‘SEEING THE MULTITUDES THROUGH THE EYES OF JESUS’
Matthew 9:36-38
I remember when I was a paperboy for the Birmingham New paper many years ago. I carried the paper to a house overlooking the town. It was a lawyer’s house and his blind sister lived with him. One day when I was delivering the paper she met me at the top of the porch. She said to me, look down over the town and tell me how it looked, tell me what going on.
We need to have compassion like Jesus had and to that, we must look at the multitudes through his eyes.
I-NOTICE THE SEEING OF JESUS:
You can tell the difference between simply Feeling sorry for someone and real compassion, in that I can walk by a beggar and feel sorry for him and do nothing but if I feel compassion I will do something for him.
A-HE SAW THEIR DEPARTURE FROM GOD:
36 But when he saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion onthem, because they fainted, and were scattered abroad, as sheep having no shepherd.
And were scattered abroad--rather, "lying about," "abandoned," or "neglected."
Jesus knew that they would never come to God unless they had the help of someone like the lost sheep had the help of the Shepherd.
I heard W.A. Criswell preach at a convention when he was 76 years of age. In his sermon as he preached about the people in Dallas who were lost from God, he begin to cry. Here was man, who pastored a Church of over 20,000 members yet he said, that is go good, if there is just one lost soul yet in Dallas.
B-HE SAW THEIR DEPRAVITY OF SIN:
But when he saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion onthem, because they fainted, and were scattered abroad, as sheep having no shepherd.
This means more than physical exhaustion but it means spiritual exhaustion. It is speaking of their giving into sins. (Rent or mangled as if by wild beasts. Because they were faint - In soul rather than in body. )
Now I am touched and concerned about those who are physically sick. I am like the preacher who said, I am touched by the cripple man, but I also concerned about the man who has been crippled by sin.
I read about a cow in Iowa who gotten stuck in a silo. All the farmers around the small town came to the silo trying to rescue the cow. And finally they did. People can be concerned about one cow, but not the many souls who need forgiveness of sin.
I read about the story of a Christian worker who taught a cripple boy how to walk but when he did, he went back into sin. She later said at his death a few years later, I taught him how to walk but I failed to teach him how to live for Jesus.
C-HE SAW THEIR DESTINY IN HELL
Luke 19:41 And when he was come near, he beheld the city, and wept over it,
JESUS Christ is the same yesterday, to day, and forever. He is the same Saviour now that he was that day when he wept over Jerusalem. If he were on earth now as he was then, I have no doubt but that there are many here today over whom he would weep, as he did over Jerusalem.
The Greek word for "wept" is much fuller. It comes from the Greek word which means to sob, i.e., to wail aloud."
Jesus knew that they were headed to hell and thus he cried out for them.
John Vassar won a blacksmith to the Lord while he was working at his job. As he was putting the horseshoe he was working on into the fire, John Vassar told him about hell, and it punishment. The blacksmith got the message quick and got saved.
The time the woman refused to let John Vassar into her house. He sat on her front porch and sang these words:
“BUT DROPS OF GRIEF CAN NE’ER REPAY
THE DEBT OF LOVE I OWE,
HERE LORD, I GIVE MYSELF AWAY,
TIS ALL THAT I CAN GOD””
A few weeks later, she came to Church and confessed he sins and got saved. She said, that song he sang, burned themselves into my heart, and I had to do something about it.
D-HE SAW THEIR DESPAIR
But when he saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion on them, because they fainted, and were scattered abroad, as sheep having no shepherd.
People without Jesus as the shepherd of their souls are at the mercy of the devil and all his demons. An unsaved person wanders aimlessly into one dangerous situation after another. But the WORST thing of all is when an unsaved person dies without Jesus he or she goes out into ETERNITY into a LAKE of FIRE forever, which the Bible calls “the second death.” (Rev. 20:14-15)
WHO IS THE BEST KNOWN PERSON IN THE WORLD TODAY?
IF YOU SAID BILLY GRAHAM, YOU WOULD BE WRONG. IF YOU SAID MOHAMMED ALI, YOU WOULD BE WRONG. IF YOU SAID THE POPE, YOU WOULD BE WRONG. IF YOU SAID ELVIS PRESLEY, YOU WOULD BE WRONG. IF YOU SAID JESUS OF NAZARETH, YOU WOULD BE WRONG. THE ANSWER IS MICKEY MOUSE! THINK ABOUT IT. A FIGURE
WHO DOES NOT EVEN EXIST, IS BETTER KNOWN THAN THE
SON OF GOD WHO DIED FOR THE SINS OF THIS WORLD.
Some years ago a former Pope developed a serious case of hiccups. People all over the world were concerned. They sent all kinds of remedies—everything from standing on his head to holding his breath. But when we hear of the spiritual condition of others, how eager are we to send forth the Good News of God’s remedy for the disease of sin?
