The Call of a Generous and Merciful Lifestyle

When a pastor takes up a call to a church or a missionary feels the call to live a life in a far off country or even when a Christian takes the role at a new law firm, a hospital, a worksite, the prayerful Christian will weigh up the question of their call to a particular line of work. It's often the time where we are the most prayerful, we may not like to admit, when these big changes in our life need to be weighed up. Where will I invest my life, my abilities? When we pray, "God, do you want me to go and work at this place?"

Should I accept this job offer from my boss? Every time we ask that question, we need to begin the process of weighing up a calling. You may not think of it this way, but your job is your calling. Now we may not always think about it this way, but it's the same when we choose the lifestyles that we have chosen. Where we live.

The house we have. The cars we drive. These are all associated with the way that we understand the calling that God has given us. Every aspect of that lifestyle including our hobbies, the things that we entertain ourselves with, the daily needs that we have. They're all tied to what we can call calling in life.

Now if we believe that God is the one who has gifted us with our wealth, gifted us with our health, with our talents and our skills, our status perhaps even in society. If we believe that God has given us these things, then we believe as well that we've been given these things for a reason. If God has given us these things, there must be a purpose to it. Now we believe that these reasons may differ widely. People will have different understandings of these reasons.

One person may think that God has given them all these things, and they've come from His grace. God has unconditionally given these good things just because He is good. And we can use these good things to bless ourselves because we are objects of God's unconditional blessing. So in other words, the purpose of it is because God is good. And the purpose of it is because God wants us to be happy.

That's one way to understand the reason for the gifts that we have. Another person may think that these gifts are given to them with no reason from God at all. Like, God has given these things and He doesn't care how we use them. God is distant from us. Yes, we may have received these things from Him, but how we spend them, in what areas we spend them, God doesn't care.

And then a third person may think that we've been given these things as good gifts because they have certain expectations of us to be used for good purposes rather than primarily for personal gain. This morning, I want to propose to you that God cares very much about what we do with His gifts. And I want to propose that while God is very happy, He's a very happy God and He's extremely generous, He is gracious, his main purpose for our lives—I want to suggest that God loves the act of mercy that comes from people redirecting their wealth to those who are needy. God loves that. How do I know this?

Well, Jesus spoke about this. He spoke about it often, but perhaps he spoke about this in the most memorable way when he told the story of the Good Samaritan. Remember the parable of the Good Samaritan? And so this morning, I want to reflect with you on that story. So we're going to turn to that in Luke chapter 10.

And we're going to look from Luke 10, verse 25. Luke 10, verse 25. "And behold, a lawyer stood up to put Him—who is Jesus—to the test, saying, 'Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?' Jesus said to him, 'What is written in the law? How do you read it?'"

"The lawyer responded, '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 neighbour as yourself.' Jesus said to him, 'You have answered correctly. Do this and you will live.' But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, 'And who is my neighbour?' Jesus replied, '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.

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. 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 2 denarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, "Take care of him, and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back." Which of these three do you think proved to be a neighbour to the man who fell among the robbers?' He said, 'The one who showed him mercy.' And Jesus said to him, 'You go and do likewise.' We started this morning by talking about the idea of calling.

Does God call any of us to specific ways to live our life? Do we believe that God calls us to our respective work? Has God given us the abilities and the skills and the talents to do that? Does God then also call us to specific lifestyles that may in some way be connected with that work? Well, if we believe in a sovereign God who daily guides our steps, then we would have to say yes, God does then call us to our respective work and our respective lifestyles connected to that work.

We have all been given these things because God has placed a calling on our lives. But the call of God doesn't end with our jobs or our lifestyles. The call of God goes further—with what we do with that job, what we do with that lifestyle. God has specifically, more specifically than our jobs and our lifestyles, he has called us to, or perhaps you should say more generally, to good works. This is how Paul bluntly puts it in Ephesians 2:10.

