When you watch the evening news and see people in foreign lands or in the streets of your own city who are acting out in hostility to your Christianity, who display behavior that is morally repugnant to your faith, who would rather kill you than allow you to live, you are seeing the very kinds of people Jesus came to seek and save. They matter to God. Jesus came to seek and save them just as much as he came to seek and save you. And since Father, Son and Holy Spirit see people that way, there ought to be a big difference in how you see them, too. Just remember, the people who drive you crazy drove Jesus to the cross.
The Journey: Luke 19:10
“For the Son of Man came to seek and save those who are lost.”
“Finding lost people!” Those three words pretty well sum up Jesus’ purpose in life. That very phrase would have likely been his mission statement if those statements had been around in Jesus’ day. Finding people who were spiritually lost was first and foremost the foundational conviction that led Jesus, the Son of God, Second Person of the Eternal Trinity, to leave his throne in glory, come to earth as a man, and die the horrific death of the cross.
Beyond the ability of human language to adequately describe the love that fueled this passion, simply put, lost people mattered to Jesus. And lost people mattered to his Father. John 3:16, the most compelling of all the verses of the Bible, reminds us of this driving conviction of God’s being: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
Obviously, the truth of Luke 19:10 and John 3:16 is so vitally important because you and I are the eternal beneficiaries of Jesus’ passionate pursuit and God’s unstoppable love for lost people. But as indescribably wonderful as that is, there is more to it. You see, since lost people matter so dearly to Father and Son (and Spirit, too—see Luke 4:18), they ought to matter deeply to us as well. This is so fundamentally critical because knowing how the Godhead perceives people ought to make a difference in how you think of and respond to them.
In other words, as you go about your day today, you cannot look into the eyes of another human being without seeing a soul so loved by God that he willingly gave his only Son to die for their redemption. When the unbeliever sitting in the cubicle next to you or in the locker beside yours or in the unkempt house across the street from you is rubbing you the wrong way, just remember that they matter to God as much as you do! When you watch the evening news and see people in foreign lands or in the streets of your own city who are acting out in hostility to your Christianity, who display behavior that is morally repugnant to your faith, who would rather kill you than allow you to live, you are seeing the very kinds of people Jesus came to seek and save.
They matter to God. Jesus came to seek and save them just as much as he came to seek and save you. And since Father, Son and Holy Spirit see people that way, there ought to be a big difference in how you see them, too.
Just remember, the people who drive you crazy drove Jesus to the cross.
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