Loving others – Page 5 – Heather C. King

Eight days after I woke up squeaking and sputtering air instead of greeting the start of a new day with my normal cheerful voice . . . (okay, maybe I don’t wake up like Cinderella, singing to birds with a smile ever morning) . . . but still, eight days after I woke up and couldn’t talk, I still sound like an alien in my own body.

My voice scratches a bit and I’ve taken a step down from a normal alto range into a definitive tenor.

Still, it’s an improvement. I can sit and hold a conversation with friends. I read about ten books to my toddler this morning while she sat on the potty. I can call out to my older girls reminders to “Be nice. Don’t be unkind. Stop being nasty to each other. If you can’t get along, I’m going to pack up your game so you can’t play.”

These are important and necessary skills for me, a busy wife and mom and friend. Today, I’m thankful for the voice I have, scratchy and low as it is, because the essential truth is I’m no longer voice-less.

And there are others who never feel that freedom. Some people never seem to gain a voice, not after years of anguished pleas. Not after infant’s tears in a forlorn and overlooked makeshift bed, crying out to an unresponsive mama or parents that simply aren’t there.

Living one week without a voice reminded me that there are some people who are perpetually voiceless. No amount of cough drops, hot tea with lemon and honey, or throat spray is going to tune the world into the sound of their need.

Our God, though, is a hearer of silenced cries. When Bartimaeus, a blind beggar sitting hopeless by a roadside, yelled out to Jesus as he passed by, the crowd tried to hush him up. “They rebuked him, telling him to be silent” (Mark 10:47).

What could Jesus care for a blind beggar? Why stop and heal someone so clearly overlooked by every . . . other . . . person.

Refusing to be silenced, though, Bartimaeus screamed louder and Jesus stopped the mob of fawning followers so he could listen to a man in need.

“What do you want me to do for you?” That’s all Jesus asked. That’s all he needed to ask in order to assure a blind beggar that finally someone had heard his cry for help. Bartimaeus, voiceless no longer, presented his clear and simple request: “Rabbi, let me recover my sight” (Mark 10:51)

More than just a miracle of sight for a blind man occurred there that day. It was the miracle of God hearing the pleas of a voiceless one amidst a noisy crowd.

In the same way, when a woman who had been bleeding for 12 years ducked her head in shameful desperation and slipped into the crowd surrounding Jesus, she was a voiceless one. Her society and culture, the laws of her faith, declared her unclean. Unfit for human contact. Unable to live among her people. Cut off from public worship.

In faith, she ran her hand along the hem of Jesus’ robe, trusting that the tiniest touch could heal her.

Jesus could have let her slip away from the crowd unnoticed. No need for her to risk discovery in a mob who thought her very presence would taint them and stain their purity.

But he didn’t. Jesus gave voice to the voiceless. He asked, “Who touched me” and waited for her to speak up, to declare her presence and give testimony. It was as if he was telling her, “You haven’t just received physical healing. You are welcome in this place. These people need to hear what you have to say. No more sneaking into a crowd and then slipping out the back.”

Even she recognized the impact of Jesus’ question, realizing “that she was not hidden” (Luke 8:47). No, not hidden anymore. Instead, “trembling, and falling down before him (she) declared in the presence of all the people why she had touched him”

It was likely her first act of public worship and her first unashamed speech in 12 years.

Don’t you love this about our Lord? That He hears when no one else will hear? That His passion and heart are for the neediest and weakest among us? That He’s given us a voice and He listens when we call for Him?

This is His character.
More than that, this is supposed to be the character of his people.

In the book of Nehemiah, this cup-bearer to a foreign King, a man with responsibility and high position, asked his brother for reports about his homeland and the people who had returned to Jerusalem.

Kelly Minter in Nehemiah: A Heart That Can Break notes this about Nehemiah’s character: “He wanted to know. Sometimes I shield myself from finding out what’s really going on with people for fear I’ll be held responsible. Because with information often comes responsibility; if we know, we might be required to do something”(p. 13).

