Matthew 9:35-38
And Jesus was going about all the cities and the villages, teaching in their synagogues, and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every kind of disease and every kind of sickness. And seeing the multitudes, He felt compassion for them, because they were distressed and downcast 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.”
The process of growing older and becoming more mature is an interesting journey. It seems that when you are a child life is more simple and less threatening. Only since I have begun to develop my own view of the world that we live in, have I realized that not everyone sees the world in the same light that I do. Not even my wife, or my family looks at certain events in the same manner as myself. I have found this to be a sweet twist on life. As I look around, often I get the sense that some viewpoints may be threatening to my own. At the same time however, I cannot ignore that most viewpoints only help to enrich mine.
It is with this realization that I wonder how you see the world that we both share. How does your opinion about the perfectionist differ from mine? Or how do you see the thief or the deathly ill? When you and I look at the same person, or the same event, what thoughts go through our minds?
How does the Lord see these people? How does the Lord look at murders or thieves? What does Christ see when He looks at a terrorist member? What does He see when He looks at your next door neighbor or the kid sitting by himself at lunch?
The Bible says that the Lord saw the multitudes and had compassion on them? He looked past their outward appearance and recognized the state of their hearts. He saw them as “distressed” and “downcast”. How different the world might look to us if we could see it through Jesus’ eyes. How different our neighbors might look if we could see them with compassion. It is only then that our hearts will be burdened with the condition of their souls like Christ’s heart was. It is only then that we would lay down our lives to simply see the world come to know the goodness of God’s grace.