15-1 Hearts That Bleed

The opposite of love isn’t so much hatred, as indifference. To be indifferent to the real welfare of our fellows in this world, and of all our own brethren, is perhaps our most common sin. The Lord taught us that we should have a sense of urgency in our response to others. The Lord showed by His example that it is better to meet the hunger of human need than to keep the letter of Sabbath law (Mk. 2:25,26). His urgency, God’s urgency, our consequent urgency…all means that when even Divine principles appear to come into conflict, we are to be influenced above all by the urgency of others’ need. " Which of you shall have a son fallen into a well, and will not straightway draw him up?" (Lk. 14:5 RV). Wells weren’t that wide. Only a small child would fall down one. We can imagine the tragic situation in the home. " Benny’s fallen down the well!" . And everyone would go running. They wouldn’t wait until the Saturday evening. Nor would they worry the slightest about infringing the letter of the law. And so, the Lord explained, that little boy was like the sick men and women, sick both physically and spiritually, whom He saw around Him. There was an urgency which He felt about them. And so there should be with us too. We can realize that this world is evil and vain; and yet we can still fail t perceive the tragedy of it all, and the urgency of our task to save at least some. The Father of the prodigal told the servants: " Bring forth quickly the best robe" (Lk. 15:22 RV). The indebted man was told to sit down quickly and have his debt reduced (Lk. 16:6). There is an urgency in the mediation of mercy towards others. When Paul thanks God that Titus has a heart of “earnest care” for the Corinthians, he uses a Greek word [spoude] which literally means “speed”, and is elsewhere translated “haste” – as well as “haste” and “business” (2 Cor. 8:16). The heart that really cares will be characterized by a speedy and quick response, not a careful weighing up of a situation, nor a resignation of responsibilities to ponderous committees. In Rom. 1:14,15, Paul speaks of his “debt” to preach to both “Greeks and Barbarians” as the reason for his planned trip to Rome- for in that city there was the widest collection of “Greeks and Barbarians”. And yet he later speaks of our ‘debt’ [Gk.] to love one another (Rom. 13:8). The debt of love that we feel on reflecting upon our unpayable debt to the Father and Son is partly an unending ‘debt’ to loving share the Gospel of grace with others, to forgive the ‘debts’ of others sins against us.

What this world is crying out for are people who really and meaningfully care. We don’t want a standard reply to our letter or e-mail that asks for information. People need people who are real and therefore credible. Not just the same old stock answers. As we survey the tragedy of humanity around us, hearts must bleed. This alone will make us and our position about anything attractive to people. Our tendency is only to feel for those who we consider to have some worth. But God commends His love to us (as though it needed any commendation) in that He poured out (and still pours out) His feelings, His passion, the blood of His only Son for those who have no worth, but are actually the most unworthy. Hundreds of pages of Old Testament history exemplify this in His attitude to His wayward children.

Consider the time when after a generation of abusing the God who so loved them, " the children of Israel said unto the Lord, We have sinned: do thou unto us whatsoever seemeth good unto thee; deliver us only, we pray thee, this day. And they put away the strange gods from among them, and served the LORD: and his soul was grieved (Heb. cut down, reaped- as in harvest) for the misery / grief of Israel. (Jud. 10:15,16). The Hebrew word translated " misery" is also translated " grief" . The soul of Almighty God so far away from us grieved for their grief. Their pain elicited in Him a response, no matter that their pain was totally their fault.

I once heard a middle class woman say to her child (in that irksome White Anglo-Saxon Protestant way): " Look at that bad man lying there in the gutter. He’s been drinking! Silly man, hey!" . She didn’t want to imagine how that red, contoured face had once been a sweet baby, a mothers pride and joy; a mischievous little lad at school; a young man with an ambition to marry a young woman and have a family. Yes, on one level it was his fault he was in the gutter. But the heart that bleeds sees the tragedy, the human pain and wastage of it all. The heart that bleeds cant walk on by. It will realize our limited ability to judge the total circumstances in any human encounter, but more than that, it will be hopeful and seeking for Gods glory to be achieved in the most apparently hopeless of cases. God need not have grieved for the grief of Israel. It was their fault. But He did, and He eventually grieved for it to the extent of giving His own son to be done to death. We began by recalling the Lords story about the little boy who falls down the well. The legalistic mind would have gone straight to Ex. 21:33: the man who dug a well and didn’t cover it was responsible for any deaths arising from it. The story would imply that the father of the child was the owner of the well. The Lord doesn’t draw the lesson that Its your own fault for being disobedient to the Law. He focuses instead on the need to act urgently to save, without maxing out on the issue of whose fault it was that the tragedy had occurred.