"For we are God's handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works." Christians have been created as Christians through Christ to do good works. Paul says, "which God prepared in advance for us to do." What does it mean? What does this specific statement mean?

Well, it means we have been created in Christ Jesus to do good works, and that these good works, God has been preparing in advance for us to do. Now that may be really hard to grasp, to wrap our heads around, because we may not see that little bit of generosity this week that we've done. You know, the $4 we gave to someone that washed our windscreen or whatever. We may not understand or even see or believe that God has prepared us in advance to do that, but this is how sovereign God is over our lives. Every one of us has been given a calling to do good works as we've been created or recreated in Christ.

And that calling to do good works, that calling is irrespective of the status, the wealth, the salary that we will have as Christians. It's irrespective of whether we are low, middle or upper class individuals. God has called us to do something. The next question is, how do I know whether it is my calling? How do I know what is my calling?

And there's going to be a lot of our young people, university aged or high school aged people that are going to ask this question: what is my calling in life? Well, over the centuries, men and women have asked this very question, and somewhere along the line, there have been developed three ideas that are really, really helpful for understanding or weighing up a calling. How can a calling be confirmed? Well, when a desire is supplemented by an ability and is presented with an opportunity. You can almost write that as a mathematical equation.

When a desire is supplemented with an ability and those two things are presented with an opportunity. Desire, ability, opportunity. How do you know that God has called you into the police force? You have a desire to serve people. You have a desire to uphold what is just and fair and right.

That is your desire. Now, in addition to that, you have an ability that matches the requirements set by the police force. You're fit enough. You are disciplined enough. You are smart enough, and perhaps you can take orders well enough.

But your desire and your ability have to be matched, or have to be applied to opportunity. Somehow your life has manoeuvred in such a way that the opportunity to join said police force has come up. A friend in the force might invite you. Perhaps you realise there's a shortage of police officers at the same time as you're considering a change in your careers. There is the opportunity.

And so as you prayerfully, as we all prayerfully weigh up these three things—desire, ability and opportunity—you start determining whether God has called you to something or not. So what does this have to do with the parable of the Good Samaritan? What does this have to do with what a Christian's calling in life is? Well, this is what I want to share with you. God calls us to a life of generosity and a life of mercy.

And we see that in this parable because these three things actually exist in the parable itself. These three elements: desire, ability and opportunity. Let's have a look at them. Firstly, we see a desire.

This is perhaps the most important aspect of the parable that Jesus is really wanting to draw out—the desire of this man as opposed to the other two men. Jesus is comparing a priest, a Levite, and this Samaritan. The first two individuals of the story, this priest and this Levite, a Levite being almost a priest in training. They don't have a desire to help. They have another desire which is to get away from there as quickly as possible, to not become ceremonially unclean by dealing with someone that may be dead.

We see that they have a desire to avoid him, but the Samaritan man has a desire which is one of mercy. Verse 33, Jesus highlights this. It says, "But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where this person was. And when he saw him, he had compassion." Compassion is the desire here.

It's a deep emotional reaction that is attached to the sense of calling. Missionaries, when they are confirming their call, often have a strong emotional connection to a particular people group. We have missionaries that we support, Neil and Beck Joubert. They had a sense of calling to Turkey, a strong sense of Muslim ministry. They cared about the Turkish people, and so they became missionaries to Turkey.

For others, it can be a strong desire to own their own business and the excitement of doing brand new things. They have that entrepreneurial desire. I don't have that. I think, "Man, that is too hard. That is too risky."

I, as a, that's why I'm a pastor, obviously. Too risky. Too much hard work. I don't know what the reason is, but I have no desire for that. But for others, it could be a strong sense or urgency to work with young people.

