Light of the World Today
“You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your strength, and all your mind. And love your neighbour as yourself. Do this, and you will live.” Luke 10 verses 27 to 28 (NLT)
Parts One and Two worked inward. Part One asked you to understand what love is and where it comes from. Part Two took you into the harder territory of forgiveness and the relationships that cost you something. Part Three moves outward. It asks what happens when love leaves the inner circle of family and close friendship and extends into the wider world, to the stranger, the overlooked, the person you have no particular reason to help, and possibly the person you have every human reason to avoid. Jesus was asked which commandment was the greatest. He gave two answers, and He deliberately bound them together. Love God with everything you have. And love your neighbour as yourself. When a lawyer pressed Him on who the neighbour was, Jesus did not give a definition. He told a story.
WHO IS YOUR NEIGHBOUR
“But a Samaritan, who was on a journey, came upon him; and when he saw him, he was deeply moved with compassion, and went to him and bandaged up his wounds, pouring oil and wine on them; and he put him on his own pack-animal, and brought him to an inn and took care of him.” Luke 10: 33 - 34 (AMP)
The story of the Good Samaritan is so well known that we can hear it without feeling its original force. To the original audience, the shock was in the identity of the hero. Samaritans and Jews shared centuries of mutual contempt. A Samaritan stopping to help a Jewish man was not the expected answer. It was a provocation. Jesus was saying, with unmistakable clarity, that your neighbour is not the person who looks like you, worships like you, or belongs to your social world. Your neighbour is whoever is in front of you with a need you have the capacity to meet. The priest and the Levite in the story are not presented as wicked men. They were religious professionals going about their duties. They passed by, Luke says, on the other side. That phrase is precise. They did not stumble past without noticing. They moved away. They adjusted their path to create distance from someone whose need was inconvenient. That is the version of love that Jesus was confronting. The version that is warm and generous inside the familiar circle, but contracts when the need belongs to someone outside it.
Love that only reaches the people who are easy to reach is not the love Jesus described.
THE BOY WHO GREW UP TO FORGIVE THE MAN WHO SHOT HIM
On the 20th of December 1974, a ten-year-old boy named Chris Carrier was walking home from his school bus stop in Coral Gables, Florida. A man he did not know approached him and offered him a lift, saying he was planning a surprise party for Chris's father and needed help with the decorations. Chris climbed into the man's vehicle. His name was David McAllister, a former employee who had been dismissed from a job by Chris's father and had carried a grievance for years. He had chosen to take it out on the child. What followed was one of the most harrowing recorded crimes of that year. McAllister drove Chris deep into the Florida Everglades, stabbing him repeatedly with an ice pick, then shooting him through the left temple and leaving him in the wilderness to die. Chris lay in the Everglades for six days, blind in one eye from the gunshot wound, before he was found alive. His father told him what had happened to him when he awoke. Police sketches identified McAllister almost immediately, and a pistol and motor home matching the evidence were found at his property. But forensics in 1974 were not what they are today, and McAllister was never charged.
Chris grew up carrying the physical and emotional weight of what had been done to him. He lost sight in his left eye permanently. He struggled through adolescence with an acute awareness of his disfigured appearance and the inability to play the sports he had loved. But around the age of thirteen, something shifted. He came to faith in Jesus Christ. And as that faith took root, he found that the consuming anger, fear, and bitterness began, slowly, to lose their grip. Twenty-two years passed. Then, in 1996, a police officer contacted Chris to tell him that David McAllister, now seventy-seven years old, blind from glaucoma, and bedridden in a nursing home in North Miami Beach, had confessed to the crime. The officer told McAllister he had nothing to fear legally. He was dying. And the confession came.
Chris Carrier went to the nursing home the next day. McAllister was initially defensive, assuming he was speaking to another officer. A friend who had accompanied Chris asked him a few gentle questions, and McAllister confirmed what he had done. Then Chris introduced himself. McAllister gasped. He began to cry. He said: I left him there. And he said he was sorry. Chris told him, " There is nothing between you and me except a new friendship. I forgive you. In the weeks that followed, Chris visited McAllister daily. He brought him smoked amberjack, his favourite food. He read to him. He prayed with him. He talked with him about the grace of Jesus Christ. McAllister, blind and dying, reached out and found his hand. He gave his life to Christ. Three weeks later, he died. Chris Carrier was the only person at his bedside.
