Who is My Neighbor?

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Sermon preached on Luke 10: 25-37 by Rev. W. Reid Hankins during the Morning Worship Service at Trinity Presbyterian Church (OPC) on 09/21/2025 in Petaluma, CA.

Sermon Manuscript

Rev. W. Reid Hankins, M.Div.

The evil of racism continues to exist today. By “racism”, I mean sinful partiality based on a person’s ancestry. Racism is a problematic term because there is only one human race, made in God’s image and descended from Adam. Yet, it is a fact of history that some people have wrongly judged certain peoples as inherently inferior or superior, and even sought to segregate from them. As I reflected on this topic, I recognized that some of what is called racism is actually other forms of sinful partiality. In addition to racism and other prejudice, there can also be strong preferences that someone holds in a way that hurts someone else. All of this led me to consider the second greatest commandment, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” The parable of the Good Samaritan will help us consider this.

Today’s passage begins by reminding us of the law’s demands, to perfectly love God and our neighbor. Jesus affirms that the law says, “Do this and live.” The problem is none of us have kept the law perfectly. That is when this lawyer attempted to justify himself in verse 29 by trying to limit the law’s demands. He asks, “Who is my neighbor?” If you can lessen the law’s demands, it can be easier to conclude that you have kept it. Jesus flips the question around to show that instead of trying to reduce how many people we need to love, we should be someone who proves to be a loving neighbor to everyone. Jesus’ parable describes a Samaritan unexpectedly doing just that.

This parable makes this point by implying the well-known conflict between Jews and Samaritans. That conflict was both racial and religious with a lot of history. The area of Samaria began with Israelites who broke away from Judah and began to worship God through idols. Later, Samaria was conquered by the Assyrians who repopulated the area with foreigners. The Assyrians had an Israelite priest teach those resettled peoples the Israelite religion. The result was a mixture of Israelite and pagan religious practices. Over time it is believed that those foreigners intermarried with remaining northern Israelites, result in a people of mixed ethnic heritage. That group of people became known as the Samaritans, having both a mixed Israelite blood line and a corrupt form of Israelite religion. Later, when the Jews returned from Babylonian captivity to resettle Jerusalem, these Samaritans professed to the Jews that they worshipped the same God and offered to help them rebuild the temple together (Ezra 4). The Jews rejected their offer and would not recognize them. There was ongoing conflict and prejudice on both sides ever since.

Yet in Jesus’ parable, the injured man, presumably Jewish, was ignored by the religious leaders among Israel, a Levite and a priest. They should have proven themselves a neighbor to this injured man. Instead, it is the unlikely help from a Samaritan that gives of his time and money to help not just a stranger but an enemy. Jesus here teaches how far-reaching the command to love is. We are to love our family, our friends, our fellow countrymen, strangers, aliens, and even enemies. If you survey the Bible on this, you will see that the call to love our neighbor applies to all. This command remains in force through any personal preferences, even amidst righteous distinctions, and calls us to not have sinful partiality such as racism. Let’s consider each of those three things.

First, let us love our neighbor with our preferences. When I speak about a preference, I refer to those things that are matters of indifference in terms of God’s law. The fancy term for this is “adiaphora”. These are things where there is no positive command for the preference nor is there is any prohibition against it. If your preference is for something sinful, then that is not a preference but a sin. True preferences, then, are permissible, but not required. They are, by definition, a matter of Christian liberty. What flavor of ice cream you like best is a matter of preference, for example. We will have various preferences, and a number of your preferences may have been inspired from your family practices or the broader culture that you have been brought up in.

Whatever your preferences are, we must still love our neighbor amidst them. Just because you have a strong preference about something that your neighbor doesn’t, that doesn’t mean you get to stop loving them. Don’t let your strongly held personal preferences become a reason for quarreling or passing judgment or for disdaining someone in such matters of indifference. I’m referencing there Romans 14:1-4 on matters of dispute, and if that applies to matters of dispute, it all the more applies to matters of indifference.

Another passage that makes this point is 1 Corinthians 10:23-24. There Paul addresses how the Corinthians were abusing Christian liberty. Speaking about Christian liberty, Paul says, “All things are lawful, but not all things build up. Let no one seek his own good, but the good of his neighbor.” That is very helpful counsel for us when thinking about our personal preference in regard to loving our neighbor. Basically, the application would be that our personal preferences take a lower priority than our neighbor’s good. I wonder why the Levi and the priest might not have stopped to help the injured man? Presumably they put their own personal priorities over the good of the injured man. But the Samaritan surely had his own plans too for the day, yet he put those aside to aid a neighbor. There is a concept known as competing principles. Scripture lays out various good things that we should do and bad things we shouldn’t do. Sometimes the principles are in a healthy tension with each other, and you have to determine how to prioritize the competing principles. Your liberty of personal preferences is biblically protected. But the good of our neighbor, generally speaking, outweighs your personal preferences.

