Christians Should Care about People
Christians Should Care about People
The call to follow Jesus is a call to love people.
We know this, intellectually. But what does it really mean, and what should it look like lived-out?
How to Love Like Jesus
In one of the last recorded conversations Jesus had with His followers, this is what He said:
“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” - Jesus (John 13:34, NIV)
Jesus went on to say that, if we love others the way He loves us, the world around us will be able to recognize us as His followers without us having to even tell them we’re Christians (John 13:35). How? Because we’ll look like our Leader.
Jesus didn’t just give us a command to love others well, and then leave us to figure out what that looks like on our own. Jesus was love walking among us, and during His earthly life, He demonstrated for us what it looks like to foster healthy, loving, Christ-centered community. If we want to learn how to do this right, we need look no further than to His example.
I spent some time a while back studying Jesus’ years of ministry, and from what I could find in the Gospels, there were two primary reasons Jesus would isolate Himself (or withdraw from other people):
to rest (Mark 6:31-32);
to pray (Luke 5:16).
And the reason Jesus prioritized getting alone to pray was because, to love people the way Jesus did requires a lifestyle of total dependency on God the Father for direction. Jesus described His relationship with the Father like this:
“Very truly I tell you, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does.” - Jesus (John 5:19, NIV)
“For I did not speak on my own, but the Father who sent me commanded me to say all that I have spoken. - Jesus (John 12:49, NIV)
The reason Jesus spent so much time alone with God the Father in prayer was because He recognized that the only way to love others as God loves them is through constant communication with God the Father.
I believe this is why, in the story of the Samaritan woman (John 4:1-42), we’re told that Jesus had to go through Samaria (John 4:3-4) on His way to Galilee from Judea, even though by looking at a map, we know there was another route that Jesus could have taken.
Jesus could have gone a different way — except that God told Him to go through Samaria, and so Jesus had to go through Samaria. Why? Because loving God and being obedient to Him always involves loving people (1 John 5:2-3); and on that particular occasion, the specific person the Father wanted Jesus to notice and engage with and care about was in Samaria.
Here’s another example:
The apostles gathered around Jesus and reported to him all they had done and taught. Then, because so many people were coming and going that they did not even have a chance to eat, he said to them, “Come with me by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest.”
So they went away by themselves in a boat to a solitary place. But many who saw them leaving recognized them and ran on foot from all the towns and got there ahead of them. When Jesus landed and saw a large crowd, he had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd. So he began teaching them many things.
- Mark 6:30-34, NIV
Can you imagine? If I’d gone to all that trouble to get away from people, only to find that the people I was trying to escape from had followed me, I’d have been pretty upset.
But how did Jesus respond? We’re told that, when Jesus saw the people who had followed Him, He had compassion on them, because they were like helpless sheep with no one to lead them nor protect them.
And then… Jesus told them to go away so that He and His disciples could get some rest, right? Wrong!
Jesus cared about their needs, and right then and there, He loved them with a sacrificial, willing-to-be-bothered sort of love.
When Jesus saw that crowd, He didn’t just see what any human would’ve seen with their natural eyes: people. (Or given His situation, pesky people.)
No, with Jesus’ spiritual eyes wide open to see others as God sees them, Jesus saw people who were like sheep without a shepherd. And Jesus was moved with compassion, so that He was willing to give up His completely reasonable, well-deserved plans to eat a meal with His disciples and to take a nap; and instead, He prioritized meeting the needs of the people God had placed right in front of Him.
Remember Jesus’ words: “I only do what I see my Father doing.” “I only speak what I hear my Father saying.”
Are you noticing the pattern in these stories? Each time Jesus hears from His Father, or perceives what the Father is up to, it involves noticing and engaging with other people.
Through Jesus’ perfect example, we’ve seen this done right. But now, let me tell you an embarrassing story about a time when I got this totally wrong…
How not to love like Jesus
One Sunday morning, I showed up early at church for prayer before the worship service. I walked through the front doors of the church building and made a beeline for the sanctuary, but someone spotted me as I was crossing the lobby and approached to engage me in conversation.