To work with people that are on the fringes of society, and so they become social workers or they become youth workers. So there's this deep desire in a call. But I want to point out to you that even in God's call towards good works, the general call for all Christians, He places in our hearts a deep emotional response in our desires. We see the Good Samaritan has a desire to help this man because he has compassion on him. This compassion from the Samaritan man is actually the most shocking part in this story because you probably know people from Samaria didn't like people from Judea and vice versa.

They were enemies. Meanwhile, the irony is that the priest and the Levite, probably from the same people group as this man who had been beaten up coming down from Jerusalem going down to Jericho, they avoid him at all costs. The Samaritan man doesn't care because he has this deep sense of mercy and compassion, and he goes to help. So we see a desire. Then we come to the ability.

And here we see that the Samaritan didn't just have a desire to help. He had the ability to help as well. He has resources available. He comes to this man, half dead in the road, and he takes out wine and he takes out oil and he takes out bandages. Now he's obviously well prepared for this journey because he's carrying with him stuff that you need to protect yourself when you've been cut or hurt or whatever.

He has the resource to help this man. Wine obviously has alcohol in it, and even back then, people discovered or knew that alcohol kills germs. So he pours alcohol over the wound. A nice red merlot. Imagine that.

Then the oil, which is probably olive oil, goes on over the top of the wounds. That olive oil in itself is also antiseptic, but it also aided the healing by sealing those wounds from other bacteria that could come in. And then finally, the man binds this person up with bandages. Can you see that he has resources to help? Not only is he compassionate, but he has something to offer.

But then it doesn't stop there, and this is where the generosity comes in with his ability or his resources. He doesn't just have medicine and bandages. He has a donkey or some other sort of beast of burden. He loads this man onto his animal. The emphasis Jesus makes here is his own animal.

He loads him up onto his own animal, probably meaning he's hopping off his animal. And then he takes him to an inn, and he pays the innkeeper 2 denarii, which commentators speculate was about two weeks of accommodation. He pays in advance. But that amount is almost negligible because he says, "Whatever it costs, however long he needs to stay here, however long it will cost you, innkeeper, to look after him while he's here, I will pay." The donkey and the inn is pretty much the modern equivalent of putting him into your own car, driving him to the hospital, and then paying all his hospital fees.

But we see the Samaritan man not only with the ability to bind up the wounds, we see him with the generosity to go even further and pay all of his costs. We shouldn't assume that this was an easy thing to do. This cost something to this man. You know, if you have some wine and some olive oil and some bandages that you're not using, well, that's one thing. But 2 denarii, which is, I think, a denarius was about a day's worth of wages.

So he pays two days' worth of wages. That is a significant amount. This man is giving something that will have been felt by him and his family. But he gives because he has. He gives because he has.

And so we see here the desire for compassion is then met with the ability to help and help generously. But then finally, the opportunity. It could have been very different for that Samaritan man. It could have been a very different day for him. If there was no highway robbery, if this poor Judean wasn't beset upon by these robbers, it would have been a very quiet, normal day on the road.

The Samaritan man would still have been kind, probably. He still would have had a merciful heart, full of compassion as he was riding on his donkey. He would have had all his medicine and all his bandages. He still would have kept his 2 silver coins in his pocket. All of these things would have still been available to him, but none of it came to life.

None of it mattered until it could be applied when the opportunity arose. Remember how a call is confirmed. A desire is supplemented by an ability, and those two are presented with an opportunity. And so the Samaritan sees the situation. He thinks about how he can help.

He realises that he has the resources available to help, and then he sets about the task of actually helping. He evaluates the situation correctly. There is an opportunity here for him to help. Not for someone else, thinking, "Oh, this is a great idea, great opportunity, a good thing for someone else to do." How many times do I hear that in church?

"Well, you know, we should be doing this. We should be doing this." Who's "we"? He sees the opportunity. He does the job.

One of the scandals of our day, of the modern church—I guess you could call it, at least in the eyes of the world—is that the church is always after our money. We hear all the time, don't we? They're greedy. They're conspiring. These organisations feeding on gullible people's willingness to part with their cash.

