I. The lawyer knew the answer at the time when he asked the question. He said, "What shall I do to inherit eternal life?" and all the time the answer was in his own recollection, had he but known it. Alas! we do not always turn our knowledge into wisdom. We know the fact and we hardly ever sublimate the fact into truth. We know the law, and we fail to see that under the law there is the beauty and there is the grace of the Gospel.
II. "This do," said Jesus, "and thou shalt live." What had the lawyer to do? To love the Lord his God with all his heart and soul and strength and mind. Love is life. Only he who loves lives. Only love can get out of a man the deepest secrets of his being, and develop the latent energies of his nature, and call him up to the highest possibility of his manhood. The end of the commandment is charity; the summing-up of all true law is love.
III. "But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbour?" It is precisely there that every man has a great battle to fight namely, at the point of self-justification. So long as there is any disposition in us to justify ourselves we are unprepared to receive the Gospel. One of the first conditions required of us at the Cross is self-renunciation.
IV. Jesus asked the man certain questions which he answered rightly, and those answers were returned to him as a response to his own enquiries. This ought to have a very serious application to ourselves, because we are to be no longer self-deluded by the impression that if more was said to us we should do more; if we had a better minister we should soon have higher knowledge of truth and keener perception of moral beauty. Jesus Christ showed in this case that all the while there was in the man's heart the very answer which he professed himself eager to ascertain. So it is with ourselves. We know the right; yet oftentimes the wrong pursue. There is in our hearts and minds information enough upon these great questions, if so be we are minded to turn that information to account.
Parker, City Temple,vol. iii., p. 85.