The Baltimore Sun and the Tampa Bay Times documented the story in October 1996. Chris later shared his testimony at the Southern Baptist Convention's annual meeting and in an NPR interview. He said afterwards: " The greatest miracle in my life is that God gave me the chance to say to the man who tried to kill me, I want to be your friend, and I want that friendship to be eternal.
He did not go to the nursing home to get closure. He went to give grace to someone who had no right to expect it.
Chris Carrier's story is not primarily about what was done to him, though it was monstrous. It is about what love, sourced in God and extended to the most unlikely recipient imaginable, is actually capable of. It took a dying man who might have faced eternity alone and without forgiveness, and it gave him both a friend and a Saviour in the same three weeks.
That is the widest circle of love. The one that reaches even there.
LOVE THAT ACTUALLY SEES PEOPLE
“For I was hungry and you gave Me food; I was thirsty, and you gave Me drink; I was a stranger, and you took Me in; I was naked, and you clothed Me; I was sick, and you visited Me; I was in prison, and you came to Me.” Matthew 25 verses 35 to 36 (New King James Version)
Jesus connects love for the overlooked so directly to love for Himself that the two become inseparable. When you see the hungry person and act, you are, He says, acting towards Him. The stranger you take in. The sick person you visit. The lonely person you call. These are not charitable extras that the especially devout perform. Jesus describes them as the natural expression of a life shaped by His love. Most of us do not walk past obvious human suffering with deliberate cruelty. We walk past it with distraction, discomfort, or a sense that the problem is simply too large for one person to make a difference. The man on the street. The colleague who is clearly struggling but has not asked for help. The elderly person in the church who always sits alone. The person at the school gate who never quite fits into the conversational groups that form naturally around them.
These are your neighbours. The love that Jesus describes does not require grand projects or exceptional resources. It requires a particular quality of attention. The willingness to actually see the person in front of you, to pause long enough to ask a genuine question and wait for a genuine answer, to let someone's need cost you something small, your time, your comfort, your schedule, rather than stepping around it as the priest and the Levite did.
Most people do not feel unseen because nobody is near them. They feel unseen because nobody pauses.
HOW TO APPLY THIS TODAY
1. Widen the circle deliberately this week.
Think of one person outside your natural relational world who could use a genuine act of love. Not a grand gesture. One conversation. One meal. One visit. One message that asks how they are and actually waits for the honest answer. The Samaritan did not reorganise his entire life. He stopped, attended to the need in front of him, and made provision. That is the model.
2. Examine who you have been crossing the road to avoid.
The priest and Levite did not stumble past the man on the road by accident. They moved to the other side. Be honest about the person, the situation, or the need you have been quietly navigating around. Name it. Bring it to God. Ask Him to give you what Chris Carrier eventually found: the capacity to move towards the person rather than away.
3. Let love be specific, not theoretical.
It is easy to feel warmly towards humanity in the abstract and walk past the particular human being in front of you. Love in the widest circle is always specific. It has a name, a face, and a need. Ask God to open your eyes today to one specific person whose need is already within reach of your hands.
Chris Carrier sat at the bedside of a dying man who had kidnapped him, stabbed him, shot him, and left him for dead as a child. He brought him smoked amberjack. He read to him. He held his hand. He told him about Jesus. And when David McAllister died three weeks later, the only person in the room was the boy he had tried to kill. That is what love in the widest circle actually looks like. It is not a feeling. It is not a programme. It is a person, shaped by the love of God, choosing to move towards the one person in the room that nobody else was moving towards. The circle of your love does not have to be that dramatic to be real. It begins with the pause. The look. The question was asked, and the answer was genuinely awaited. It begins with choosing not to cross to the other side of the road.
Your neighbour is whoever is in front of you. Go and do likewise.
MEMORY VERSE FOR PART THREE
“Then Jesus said, 'Yes, now go and do the same.'” Luke 10 verse 37 (New Living Translation)