II-NOTICE THE SAYINGS OF JESUS:
37 Then saith he unto his disciples,
A-HE TALKED ABOUT A PLENTFUL HARVEST:
The harvest truly is plenteous,
He saw a harvest ripe and ready to be reaped John 4: 35. Do you not say, `Four months more and then the harvest’? I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest.
Finding his newly-appointed pastor standing at his study window in the church weeping as he looked over the inner city’s tragic conditions, a layman sought to console him: "Don’t worry. After you’ve been here a while, you’ll get used to it." Responded the minister, "Yes, I know. That’s why I am crying."
He Went through all the towns and villages" of Galilee, we are told (9:35), "teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness
According to Josephus, a Jewish historian writing about a generation after Jesus, there were 204 cities and villages in Galilee, each with no fewer than fifteen thousand persons. Even if the latter figure is applicable only to the walled cities, and not to the villages (which is not what Josephus says), a conservative estimate points to a very large population, even if smaller than the three million that Josephus figures indicate. If Jesus were to speak in two towns or villages a day, it would still take about four months to canvass the lot.
BILLY GRAHAM SAID THIS: THE EVANGELISTIC HARVEST IS ALWAYS URGENT. THE DESTINY OF MEN, AND OF NATIONS, IS ALWAYS BEING DECIDED. EVERY GENERATION IS STRATEGIC. WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THE PAST GENERATION, AND WE CANNOT BEAR THE FULL RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE NEXT ONE; BUT WE DO HAVE OUR GENERATION. GOD WILL HOLD US RESPON-SIBLE AS TO HOW WELL WE FULFILL OUR RESPONSIBILITIES TO THIS AGE, AND TAKE ADVANTAGE OF OUR OPPORTUNITIES.
B-HE TALKED ABOUT PERSONAL WORKERS:
but the labourers are few;
The Marines are looking for The Few and The Proud… The Army is looking for those who are willing to be All that they can be… The Navy is looking for those who want not just A Job, But an Adventure… The Air Force is looking for those who want to aim high…! Everybody is looking for somebody…!
The Lord is looking for someone who is willing to give their all… The Lord is looking for someone who is willing to help in the harvest of the lost… The Lord is looking for someone who is willing to labor… For the Kingdom…!
A fellow in Alaska has been throwing the Word of God into the ocean for a third of a century. Missionary Everett Bachelder has tossed more than 1,000 mayonnaise jars and ketchup bottles into the Bering Sea. He has crammed them with Scripture messages written in 100 languages.
Wind and waves have carried the story of God’s love to the far
corners of the earth. He has received responses from as far as 10,000 miles away. Kids from the various area churches help him fold the messages and
put them in the jars and bottles.
A man in Singapore, distraught over a romance gone sour, was about to commit suicide by jumping into the waters from a cliff. But he saw a bottle wash up against the rocks below. Deciding to leap when the bottle broke, he watched it hit the rocks again and again without breaking. Curious, he climbed down the cliff, saw the messages, opened the bottle, and discovered it related to the Word of God, sought out a missionary in Singapore, and got saved!
C-HE TALKED ABOUT PURPOSEFUL PRAYING:
38 Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth labourers into his harvest.
Notice this is not praying in generalities, this is praying specially, for laborers to go into the harvest.
What happens when you get to praying this prayer, you will get a burden and go yourself. You will be like Isaiah in chaper 6, he asks the question, who shall go? And then he answers it with, here am I, send me Lord.
C.T. Studd-:Some want to live within the sound of the Church bell. O Lord, I want to run a rescue shop within a yard of hell.
CONCLUSION: Fanny Crosby that great blind songwriter, who is known as “the queen of gospel music,” had another noble quality about her which was appealing, and that was her burden for souls. One night, in the summer of 1869, she was speaking to a large audience in the New York Bowery Mission. While she was speaking to them she was impressed, over and over again, that some mother’s boy must be rescued that night, or he might be eternally lost. Therefore, she made a pressing plea that if there was a boy present who had wandered from his mother’s home he must come to her at the end of the service. The service ended, and a young 18 year old man came forward, and asked, “Were you talking to me, Miss Crosby? I promised my mother that I would meet her in heaven, but as I am now living, that will be impossible.” She knelt down, spoke and prayed with the boy, and in a few minutes he stood up with a gleam in his eye, saying, “Now I am ready to meet my mother in heaven, for I have found God!”
Several months later, Miss Crosby remembering the events of that hot
summer night, and the boy’s conversion from a life of hopelessness, wrote the immortal words:
“Rescue the perishing, care for the dying,
Snatch them in pity from sin and the grave
Weep o’er the erring one, lift up the fallen,
Tell them of Jesus, the mighty to save.
Rescue the perishing, duty demands it;
Strength for thy labor the Lord will provide
Back to the narrow way patiently win them
Tell the poor wand’rer a Savior has died.
Rescue the perishing, care for the dying;
Jesus is merciful, Jesus will save!”
