Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Do You Have the Right Answer, But the Wrong Heart? | The Gospels | Luke 10:25–37

Episode Date: April 15, 2026

Have you ever treated your faith like a game of giving the right answers? Why do we sometimes settle for knowing truth instead of living it? And what does Jesus reveal about the kind of heart God actually wants? In today’s episode, Luke shares how Jesus's parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10:25–37 shows that following Jesus means moving beyond correct answers to real obedience. Read the Bible with us in 2026! This year, we’re exploring the Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Download your reading plan now. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it so that others can find it, too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passage: Luke 10:25–37

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work. If you're like me and grew up in the church, you might be really good at the whole right answer game. Like, you know the vocabulary, you know the verses, and you know that the answer to about 90% of Sunday school questions is, well, Jesus. And the other 10% is usually something like love or Jesus died for my sins or something like that. You know what? I think God is paying me back for all my years of being a smart aleck kid because now I lead a group of high school students who also grew up in the church and they have a running joke where they answer all my questions with Jesus's love is fulfilling. No matter what I ask, they answer

Jesus's love is fulfilling. I think that can be a temptation for all of us though. Like we might have the theology down. We might know the right answer. But there is a massive, dangerous gap between having a correct theology in our heads and having a transformed heart. that actually lives it out. You can be a world-class expert on the Bible and still be completely blind to the person bleeding out right in front of you. In fact, that's what's going to happen in our story today. Today, we're in Luke chapter 10 and we're meeting a man who was the undisputed champion of the right answer game. He's a lawyer, a professional interpreter of God's word. So he's not like a courtroom lawyer. He's a lawyer in the sense that he knows God's law.

and he's going to ask Jesus a question about eternal life that leads to one of the most famous parables ever told. But what's fascinating is that this man and Jesus actually agree on a lot. They both look at the same law and come to the exact same conclusion about what matters most. The problem isn't the man's information, it's his application. Before we dive in, let's pray. Father, thank you that your word doesn't just inform us, it confronts us, it convicts us, it transforms us. Would you help us to stop playing games with your commands? Don't let us settle for only right answers today. Give us the right heart. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. We pick up in verse 25 of 10 with the lawyer standing up to put Jesus to the test. Now here's a quick tip for all of us. If you're

ever going to try to test Jesus, you should probably do that sitting down because you won't have as far to fall when you fail. But this guy, it says he stands up. full of confidence, and he asks, Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life? Now, that's an incredibly important question, the most important question. But he's not asking this because he's desperate or genuinely curious. He's asking because he thinks he's smart. And Jesus, as he often does, points him right back to the scriptures.

He asks, what is written in the law? And to give the guy credit, he doesn't miss a beat. He goes back to Deuteronomy 6 and Leviticus 19, and he responds to Jesus, well, love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. That's a brilliant summary. In fact, it's the exact same way Jesus interprets the law and other parts of the Gospels. So these two are on the same page. Jesus even replies to him and says, you have answered correctly. But then Jesus says, do this and you will live.

See, that's where the whole correct answer game meets real life. Jesus says, do this. In other words, obey God's commandments perfectly and you're good. And that's when the man flinches, right? Verse 29 tells us that wanting to justify himself, the man asks, and who is my neighbor? See, this is where the greatest commandment falls apart for the lawyer. He was fine with the command as long as he could define the boundaries. He wanted a list. He wanted to know the specific zip code of his responsibility, so he could feel like he had fulfilled the law while still keeping his prejudices in intact. He was looking for a definition of neighbor that included only the people he already liked and excluded everyone else. He wanted to fulfill the command by narrowing it down to a size he could manage. So instead of giving him a definition, Jesus says, you know what, I think you need to hear a story.

