“Jesus said to [the Pharisees], ‘It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.’”
~Mark 2:17 (NIV).
“In the same way your Father in heaven is not willing that any of these little ones should be lost.”
~Matthew 18:14 (NIV).
God cares for every single being he creates—all equally. God doesn’t care if our names are Obama or Fred or Tiger or Dorothy. All are equally important so far as his Kingdom is concerned.
God has come into this world, incarnate in Jesus, and now via God the Holy Spirit—sent to be our Helper—such that he might be with us willing us to him. He seeks us with a love that defies human understanding.
How is it that those seeing their particular ailments, and caring for themselves, get themselves to the doctor and do not resist hospital and the necessary treatment to become better, and yet many, many others refuse the truth, continuing in their insanity apart from God—and all his existent and delicious living fruit? It’s a question many of us ask, for this fruit is freely available unto physical, mental, emotional and spiritual blessing.
We know who’s to blame; it’s the adversary of God who has blinded all, conditional on faith—or lack thereof.
God is not particularly partial to the ninety-nine occupied hospital beds. These are tended by skilled nurses (God’s Spirit and his angels) and they have the antidote to their sickness (belief and the forgiveness of sin, discipleship via God’s Word and prayerful communion with God, fellowship, ministry etc). They know they have a lifelong condition requiring lifelong treatment. God’s glad they’re there, but it pains him that there are others out there who, in their spiritual blindness, are captive to the devil and crimes against God—which are, at last, crimes against their very selves!
Who would’ve thought much about the Jesus’ passion to mix with ‘the other side’ of humanity... the people who really needed a Saviour? It just seemed bizarre and preposterous to the Pharisees.
But we all need this Saviour, Jesus.
And God’s purpose, through his church, and through his Spiritual Presence with us, is he gives us his heart on this matter. We must so desperately want those who don’t know the peace and love and grace of God to come to know it that we deal ever-so-patiently with them, always acceding to them as to the Spiritual will of God.
We don’t even bother them with Christian platitudes. We just “be” love, be grace, be forgiveness, be peace, be understanding... be the advocate standing up quietly for the underdog, empathising with the broken and weary.
And we don’t take pleasant company with the wantonly sinful or spiritually proud.
© 2010 S. J. Wickham.
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