The Motive Behind It (Matt. 4:23-25)
Back in the 1980s, undercover investigators conducted a sting operation on certain American televangelists. Noticing that these preachers would invite people to send in their personal prayer requests to the broadcast, with urgent appeals that they enclose a gift "to keep the program on the air," the investigators wanted to know what happened to those donations and prayer requests. What they discovered shocked them. Staffers for the televangelists would go to the post office, collect the letters sent in by listeners, open them on the spot, fish out the donations, then dump the prayer requests right there in the post office trash bins.
In the key passage above, we read of Jesus traversing the entire area of Galilee, with huge crowds following Him from all across the region. And when Matthew returns to that same theme in chapter 9, he adds a critical dimension that forever distinguishes the motives of Jesus from that of these charlatans of the airwaves.
read Matthew 9:35, 36. How does it describe the motive that propelled Jesus' ministry?
The word compassion comes from a Greek word (splagchnon) that refers to "the inward parts," "the bowels," considered the seat of the emotions in the ancient world. Compassion goes beyond sympathy (which merely can be intellectual). Compassion comes from the inside, from the heart and even the very gut.
That is what Jesus had. For Him, grabbing people's money and dumping their heart-rending prayer requests into post office garbage bins would have been inconceivable. Again and again in the Gospels, the quality of compassion describes His attitude toward the people. A leper begs Him: "If you are willing, you can make me clean." Jesus, "filled with compassion," reaches out to him: "I am willing. . . . Be clean!" (Mark 1:40, 41, NIV); cf. Matt. 20:29-34; Mark 10:46-52).
If you can imagine someone doing all this with never a thought of personal gain, never a thought that what he is doing will be picked up by the press, or at least will look good on a resume-with absolutely no thought of personal gain whatsoever, then you are thinking about Jesus. The single force that moved Him was love, love from the belly, love from the gut. The Gospels call it compassion. To what extent does compassion like this undergird your feelings and actions toward others?
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