The Disciple is Caring

There once was a poor Mexican farmer named Lencho. One summer, he was in desperate need of rain. It so happened as he was eating with his family one night that it began to rain. He ran outside to feel the rain on his body. At last the fruit trees, the rice, and the flowers of the bean plants could get some much needed water.

But after a couple of minutes, the rain turned to hail. Small bits of the hail soon gave way to bigger chunks the size of golf balls. Lencho ran inside to shelter. When the hail stopped, he went outside to survey the damage. His fruit trees were without leaves, his rice was destroyed, and there wasn’t a single flower left on his bean plants.

Nevertheless, Lencho was not dismayed. He walked a couple miles to the nearest post office. There he got ink and paper. Lencho may have been poor, but he knew how to read and write. He carefully formed the words on the paper and this is what he wrote:

“Dear God, I am in desperate need of 100 pesos. A hail storm came and destroyed my crop this year, and I need the money to reseed. Please, Lord, send me the money right away. Signed—Lencho”

When He finished, he dropped the letter in the post office box and walked back to his farm. When the postmaster collected the mail that day, he noticed Lencho’s letter with a single word as its address: God. He opened the letter to see who had written it, and when he had read it, he was impressed by the poor farmer’s faith. So the postmaster decided to try to answer the letter himself.

The postmaster gathered up as much of his own money as he could, but it wasn’t enough. So he went to his family and friends, and he took up a collection among the other postal workers. However, he was only able to collect 60 pesos. He decided to send the money to the farmer anyway, so he put it in a stamped envelope, addressed it to Lencho, cancelled the stamp, and put it in the incoming mail for the following week.

The next week, Lencho the farmer returned to the post office to collect his mail. The postmaster watched him as he tore open the envelope that had “God.” as its return address. But when he opened the letter and counted the money that was inside, Lencho did not express surprise or gratitude; instead he frowned and became very angry. He asked the postmaster for a piece of paper and some ink. And this is what he wrote…

“Dear God, I asked you for 100 pesos but I only received 60. Would you please send me the rest of the money. But don’t send it through the mail. These postal workers are a bunch of crooks.”

There was a man who did not have a very high regard for the people around him! And that can often be true of you and me. We look at people with suspicion. We regard them as irritating obstacles who stand in the way of us getting what we want. Sometimes we ignore people completely, or treat them with callous disrespect. But that is not what God wants us to do.

We have been studying the marks of a fully equipped disciple and today we come to the fourth one—a disciple is caring. (You’ll find these marks in the “Catch the Vision” brochure. Ushers pass out.) This characteristic has to do with our attitude toward people.

If we are growing in our commitment to Jesus Christ, then one of the ways that that is going to be demonstrated is in the way that we treat people. A growing disciple is going to increasingly care about people—their needs, their hurts, their hearts—because people matter to God. The way you treat people shows how you feel about God.

Someone has said that in the economy of God, people always come first. And that was demonstrated in the way that Jesus lived.

Jesus taught us three things about people. He taught us that…

1. People are beautiful

2. People are broken

3. People need blessing

1. People are beautiful…

Author Richard Stanford lives in Atlanta. One morning he was riding the Atlanta subway system into the city, along with thousands of other commuters. He noticed as he rode that there were people of all ethnic backgrounds on the train—whites, Hispanics, African Americans, Asians. The crowd looked like the United Nations.

And he noticed that nobody was talking. People were absorbed in themselves—some were reading newspapers and novels; others were simply staring off into space. But no one was interacting with anyone else. Every person seemed to be in a capsule of isolation and silence.

Stanford’s train pulled in to a main station, called Five Points, and he and most of the other commuters disembarked to transfer to other trains. There they stood on the platform in that cavernous space, thousands of people standing in eerie silence waiting for their next train to come.

When all of a sudden, a friendly woman’s voice called out “Good morning, everybody!” Instantly, everyone’s head snapped to where the voice had come from. There, riding down a long escalator on the far side of the station was a petite African American woman with a radiant smile on her face. She was short, and she wasn’t dressed too well, but her smile overcame all that.

As thousands of eyes stared blankly up at her, she sang out to the station “How y’all doin’ this morning?” And when she got to the bottom of the escalator, she strode up to a well-dressed businessman, grabbed his hand and said “Good mornin’ sir, how are you doin’ this morning?” The man looked at the little woman who had him in her grip and he broke into a smile. “Fine thank you!” he replied.

The woman began to move through the crowd, shouting greetings, shaking hands, and laughing freely. Finally, she made her way to the edge of the platform and looked across the tracks to where another crowd of riders was standing in amazement and she cried “And how y’all folks over there this morning?”

