18TH AUGUST
Matthew 23:37-39
“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you desolate. For I tell you, you will not see me again, until you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord’”
When you truly care about people’s souls there is a deep sense of sorrow and loss when someone rejects Christ!
Jesus had just been talking about how God would judge his generation. But rather than having a sense of satisfaction over the fact that God would judge those who were rejecting him, he bursts out with this sense of grief. What he wanted was not judgement, but for them to respond to his love!
As you try to develop Jesus’ way of reaching out to people with a ministry heart and leading them to faith in him, recognise that when you open your heart up to love people deeply, to care about their inner lives, to introduce them to Jesus—opening up to people like that opens you up to both the overflowing joy of seeing people turn to Christ in faith and the deep pain of seeing some reject the lover of their souls.
Jesus kept on loving people with the love of the Father, even though he knew some would reject both him and the Father. Why? Because he was sent to be a witness and he did everything with that sense of sentness. No matter what!
MAKE IT PERSONAL:
Are there people in your life you find hard to love? The Bible says God will never give us more than we can handle. It is very likely that with Jesus’ help you can love those people. What do you think about that?