I was annoyed. They knew our church’s schedule and that prayer time was about to begin, so they had to know where I was headed and why. But that didn’t seem to matter to them.
They stepped right in front of me, blocking my path to the sanctuary, and asked me about my week, clearly expecting me to ask them about theirs in turn. Nothing about the conversation seemed urgent to me, except that they seemed dead-set on having it right then and there.
As I was determined to stay focused on what “mattered most,” they received minimal attention from me. My responses were short and to the point, in an effort to subtly convey to them that I had somewhere else to be and something more important to do.
They eventually took the hint, and, still aggravated by the encounter, I continued on into the sanctuary to pray.
At the time, I truly believed that I was doing the right thing — the spiritual thing. Jesus prioritized prayer, right? I was just trying to be like Jesus, and that pesky person was making it harder for me to follow in His footsteps.
It was only after I started praying (and finally started listening to God) that I realized how far I’d missed the mark — how bad I really was at recognizing God at work and adjusting my plans to join Him in whatever He was up to.
But had I stopped to listen, I would’ve known that that person was exactly why I’d had to come to church early that morning. If the sanctuary had been my Galilee that Sunday, the lobby was my Samaria; and I had to pass through it because there was someone there whom I was supposed to notice and engage with and care about.
When I don’t stop to listen — when I don’t stop to ask God to speak — when I encounter other people, I look nothing like the Jesus I claim to follow.
do we really look like Jesus?
I’ve noticed a tendency in modern Christian culture to put a heavy emphasis on prioritizing our alone time with God, while we make actively engaging with others secondary and almost optional — even in church settings. But with Jesus, spending time with God always involved (or at least led to) purposeful engagement with people.
At Christian gatherings (church functions, conferences, concerts, etc.), we can lean into the belief that, the more intimate an encounter we have with God individually while gathered together, the more meaningful our experience is.
Even when we gather together to worship on Sunday mornings (or whenever you gather), we can make it so about ourselves (what we felt during worship through song, how God spoke to us personally through the teaching, whether or not we felt God’s presence, etc.) that we can come and go, and see a hundred different faces, and never actually see a single person through our spiritual eyes.
A while back — sometime after my botched Samaritan encounter — God laid it on my heart to start praying this simple prayer in the quiet, just-me-and-God moments of the day:
LORD,
Give me eyes to see what You want me to see;
Ears to hear what You want me to hear;
A heart that is willing to do what You want me to do;
No matter what I think or feel about it.
I’ve started to pray this prayer (as often as I remember to) at the start of my days, to reset my focus. It reminds me of the way that Jesus lived, and of the calling that’s been placed on my life as a Christian — as a follower of Jesus. It reinforces the truth that, if I want to love like Jesus, I’m going to have to hear from God the Father, just like He did.
And since I began praying this prayer, I’ve found myself in other situations where I’ve seen people as “inconveniences” to me, or as “getting in the way” of more spiritual things. And much like in my Samaritan encounter, seeing through my natural eyes alone, I still find myself getting irritated by the people around me.
But when I catch myself doing this, I’ve started pausing to silently pray, “God, what do you want me to see?” And without fail, God allows me to see those people differently. Once my spiritual eyes are opened to see them the way God sees them, and to notice their needs that I was too self-centered to notice before, God frees me up to let Jesus love those people through me.
Jesus said the world will know we’re His followers when we love like He did.
So think back over this past week, and the encounters you’ve had with people in your home, in your neighborhood, at your church, in the office, at the grocery store, while stuck in traffic — wherever you’ve been, where someone else was too. Do you think they really know?
Being a follower of Jesus was never supposed to be just a Jesus-and-me thing. It was always, from the beginning, supposed to be a Jesus-and-others thing. And if our pursuit of Jesus doesn’t lead us to care more about others each day than we did the day before, we might not be following Him at all.
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