Somebody cried out “Just fine, thank you!” and everyone broke out laughing. You could almost see a wave of warmth washing over the crowd in that great station.

The little woman cried “That’s good! Now listen here…” and then she paused and looked around. Thousands of eyes were on her; everyone was listening. “God sent me here to cheer you up this morning.” And she said it with a big smile and a twinkle in her eye. As she faded into the crowd, shaking hands and greeting people, her work was already done. Everyone was smiling, and everyone began to talk. Total strangers taking time to notice one another, complimenting one another, wishing each other a good day.

As Richard Stanford reflected on that scene, he found himself wondering if that little lady might have been an angel—the escalator angel. And he has never forgotten what happened that day in the underground of Atlanta. Because someone saw that people are beautiful.

When we learn to see people through Jesus’ eyes, we see that they are beautiful. Look at the people Jesus touched. They were all so different. Nicodemus, a powerful, educated Pharisee. The demoniac of Gaddara; a man so tormented that he was naked and kept in chains. The woman at the well; a woman with a painful past. Zacchaeus; a collaborator with the Romans, hated by his countrymen. A burly fisherman, a tough centurion, a weeping prostitute, a blind beggar, a rich young ruler.

So many different people—but every one of them valued and treated with dignity and respect. Jesus cared about them. He loved each one of them. Because to Jesus, people are beautiful. And if you are a follower of Jesus Christ, people will become beautiful to you too, because you’ll start to see them through Jesus’ eyes.

2. Something else we learn from Jesus is that people are broken. Jesus was acutely conscious of the pain of the people he met. Many times in the Gospel records, we read that “Jesus had compassion for them…”

People are broken because of sin. We live in a sinful world. We ourselves are sinners. We make sinful choices. And those choices lead to brokenness and pain.

I was talking with my brother in law Mark Crate this past weekend in Buffalo. Mark is the Pastor of Youth and Family Ministries in a large church in Western Ontario. He told me the story of a man named Ernie.

Fifteen years ago, Ernie had been involved in a terrible accident. He had had a fight with his girlfriend and so he went out and got drunk. In that intoxicated condition, he drove over to pick up his brother Roy to take him home from work. While driving home, Ernie lost control of the car, skidded into a bridge abutment, and Roy was critically injured. In fact, Roy has been in a coma for the past fifteen years.

A couple of weeks ago, Ernie came to Mark’s church to seek help for the terrible burden of guilt he has been carrying. He spoke with some of the pastors there, and they tried to encourage him that there was hope and forgiveness in Jesus. But Ernie was so despondent that he left without committing his life to Christ and two days later, he committed suicide.

There’s a lot of pain out there. And I have noticed in the Gospels that Jesus always felt people’s pain. He was acutely aware of it, and he moved toward it. HE didn’t shy away from it or try to ignore it as we so often do.

When he talked with the woman at the well in John 4, he zeroed right in on her area of pain. When he talked with the rich young ruler in Luke 18, he zeroed right in on his area of struggle.

And you know the amazing thing? Jesus never condemned people for their pain. He never scolded them; he never lectured them; he never said “See, I told you so. I told you that if you sinned this would happen.” He never made them squirm. He saved all of that for the people who thought they didn’t have any pain—the Pharisees!

But when it came to broken people, Jesus forgave them. He released them. He affirmed them. And he healed them. And that is what we need to do as Christians if we are going to be true followers of Christ.

Why is it that the church is the last place people want to come and admit that they have problems? Why is it that we want to pretend on Sunday mornings that everything is okay? Why is it that we don’t want others in the body of Christ to know that we are broken, that we are struggling, that we are hurting deeply in some area of our lives?

Could it be that we don’t trust each other to have the heart of Jesus? Could it be that maybe we suspect that there are Pharisees in the church who will condemn us for being sinners? Could it be that we suspect that because we ourselves have been guilty of judging others for their sins? Mother Theresa said “If you judge people, you have no time to love them.”

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an article for our Newsletter which you’ll see in a couple of weeks. In that article I compared hospitals with hotels and the people who go to hospitals with the people who go to hotels.

Why do you go to the hospital? You go to the hospital because you are broken. You are in pain. You are looking for help. You have a crying, desperate, urgent need for healing. And you’re grateful for whatever help they can give you.

But that’s not why you go to a hotel. You go to a hotel to be spoiled, to be coddled, to be pampered, to be served. And if those things don’t happen according to your high expectations, you tend to be put out. You tend to complain. “Why were there no mints on my pillow last night? The maid forgot to give me extra towels. Why doesn’t this air conditioner work properly?”