This doesn’t mean that your neighbor’s personal preferences outweigh your preferences. It means the good of your neighbor is more important than whatever matter of indifference you hold. When it comes to matters under the umbrella of racism, sometimes the conflict between two parties isn’t actually racism, but that they each have some very different personal preferences that come from their family or cultural backgrounds. What food people eat, what language they speak, what style of music they listen to, the customs and social graces they expect, and so much more, could add challenges to a relationship when both parties have strong but different preferences. For example, one person might want to greet someone with a handshake, others with a kiss on the cheek, how will you handle such differences? The answer should be that you will handle those differences in love, not in evil discrimination or sinful segregation. There are ways to hold different personal preferences while loving one another as mutual image bearers of God.

Let me add that people can have trouble distinguishing between personal preference and what they think God demands. They usually start with some clear principle of Scripture and make one application on top of another until they get to their strongly held personal preference, and truly do believe it to be what God demands of them. If this might describe you, I would encourage you to do some examining to see if you need to better distinguish between clear religious convictions and personal applications made in good conscience.

Let’s next turn to consider how we ought to love our neighbor in righteous distinctions. By “righteous distinctions”, I mean the truthful, impartial judgments God requires us to make. Now, if we make a righteous distinction, someone might call us discriminatory. But if God’s Word calls us to make such a distinction, then we need to do it. For example, the Bible clearly says homosexuality is a sin. The Bible demands us to call people to turn from it. If someone refuses that, we couldn’t receive them into membership of the church. 1 Corinthians 5-6 says we shouldn’t even eat with such a person. But it does immediately clarify that it is talking about those who claim to be Christians, not the world. That is one form of biblical segregation that we employ in the church, that we distinguish between Christians and non-Christians. That’s even why we fence the Lord’s Supper. But that also is a righteous distinction.

I wanted to talk about righteous distinctions because some people have tried to justify their racism or other prejudice in such terms. They might point to certain evils prevalent among a certain people group. They might say, well, this tribe of people practices this false religion, or this certain sin. But even if that were true, it wouldn’t excuse the racism. Having a righteous distinction doesn’t mean you are to stop loving your neighbor.

Take the Good Samaritan example. Part of the animosity between the Jews and Samaritans was religious in nature. Remember the conversation Jesus had with the Samaritan in John 4, where you see how Jews and Samaritans debated over the right place to worship. Let us be clear, under the old covenant the Jews were right and the Samaritans were wrong on that point. The Jews could make one of these righteous distinctions to say the Samaritans were wrong on their religion. That did not give the Jews the right to stop loving their neighbors who were Samaritans. Clearly that is an application of today’s parable. When the lawyer asked the question “Who is my neighbor” that I have to love, it’s to try to get out of loving some people. Surely, one group they thought they could get away with not loving was the Samaritans because they were adherents to a faulty religion. Jesus commends the Samaritan who won’t let that important distinction stop him from keeping the second greatest commandment. That conversation in John 4 between Jesus and the Samaritan observed the same issue. The Samaritan woman was surprised that Jesus would speak with her, given how Jews segregated themselves from them. But Jesus knew that such was sinful segregation, a violation of the command to love our neighbor.

We can see a positive example of this in our OPC mission work in Uganda. The tribe that we are ministering to has the culturally accepted practice of polygamy. Our missionaries must make a righteous distinction to speak against that as sinful. But instead of having racism against those Ugandans who are polygamist, our missionaries are loving them by trying to evangelize them. They’ve done the opposite of segregating from them, they’ve gone and lived there to meet them where they are to try to love them. You can make righteous distinctions without falling into racism or anything that may look like it.

Let’s turn now to our third point to consider how we should love our neighbor by putting off sinful partiality. To speak of sinful partiality is to be redundant in biblical terminology which always speaks of partiality as a sin. It could be defined as showing sinful favor or disfavor against someone based on outward factors that don’t warrant such bias. James 2 categorically condemns partiality and uses the example of exalting a rich person while dishonoring a poor person, simply due to their economic status. The Scripture further affirms this in repeated places by teaching that God himself shows no partiality as the equitable judge of all the earth. In terms of racism, Acts 10:34 specifically makes this point with the closely related concept of nationality, that God shows no partiality among the nations. Instead, Acts 10 speaks of how people from any nation can find acceptance with God. In other words, racism, is inherently a sin of partiality.

One reason why judging someone on race alone is sinful partiality is that it fails to account for the fact that we are all descended from Adam. That fact that people have different color skin or other physical features reflects the beautiful variation God built into human DNA. Just like it would be sinful partiality to judge someone on the basis of the color of their hair or their eyes, the same is true regarding the color of their skin. Acts 17:26 makes this point saying that God “made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him.” What I love about that verse is it sets in proper context the fact that there is ultimately one human race, and even though in God’s providence they have dispersed into different peoples and nations, that doesn’t change the unity we have as one race descended from Adam. As Acts says, this relates to how God desires for peoples from all nations to come to him. We as humans have more in common than what we have that is different.

