. It's so difficult, especially if you've been living in a Christian bubble for your whole life, to realize, oh, there are Christians who think differently about alcohol. There are Christians who think differently about communion. There are Christians who think differently than me about baptism. One of the things that I want to do on this podcast and on the ARMA platform all the time is always celebrate the diversity that exists in the Christian community.