Sunday, July 4th – Caring For The Need

Our world is filled with people who are unable to see any light in their lives. Some feel the oppression of physical needs, like hunger and disease, some live in the darkness of being unloved, where loneliness is like an empty pit they keep falling down, some can’t see where their next bread will come from. And just as parents do their best to supply their child’s necessities when known, so too our Church must minister, as best we can, to those who are in need. Ministering to the needy is not just the task of the corporate Church but also of every individual Christian.

Just because you may not have one of the specific “caring” gifts doesn’t release you from the responsibility of helping others when you have the opportunity. Sometimes we just need to climb out of our beds of comfort and respond to the need first hand. Ministering to human or temporal needs must always come 2nd to ministering to spiritual needs.

Our first priority is reaching the lost; Jesus is our primary example of this proper balance. He was certainly concerned about the physical needs of people, He healed the sick, fed the hungry, befriended the lonely, comforted the fallen but His primary task was to “seek and save the lost.”

The reason the “spiritual” must come before the “temporal” is because the only thing that is going to last is our soul. That makes our chief responsibility to share the good news of Christ to those lost in sin. But we also must understand that ministering to needs many times opens the door to sharing the message of salvation. The proper Biblical priority is making our primary focus reaching the lost, but while we are doing that, as Ambassadors of Jesus, we minister to those who have need and I mean those who are really in need not those who have less.

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