Sadly, some have tried to craft a biblical argument to support racism and/or racial segregation. Some have tried to argue from Noah’s cursing of Canaan and the blessing of Shem and Japheth, but while that may help explain the waywardness of the Canaanites in the Bible, it is does not justify racism or treating any tribe of people as inferior. Some have tried to argue from how God confused the languages of the people at the Tower of Babel, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t strive to overcome such a curse, just like the curse of the land in Genesis 3 doesn’t mean we shouldn’t make plows to make farming easier. Indeed, God signaled his redemptive efforts in this at Pentecost in Acts 2 when he blessed peoples of various languages to all hear the gospel preaching that day in their own tongue. Some have argued that when Acts (and Deut 32:8) says God determined allotted periods and boundaries of nations that such means we need to protect and contain peoples within those boundaries. Yet, God’s providence in boundaries of nations is descriptive not prescriptive. It describes God’s providence in the affairs of the nations, that he is ultimately in control. Indeed, national boundaries have varied throughout history, and nations have risen and fallen as well. Scripture is also very descriptive on the common fact that there are sojourners and foreigners who will be in various countries, but it does repeatedly prescribe that we must love them and treat them well.

Indeed, there is no room for a biblical argument for racism. Christians should especially reject all forms of racism within the church. The New Testament clearly speaks of how God brings people together from all the nations into a single united body, Ephesians 2:14 and 3:6. Likewise, in Galatians, Paul had to rebuke Peter when he segregated himself from Gentile Christians when the Judaizers showed up. Galatians 3:28 speaks of how both Jew and Greek are all one in Christ. That doesn’t mean those people lose their ethnic heritage or earthly nationality, but it does mean they are united in Christ. And the clear teaching of the New Testament is that such is one united body, not a place for segregation or racism among the body of Christ. Yes, we each have an ethnic background and a cultural heritage. But, if we go back far enough, we end up at the same place with Adam. In between there has been variation. We don’t lose that being a Christian. But we realize that whatever we are according to the flesh, is not nearly as important as what we are according to the spirit. The unity we have in Christ compels us to love people of all tongues, tribes, and nations, even as we seek their salvation.

But Jesus’ parable teaches that you don’t even need to be a Christian to recognize something as basic as we should love our neighbor by putting off sinful partiality. Surely, some of the conflict between the Jews and Samaritans involved sinful partiality. John 8:48 shows that the Jews would even use the word Samaritan as a slur. But this Samaritan, with his faulty religion, put aside racism to love his neighbor. Jesus commands us to do the same. Indeed, many in the world have recognized the need to love neighbor. But we who are priests and Levites in Christ should lead the way in putting aside racism. Don’t be the person in the parable who didn’t love their neighbor!

Trinity Presbyterian Church, I hope today’s message reminds us that God’s command to love our neighbor includes loving everyone. Let not our personal preferences get in the way of that. Let not even important righteous distinctions get in that way of that. Certainly, sinful partiality like overt racism is something to put off, and to then put love in its place. Along these lines, I’d like to offer seven practical applications in this matter:

1. Don’t judge a book by its cover. Don’t look at someone and assume things about them because they look like one so-called race or another. See instead a unique person created in God’s image and get to know them. Don’t make value judgments based on their racial appearances. Likewise, don’t assume things about their preferences and culture by their race. Prov. 18:13 says it is foolish and shameful if you give an answer before you hear. Don’t be foolish and shameful by judging by mere outward appearances.
2. Reject racial segregation because it is founded on racism which is sinful partiality. Particularly in the church, the Bible is abundantly clear there is no place for segregation among members.
3. Avoid racial jokes and racial mockery and beware racial stereotypes.
4. Racism can go in any direction. Modern critical theory has tried to redefine racism as something that can only happen against a minority. But a minority can commit racism too. It’s wrong to be racist to anyone, white, brown, black, or whatever.
5. People of different cultures sometimes misunderstand each other. Unless it is overtly clear, beware too quickly assuming someone is being racist to you. It may be that you have different preferences. We need to love each other with understanding and mutual respect, even if we have different cultural preferences and practices.
6. In politics, you can find some people on both sides of the aisle who employ racism in their politics. But that is evil regardless of their politics.
7. Beware of any pride that would give rise to racism. As Philippians 2 says, “in humility count others more significant than yourself, looking not only to your own interests, but also the interest of others.”

Stepping back, I hope you understand that this sermon has brought you a lot of law. It is good law that we should look to embrace. But I want to point you back to verse 29. When this lawyer was confronted with God’s law, he was tempted to try to justify himself. Don’t try to do that with today’s message. Don’t try to explain to yourself how you have kept this well enough so as to justify yourself before God. That would be to miss the bigger point about the gospel. To love our neighbor is a good law that would should seek to keep. But we will fall short. Look again to the gospel today. Be justified not by your works that fall short but by Jesus who loved us his neighbor as himself and died on the cross in your place. He didn’t take our race into account when he died for us. If this Good Samaritan proved to be a good neighbor, Jesus has proven himself to the Best Neighbor. Jesus has showed us mercy. Let us hear this message today with much law and remember the mercy we have in Christ. Then, by his grace, let us go and look to show mercy to all the world, as an act of love to all neighbors.

Amen.

Copyright © 2025 Rev. W. Reid Hankins, M.Div.
All Rights Reserved.