Matthew 9:35-38
Jesus was going through all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every kind of disease and every kind of sickness. Seeing the people, He felt compassion for them, because they were distressed and dispirited like sheep without * a shepherd. Then He said to His disciples, "The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. "Therefore beseech the Lord of the harvest to send out workers into His harvest."
Jesus was working, focused on the tasks before Him. Just like Rem mentioned in the last devotion, it's easy to get busy doing things in life that we want and not things God wants us doing. Jesus was busy serving His Father, but He wasn't too busy to look at the lost. In the Greek language, it has the idea of Jesus staring carefully at the multitude before Him studying them and truthfully assessing their spiritual condition. It wasn't a passing glance. His response...He errupted from the deepest part of His being with compassion that overflowed like an exploding volcanoe . I know I can get so busy with work or hunting that I neglect looking at the people around me to truly understand their spiritual condition. When I'm too busy to notice, I never feel the compassion Jesus wants me to feel for them.
Jesus chose 2 very descriptive words to inform us about the condition of the people He was looking at. The first, "distressed" actually means to skin alive. The Assyrians were known for their cruelty during biblical times, and when they conquered a fortified town or city, they would take the soldiers from the town outside the walls and skin them alive and hang their skins over the walls of the city to instill a fear in the inhabitants so that they would submit without any resistance. The second word, "dispirited" actually means to be cast down. It was a common practice of the poor of Jesus' time when they had too many children to feed that they would take the newborn out into the wilderness and "cast him/her down" to die of exposure. Jesus saw that the spiritual condition of the masses was one of brutal oppression by a ruthless ruler, Satan. Jesus also saw that they were alone, abandoned because of their separation from God because of their sinful condition...not God's choice, but the reality of how sin separates people from Him.
Jesus' response? He commanded his disciples to"beseech" the Lord of the harvest to "thrust out" labors into the harvest. In the New Testement, there are 2 common words used for praying. The first and most common is "prosuksomai" and is used about 80% of the time to refer to praying. That's not the word Jesus used in this situation. He used the word "deomai" , which has a more specific meaning. A good example of it can be found in Luke 5:12 which says, "While He was in one of the cities, behold, there was a man covered with leprosy ; and when he saw Jesus, he fell on his face and implored Him, saying, "Lord, if You are willing, You can make me clean." It has the idea of begging God for a deep personal need that you can do nothing about...it implies a sense of desperation and urgency when praying.
What is Jesus saying in all this?
1. I believe He wants us to take time to study carefully the spiritual condition and needs of those around us, and to share His heart of compassion for them. Set aside those things that keep us too busy or too focused on other things to do this.
2. He also wants our hearts conformed to His and His Father's. He wants us to pray with the same urgency and fervency for the things that are dear to His heart as we do for our own personal needs.
I fail miserably at this so often, but the deepest part of my heart yearns for this and so I keep pushing toward this goal...
