HeartFelt Kids Bible

A man came up to Jesus with a question he thought was clever. The rule says love your neighbor, he said, so who exactly counts as my neighbor? He was hoping for a short list. Instead of answering him straight, Jesus told him a story, and it is the story people have remembered ever since.

There was a man walking down the long steep road from Jerusalem to Jericho, and it was a lonely road with rocks and caves all along it. Robbers were waiting for him. They took everything he had, even his coat, and they left him lying at the side of the road, hurt, and they ran off.

After a while a priest came along, a good and important man on his way to the temple. He saw the man lying there. And he crossed right over to the far side of the road and kept going, and did not look back. Perhaps he was busy. Perhaps he was frightened. Either way, he went past.

Then a Levite came, another man who worked at the temple. He actually came over and looked properly at the man on the ground. And then he straightened up, and he walked past too. Two people had now seen exactly what had happened, and the man was still lying there on his own.

Then along came a Samaritan. Now the people listening would have expected nothing from him, because Samaritans and Jews had disliked each other for hundreds of years. But when this man saw the traveller lying there, his heart went out to him, and he stopped, and he got down in the dust beside him.

He cleaned the man's cuts and bandaged them, and lifted him up onto his own donkey and walked beside it all the way to an inn, and stayed the night looking after him. In the morning he paid the innkeeper and said, whatever else it costs, I will pay you when I come back. Now which one, Jesus asked, was the neighbor? Go and do the same.