The Lord Will Never Be Too Busy to Attend to Our Needs

The Lord calls the disciples to go on vacation, find a place of retreat, and invites them to spend some time resting together. The Christian life has to be a balanced life; it is not all simply serving, serving

, serving, working, working, working—and that is also true in the secular world, or in any kind of work, in the home, for homemakers, or whatever the case may be. We must make time to rest, relax, recharge our batteries, and then return to the task with renewed strength.

That is an inescapable law of life, and certainly of the Christian life and ministry as well. And we have to give one another opportunities to take those times of rest. Interestingly, what happens here reveals something about the person of Jesus that I also want to share with you.

They get into a boat and head toward that place of retreat, but what happens? That crowd, which knows about the Word of life contained in Jesus’ ministry, the wonderful miracles He performs, the healings He performs, the healings He performs, discovers that the Lord has left and is going to the other side of the lake; so they hurry, word spreads, and they run to the other side of the lake.

And when the Lord arrives there and is perhaps preparing to leave with the disciples for that deserted place they have agreed to visit for a while, He discovers that a great crowd is waiting for Him—hungry, eager, and in need of those words of life that He wants to give them. The Lord’s reaction at that moment is interesting.

I imagine that perhaps, at first, He felt a little annoyed—I would have felt that way; who knows whether He even experienced that—but the truth is that suddenly all the Lord’s plans fell through, and that much-needed rest and vacation were suddenly interrupted by a great mass of people in need of ministry from the Lord.

Christ’s reaction is what interests me most, and it is one of compassion and mercy, something that characterized Him time and again. It says that when the Lord saw that great crowd that had come from the cities and gathered around Him—it says that Jesus went out when they told Him, Lord, a great crowd is waiting for You—it says that Jesus went out: “He saw a great crowd and had compassion on them, because they were like sheep that had no shepherd.”

That was the Lord’s reaction time and again when people came. We recently saw how, when this woman with the flow of blood approaches Him and presses Him with her need, the Lord responds in a beautiful and merciful way. When the paralytic’s friends lower the bed through the roof, the Lord, instead of rejecting them, grants their urgent request. When the Syrophoenician woman also presses the Lord with her need, as we saw, the Lord time and again responds mercifully to the people around Him; even His own disciples were not so merciful.

When Bartimaeus, for example, begins to cry out to the Lord, “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me; heal me,” the people tell Bartimaeus, “Be quiet; leave the Lord alone. He is too busy.” When the children approach the Lord to be blessed, the disciples keep them away, thinking that they are merely children and that the Lord has no interest in those little creatures, but the Lord corrects them.

In this case, we will see later that when the Lord identifies with the crowd’s need for food, the disciples tell Him, “Send them away so they can buy food elsewhere.” But I always see that compassion, that mercy, which moved the Lord to go beyond the moment and which tells us something about the heart of Jesus: it is a compassionate heart, it is a merciful heart, it is a heart that takes pity on our needs and our condition.

One of my favorite verses is in Psalm 103, which says: “As a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear Him.” Time and again, the Lord invites us to draw near to Him with that sense of confidence. We have a Father who knows that we are made of very fragile material. We are human. That is why that same Psalm 103 says: “For He knows our condition.” In English it says: “For He knows our frame.” He knows our frame; He knows the very structure of our being; He remembers that we are dust.

The Lord knows that we are very weak and very fragile children. And He treats us that way. And we must always see the Father as viewing us in that way. When we fail the Lord, when we have wanted to serve Him and have failed, let us remember that the Lord is merciful and compassionate; He never rejects anyone who approaches Him. The Lord does not reject or despise us when we display our humanity or our imperfection; He always looks upon us with compassion.

The Lord will never be too busy to attend to our needs. He will never tell us, “Oh, what you are asking Me for is too insignificant.” For Him, there is no great or small; we can come to Him with all our needs, and we ourselves must be people of compassion; we must treat one another with that mercy. Our churches must be places of refuge, places of compassion, places of healing, where people can come with any situation, whatever it may be—sometimes ugly or unpleasant, or flaws that life has accumulated upon our character.

And the Church of Jesus Christ has to be a compassionate, merciful community that attends to the needy and deals with people in their brokenness and imperfections with the same mercy with which Christ treated that crowd. The distinguishing mark of God’s people must be compassion and grace. That is precisely why the apostle Paul says in one passage: “Let your gentleness be known to all men.” And the apostle Paul also says in another passage: “Brothers, if any of you is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should correct him in a spirit of gentleness, watching yourselves, lest you also fall.”

By being aware of our own humanity, we can also treat others with great compassion and great mercy. That must be the distinguishing mark of every believer and every community of faith: the compassion that Christ Himself displays.

Let us be people of mercy and grace. God bless you, and we will continue with this series of meditations later. Your brother in Christ, Pastor Roberto Miranda, bids you farewell.