Why is that? Why is that accusation leveraged against us? Well, perhaps for two reasons. Firstly, we know that there are good causes and we know that there are less good causes to which we can be generous. And there have been churches, and there are churches, and will be churches, and pastors who too quickly enrich themselves before they enrich their neighbours.

That's true. And so there is something for us to weigh up and always be mindful of. But there's probably another reason, and I think a prevalent reason for this accusation to be made of us as Christians and the church. When they say they're after your money, the other thing to remember is that the human heart is greedy and doesn't want to give away its money. When the world sees Christianity giving away, it is foreign and strange.

And so therefore, the assumption is there is something terribly wrong here, something very fishy about what these Christians are doing. We often hear how generous Australians are. I hear it all the time when we have to, you know, give towards bushfire causes. You know, we're generous people. But in figures from 2016—so three years old about now—the average amount Australians gave to charity was less than half a percent of their income. 0.5% of their taxable income.

If we're generous, I want to know what is not generous. If that's the case, okay, remember that figure: 0.5%. If that's the case, how weird is it to think, for these people, that Christians are encouraged to work towards a tithing of their income? 10%.

That is ridiculous. Outrageous. And so this morning, we're encouraged, reminded that the Lord Jesus calls His followers to radical and generous mercy as exemplified by the Good Samaritan parable. And so as we head into Christmas, we're going to celebrate, and we're going to be very festive. And we have, we have an excellent reason for that.

Christians above all have an excellent reason for that because we believe our Saviour came, that our God loved us so much that He would come to us in order to fulfil His calling—to live that perfect life, to die that sacrificial death, and to offer all those who believe life eternal. If we ever needed a great example of mercy, this is it. But as we celebrate Christmas with lots of feasting and gift giving in line with this great, amazing event, let's not forget to be generous with the very other important things in our life as well. Christmas is inherently a time of generosity because we realise how generous God has been to us. But as Christians, we go deeper than just being generous.

We move into being merciful. We are moved by compassion to the needy because we realise and we know how needy we were. Timothy Keller writes this: "Mercy is the spontaneous superabounding love which comes from an experience of the grace of God. The deeper the experience of the free grace of God, the more generous we must become." And so again, I just want to tell us and remind us this morning that we have the opportunity of literally two dozen causes we can give to in just those two pamphlets.

And so across these very worthy causes, causes of various types, things that we will be drawn to more than others perhaps, of various costs, things that we will have more ability to give to than others—even our young people, $20. We've been presented with an opportunity to be generous and merciful. So ultimately, I hope that as we head into Christmas, as we head into the New Year, as we talk about perhaps even New Year's resolutions, that we are challenged this morning to realise that we are called to a life of ongoing mercy, generous mercy in our daily life. So may we as Open House be a people with a deep desire to help.

May we be blessed by God so much that we have an ability to help. And may we have the eyes, the sensitivity to see the opportunity when it arises. Let's pray. Father, we are just so thankful, thankful that You love us so much that You have gifted us, lavished all these graces upon us.

The grace of our forgiveness, our salvation, our acceptance into the family of God. We are forever Yours regardless of how well we have applied some of these truths even here this morning. We are Your children, and You love us fully. But now in view of Your great mercy, Lord, You have reminded us that we are to be merciful. You have called us to be generous in view of Your generosity.

And as we become just that little bit more reflective and sentimental, generous in view of Christmas, celebrating the great gift of Jesus, as we give to others, Lord, I pray that we will feel the call on our lives to be people that love You sacrificially, love You with our lives. Help us to offer to those people in need what they need. Help us, Lord, to give without thinking too much, thinking our ways perhaps even out of it—giving while expecting something in return. Lord, help us to give because the giving in itself is good. We pray, Lord, that You will bless our church to be a generous church and to do, Lord, what You are calling all of us as Christians to do: to do those good works that You have prepared in advance for us to do.

We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.