Listen. Jesus wants our church to be a hospital, not a hotel. He wants it to be a place where people are helped and healed not coddled and spoiled. But that can only happen when we are ready to admit that we ourselves are the ones who need healing. Because we are broken. We are sinners. We have pain in our lives. And until that happens, we will never be in a position to help anyone else.

People are beautiful - we need to see them with Jesus’ eyes.

People are broken - we need to have compassion for them with Jesus’ heart.

3. People need blessing - so we need to serve them with Jesus’ hands.

Turn to James 2:14 (page 1197 in pew Bible).

What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save him? Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him, “Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.

There are three truths I would like you to see in this passage:

1. Christianity is dead without deeds.

If your profession of faith in Christ does not lead to your practicing the work of Christ, you are systematically kidding yourself that you are a Christian. Because faith is dead if it does not result in practical, tangible actions.

What is the work of Christ? Paul tells us in Galatians 6:2:

Galatians 6:2 Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.

The Lord said in 2 Peter 1:5 that we should “add to our faith goodness.” What kind of goodness? Goodness that is directed toward meeting people’s needs. Paul explains it for us in Galatians 6:9–10:

Galatians 6:9-10 Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up. Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers.

This is the second truth in this James 2 passage:

2. Active faith sees where people are hurting and serves to heal that hurt

Look at James 2:15: “Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food.” That’s a need. In fact, that’s a crying need. The word for “without clothes” means, literally, “naked”. And if you are without daily food, you are obviously starving!

So here’s the scenario—you become aware that someone close to you (a brother or sister - perhaps someone in the church) has an urgent, crying need. What do you do? Look at verse 16:

James 2:16 If one of you says to him, “Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it?

The greeting “Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed.” was a common form of salutation in those days. Our modern equivalent would be “Have a nice day.”

So here’s the situation: It comes to your attention that someone in your life is in desperate need. They have awful pain. There is heartache, humiliation, hopelessness. And you treat them as though nothing is wrong—you pat them on the back and say “Hope you have a nice day.”

Where is the good in that? Where is the hope in that? Where is the help and encouragement in that? You have not seen and you have not served. If you do that, your faith is empty; it is dead; it is not fruitful. That person is going to look at you and say “If that is what a Christian is, then what good is it to be a Christian?”

You can be very religious, and very devout, and a great Bible student and all that, but if your faith doesn’t end up in helping other people with their needs; your faith is worthless.

Jesus said that to the Pharisees in Matthew 15. He said “You guys make a big show of doing all this religious stuff. But all your religion doesn’t end up helping anybody. In fact, it makes life harder for everyone around you.”

When I boil it all down, I have to conclude that if people and their needs don’t matter to me—if I don’t have a heart of compassion the way Jesus did, and if I don’t have hands that are willing to serve people the way that Jesus did—then it just demonstrates that I have a major spiritual problem. I am very far away from God.

Because people matter to God. And people will matter to me as I draw closer to Him. And that brings us to our final truth…

3. As my faith in Christ grows, my sensitivity to people’s needs will grow also. Turn back to James 1:27.

James 1:27 Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.

Orphans and widows are people whose lives are broken. They are people who are in pain. The Bible says they are in distress. They are people who have problems: ongoing, chronic problems.

But there’s also something else about them; they are the kind of people who are easy to forget, easy to sweep under the rug, easy to ignore. They are not all that visible. They are certainly not the kind of people who stand up and clamor for attention.

Yet God says that he looks with special fondness on those who care for such people. This is the kind of religion he wants to see us practicing. And as we walk closer with Christ, I believe that we will increasingly see through Christ’s eyes and recognize the hurts and the pain of forgotten people and be willing to get involved in helping them.

I want to close with a parable whose author is unknown.

On the street I saw a small girl

cold and shivering in a thin dress,

with little hope of a decent meal.

I became angry and said to God:

Why did you permit this? Why don’t you do something about it?

For awhile God said nothing, but then he replied

“I certainly did do something about it.

I made you.”

Take your Catch the Vision brochure and look at the section on p. 3 where it says “The Caring Nature of a Disciple”. Evaluate yourself on those things:

1. I actively communicate love to others

2. I strive to meet a need rather than passing it off

3. My relationship with my family is a high priority

4. I am in a CARE accountability group.

5. I am accountable for personal holiness.

Remember, people matter to God. And the degree to which they matter to you indicates whether you are moving forward in discipleship.