He takes the lawyer to the way of blood. It was a dangerous road from Jerusalem to Jericho. And listen to how Jesus describes it, starting in verse 30. It says, a man was going down from Jerusalem to to Jericho. This was on the way of blood. When he was attacked by robbers, they stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. A priest and a Levite, men who could have quoted the greatest commandment just as fast as the lawyer did, both see the man and pass by. See, they had the right. They had the right theology, but they didn't have the heart. See, a priest and a Levi needed to be pure to work

in God's temple. But they probably would have been concerned that helping this man with all this blood on him who was beat up would have made them impure. So instead of going to love their neighbor, they prioritize their religious purity over their actual neighbor. And see, this is where the story takes an unexpected turn that the lawyer would never see coming. Jesus goes on, but a Samaritan as he traveled came where the man was. And when he saw him, he took pity on him. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an end and took care of him. The next day he took out two denari and gave them to the innkeeper. Look after him, he said, and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have. See, we have to understand

that to the lawyer standing there, Samaritan wasn't just a different nationality, it was a slur. The hatred between Jews and Samaritans had been smoldering for hundreds of years. It was a toxic mix of racial and religious rivalry. Both groups claimed to be the true heirs of Moses, but they looked at each other as illegitimate, compromised, and unclean. To a Jew, a Samaritan was a half-breed who had corrupted the faith. You wouldn't eat with them, and you certainly didn't expect any mercy from them. To the Jewish lawyer, the Samaritans were the other. They were not his neighbor.

they were rivals, the people you avoided all costs. But this Samaritan is the only one who actually fulfills the command, the lawyer just quoted. He sees, he feels pity, and he moves. See, Jesus tells a story in which the hated one turns out to be the hero. And there's a lot of irony going on here because the lawyer, the good Jewish Torah observant lawyer who knows all the right answers doesn't understand what love truly looks like. He doesn't understand what God's kingdom is about. he draws boundaries, and he would be like the priests and the Levite who would pass by the weak and lowly.

But this fictional Samaritan, who probably has screwed up theology, who is not a part of God's covenant people, is the one who actually acts out Jesus' kingdom. It's the opposite of what you expect. Do you notice how Jesus doesn't even really answer the lawyer's question? Like the lawyer asked, who is my neighbor, hoping for a noun, a person, or a group to identify. But instead, Jesus kind of gives him a verb? He asks, which of these three people do you think turned out to be a neighbor? See, Jesus shifts the focus from the object of our love to the subject of our love. He doesn't tell us who counts as a neighbor. He shows us what a neighbor looks like, what a neighbor does, how they act. A neighbor is someone who crosses the road. A neighbor is someone who welcomes inconvenience. A neighbor is

someone who sees a need and decides that their purity or their schedule or their budget is less important than other people. The lawyer asked, who is my neighbor? But Jesus avoids his question altogether. Instead, he commands the lawyer to be a neighbor. And this is the radical challenge of Jesus' kingdom. The Samaritan's mercy was fundamentally about proximity. He came close. He got dirty. He took the man's burden onto his own animal and took the man's debt onto his own account. He showed that you cannot truly love God, whom you cannot see. If you are unwilling to move toward the neighbor, you can see. The lawyer wanted to know where the border of the command was, and Jesus showed him that for a child of God, there are no borders. Mercy is a gift that we offer because it's a gift that

we've received. And this is the pivot where we find ourselves in the story. We are not the hero. We're not the Samaritan. We're the one in the ditch. We were the one stripped of our righteousness and left for dead by our own sin. All the priests and Levites of our own effort and religious performance passed us by because they can't save us, but Jesus, the ultimate outsider, who was rejected by his own, came to where we were. He didn't just walk by our mess. He stepped into it. He paid the debt of our salvation with his own life. Jesus is the only one who perfectly fulfilled the greatest commandment, loving God with all his heart and loving us. See, even though we were his enemies, Jesus acted like a neighbor. So the question today isn't who is my neighbor. The question is, am I being a neighbor?

when we realized that we were once the person in the ditch and that Jesus didn't look for a loophole to avoid us. Our right answer game has to end. We don't love just to check a box or to justify ourselves. We love because we have been found by a neighbor who is willing to go to the cross to bring us home. So please stop looking for a limit of the command. Start looking for the heart of the Father. Let's pray. Father, thank you for being the neighbor who moved toward us when we were helpless. Forgive us for trying to limit your commands to fit our comfort. Give us eyes to see the people in the ditch around us and the courage to cross the road in your name. It's in Jesus' name that we pray. Amen.