But even the hairs of your head are all numbered. (Matt. 10:30)
Not a single one of us could count the hairs on his or her head, and yet God both can and has.
Jesus’ point in Matthew 10 has multiple levels. First, God knows us more than we know ourselves. That alone should cause us to stop, to wonder, to pray! We all have aspects of our heart of which we are ignorant. We think we know ourselves, but we have blind spots, places where we simply “don’t know what we don’t know.” We act according to un-understood desires, needs, and worries. We have un-scrutinized longings and fears. Our vision and understanding are partial; we only know ourselves in limited sense. And yet there is not a single aspect of our being and identity that God does not know! According to Psalm 139, he is “intimately acquainted with all our ways.”
But Jesus’ point is not just that God knows every recess of our being and heart—even the ones of which we are ignorant. His point is how much God values us! Knowing us intimately, more intimately than we know ourselves, would be terrifying if it were not coupled to tender love and appreciation. After all, many of the dark recesses of our hearts are anything but attractive. And yet Jesus is clear: “you are of more value than many sparrows.” God’s knowledge of us is the sort of knowledge that a parent or lover seeks, the knowledge that seeks to know every last detail out of delight for the other.
As you go about your day, ponder the fact that God knows you more fully than you know yourself and values you more highly than you value yourself. He delights in his children!
Steven+
Scripture Reflections
And Jesus went throughout all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction.
Matthew 9:35 summarizes Jesus’ ministry in Galilee, and is worth our consideration because it challenges three misconceptions that tend to arise in the church. The first is the idea that the only thing that matters is that people hear the Gospel. The second is the idea that the only thing that matters is meeting the practical needs of people. Related to this, the third is the idea that the Gospel can be preached without words. Jesus’ ministry doesn’t allow us to draw any of these conclusions!
He taught about the kingdom, he proclaimed the Gospel, and he healed every affliction.
The Church doesn’t have a mission other than Jesus’ mission. As the Spirit fills and empowers the Church, it enables it to step into Jesus’ mission, because the Church is his body, his presence on earth. This means that the Church is supposed to do—by the power of the Spirit—the things that Jesus did: proclaim, teach, and heal. The Gospel must be proclaimed with words, people need teaching about the kingdom of God, and people need healing from the effects of the fall! Simply put, we don’t get to pick between speaking about the kingdom and acting out the kingdom. The Church is supposed to do all of this, because Jesus did.
This does not mean that every individual is equally adept at all of this. Some are supremely gifted at demonstrating the kingdom by healing sickness. Some are uniquely able to address societal afflictions, like injustice, poverty, drug addiction, or prostitution. Some are given the ministry of delivering people from spiritual and satanic bondage. Some are gifted as evangelists, and others as teachers of the kingdom, uniquely able to explain it in a way that makes sense. None of us is gifted (like Jesus was!) at all of this, but together, the body is supposed to do all of it.
As you wrestle with your own place in the full mission of Jesus, consider where God has placed you and what he has given you gifts to do. Look around you and ask, “What portion of this mission has God laid in my lap? What portion of this do I have the ability to accomplish?” It is easy for each of us to overlook (or think lowly of) the things that come easily to us—we tend to value the more “difficult” roles. But it may be that the thing that comes easiest to you is an indication of how God has gifted you to step into the ministry of Jesus.
Steven+
Scripture Reflections
As Jesus passed on from there, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth, and he
said to him, “Follow me.” And he rose and followed him.
The call of Matthew—as recounted by Matthew in his gospel—has almost no detail. Something happened that day, something that changed Matthew’s whole life, and yet he doesn’t tell us anything about it other than the fact that he was a tax-collector, Jesus called him, and he left everything to follow Jesus. What stirred in his heart in that moment? What new hope changed the whole course of his life?
I wonder how many years had gone by since he accepted a post that was both lucrative and despised. I wonder how he justified it to himself. I wonder about the callousness that grew from being both rich and hated, treated like an outcast and yet with too much power for anyone to ignore. It is easy to imagine that his heart was hard, the guilt buried deep, the defensive walls high.
It is in this speculative wondering about Matthew that I see a bit of myself. I too have places where it is easy to cauterize my heart, because examining the places of pain and guilt is too threatening. We all have things that we don’t want to admit out loud because it seems too painful. Sometimes it is our sin, sometimes it is the way we have been hurt by others, sometimes it is simply that God hasn’t given us the life we hoped for.
I wonder if Matthew didn’t include the details of his story so that we all could see ourselves in him. As long as he kept his testimony terse and generic, we can imagine being in his place. Shut off, hurting, angry, defensive—perhaps not because we chose a profession that was despised, but for some other reason.
My sense is that he wants us to see ourselves in his story so that we might realize that even in the hardened places of the heart, it is possible to hear the voice of Jesus. Matthew lets us see that Jesus’ voice can break through our defensiveness, our pain, our sin. He speaks, and his voice brings transformation. If, like Matthew, you have “fenced off” an area of your heart that is too painful to acknowledge, Matthew’s testimony demonstrates that this does not have to be the end of the story. The voice of Jesus can bring healing; it can transform us.
Steven+