We may want to remain blind and deaf to need, but Nehemiah wanted to know. And when he heard about the state of his people, he responded with prayer and action.

All because he served a God who hears and cares about those with no voice. We serve that same God—do we hear and care?

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Heather King is a wife, mom, Bible Study teacher, writer for www.myfrienddebbie.com and worship leader. Most importantly, she is a Christ follower with a desire to help others apply the Bible to everyday life with all its mess, noise, and busyness. To read more devotionals by Heather King, click here.

I clearly remember the first time my then future-husband, James, told me he loved me. He sat next to me on the couch, held my hand, looked deep into my eyes and said those three magic words.

I then walked to the bathroom and threw up.

Romantic, huh?

It’s partly because it wasn’t just some sweet nothing that people in a relationship say to each other when their hearts go pitter-patter. We had decided when we started dating that James would be the one to say, “I love you” first and that he would say it when he felt confident I was the one he wanted to marry.

So, “I love you” really meant, “I’m committed to you and to our relationship. This isn’t casual dating; it’s getting ready for marriage.”

Hence, my reaction.

Now, we’re just two days away from our 12th anniversary and “I love you” is something we say all the time. In fact, I often stop and think about what I’ve just said or heard when we hang up the phone or kiss goodbye in the rush of the morning. I want to make sure the significance isn’t lost in the banalities of life or the commonness of overuse.

I love you.

That means I’m committed to you and to us. I care about you because of who you are and not what you do. Whatever we’re facing in life, we’re doing this together.

We all need a reminder at times of what love really means because we take it for granted too often. Or, perhaps, we need the reminder that we’re loved because sometimes we just don’t feel it’s true.

That’s why the last person I’d choose for my Spiritual Dream Team is someone who always reminds us of God’s love—the apostle John.

In Part One, I told you how we all need an encourager, a Barnabas to help us keep going and never quit.

In Part Two, I told you that we need an intercessor, a James, who will wear holes in his jeans from time on his knees praying for you.

We also need someone to remind us all the time that we are loved. Fully, truly loved. Known intimately, through and through, but loved just the same. Loved so greatly that nothing we can do can alter God’s affection for us. Passionately loved with such intensity that Jesus would die just for us.

Job Posting #3: John

Must remind us on the tough days and in the moments when we don’t feel it’s true that God loves us.
Must spur us on to love one another with more grace so we can be a living example of God’s love in the world.

John couldn’t forget that God loved him. Jesus had chosen John for his inner circle of three intimate disciples. At the Last Supper, John had actually leaned against Jesus. He was the disciple “whom Jesus loved” (John 13). Jesus thought so highly of John, that He entrusted His mother into John’s care as He died on the cross (John 19:26-27).

It’s no surprise, then, that John’s primary message in his writings is that God loves us and that we should love others.

God’s love was John’s consistent theme. He wrote:

“See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!” (1 John 3:1).
“This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1 John 4:10).
“God is love . . . We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:16, 19).

God didn’t just love us; He loved us first and He loved us sacrificially.

In his book, 100 Bible Verses Everyone Should Know By Heart, Robert Morgan wrote about one of John’s most famous statements of all:

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life (John 3:16)

According to Morgan, when the great evangelist D.L. Moody heard a fresh young preacher named Henry Moorehouse speak on John 3:16, he said, “I never knew up to that time that God loved us so much. This heart of mine began to thaw out, and I could not keep back the tears. It was like news from a far country. I just drank it in” (p. 53).

We can’t take such extravagant love for granted. We can’t depersonalize it and assume that although God loved the world, He doesn’t necessarily love us–you and me—personally and passionately.

We need someone to remind us during stress, fear, trial, and even in the midst of the mundane that God’s love for us never fails.

But John doesn’t stop there. He says, God loves you . . .so, love one another.

It’s a natural progression.

We all have the opportunity to be the physical, tangible reminders of God’s love in a world starving for His affection.

John tells us: “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God, for God is love” (1 John 4:7-8).

Yes, he says, “You who are loved, love others.”

How can you show God’s love to others today?

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