Reflecting Christ: Compassion for the Marginalized

The words, of course, come from the Gospel of Matthew 25, the last teaching section in the Gospel of Matthew before the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Placed as the fifth great block of teaching in Matthew's gospel, and Christ, of course, speaking to His disciples to tell us what the standard of the Lord's assessment of our life is going to be. [00:00:37]

Jesus has no interest in those photographs whatsoever. He who is the king of all things remains utterly unimpressed by our name dropping and the photographs that he loves to watch, as it were, on the grand screens of heaven, is when we're photographed with those who are perhaps mentally deprived, those who are discouraged and depressed, as His half-brother James says, the widows and the orphans. [00:02:21]

And you see evidences of it, I think, in the Reformed subculture. And one of the things that we see is lacking, actually one of the great things for which this ministry has stood, that the paramount need in the church of Jesus Christ is for God's Word itself to do its own work. Not for us, first of all, to work God's Word, but for God's Word to work in us. [00:03:40]

Our lives are transformed as we know by the renewing of our minds, and the renewing of our minds come from the Scriptures. And we are such in need of a day as in the day of Paul's visit to the Thessalonians when they received the Word of God not as the word of man, but as it really is: the Word of God – I wonder if you can finish Paul's sentence – which is at work in you believers. [00:04:22]

And we will never grasp the compassion of Jesus until we understand that He framed His whole thinking about others in the light of God's purposes and God's Word. Someone comes to Him with a little theological question. How do we relate the law of God in the Old Testament to the contemporary situation? You'll notice in Matthew chapter 19, how does Jesus think? [00:07:17]

And we need to see this as Paul would say so that we no longer look at men and women and young people and boys and girls according to the flesh. And we do. So how was it in the beginning is the clue to understanding how compassion will break out of my heart in order that I am able to deal with situations as they present themselves to me. [00:08:23]

And this is what gives our life its significance. The sheer marvel of creation out of nothing gives our life its context. But it's the fact that we are made as the divine image and we can never destroy the divine image. The rest of the New Testament (and even principals we find in the Old Testament) make it clear that even the rebellious sinner remains as the image of God and that is the ultimate horror of his rebellion. [00:21:05]

And the result is, of course, the cheapening of our lives and the cheapening of the lives of others. Richard Dawkins, and others; you discover that the child who is going to be born is a downs syndrome child. And it would be immoral not to abort that child. Some of you come from churches where downs syndrome children are very visible in the church and they are part of the glory of the church, are they not? [00:33:02]

And so, most of the ministry of Jesus is a demonstration of the compassion of God for His broken image. You know, the picture of George Washington that's on the dollar bill painted by Gilbert Stewart? You probably know that Steward never finished the painting. The head is there, and the rest of the canvas is blank. But I think he made a few shekels on the side by making a few copies of what he had done. [00:41:20]

And what therefore drives us in our Christian lives and in our Christian ministries is Jesus-like. So He comes to the leper and to the paralytic and He restores them. He wants to see the divine image restored. He's giving us a little – it's as though he's turning on the light in a very dark room and saying to us, "Just see what I'm going to do!" [00:43:33]

And He heals the leper. And He has mercy on blind beggars. And then He calls another tax collector out of a tree, and aware that there had been shame in this man's life, glory begins to break out. You know there is a wonderful passage in Calvin's institutes where he says this. He says, "In order not to grow weary in well-doing, which otherwise might happen immediately, one of the things that we need to learn is that we should not consider that man merit of themselves what men merit of themselves, but to look upon the image of God and all men to which we owe all honor and love, especially those of the household of faith. [00:47:29]

And we pray that we may have eyes to see through our ears. That the Word of God will do its work in us, and that Jesus Christ will be honored and glorified especially among us by how we love those who are marginalized and poor and disadvantaged and lost. And we pray this in our savior's name. Amen. [00:54:48]