Know Good to Be Good

Pastor Jamie Self - 5/31/2026

Most of us aren't trying to avoid God. We're trying to impress him. In Luke 10, Jesus encounters two people who are doing everything right — a lawyer who knows his Bible cold and a woman who opens her home to a crowd — and gently shows them both that doing good and knowing good isn't the same as having the one thing that's actually necessary. This sermon follows Luke's deliberate placement of the Good Samaritan parable between those two characters, and what emerges is a picture of people in a ditch they don't know they're in and a Savior who crosses the road to get them out.
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Weekly Reflection

“Her faithfulness has become her effort to save herself. And here's the problem — it seems so right.”
The most dangerous version of self-reliance is the one that looks like devotion. Luke places the lawyer and Martha side by side for a reason: one was using what he knew, the other what she did, and both were quietly trying to confirm they were good enough without needing to be rescued. The ditch is real, but so is the one who crosses the road to get in it with us. Jesus doesn't offer a better strategy — he offers himself. That's the one thing necessary. Everything else gets reorganized around that.

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This Week’s Challenge:
Pause and ask: Am I sitting at Jesus' feet this week, or am I recruiting Jesus to confirm that what I'm already doing is enough? Name one thing you'll do this week to be still before him — not to be more productive, but simply because he is the good portion.

Scripture: Luke 10:25-42