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It’s a relief when a warning light disappears—unless the problem under the hood is still there. In Matthew 9:35–36, Jesus heals sickness, preaches the good news of the kingdom, and looks with compassion on people who are helpless and without a shepherd. What does his compassion say about the immediate burdens we bring to him and the deeper need we cannot afford to ignore?
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
There we are. For some reason our two computers have decided to quit talking to each other today. A lot of things that we’d like for God to have in his hands directly, right? Just go ahead and reconfigure this for us. That would be nice.
I saw some workers the other day, a video of them in O’Fallon High School. I’d imagine they were very much wishing that part of God having the whole world in his hands meant that he would have done the work they’d been doing for them. Here’s what they were doing. They were in the gymnasium. And in the gym, as you can see, they are raising a brand new big screen to show that year’s events going on in the school. Going pretty well. Oh, no, not so well.
I was trying to imagine, what do you feel like in that moment? I don’t even want to know how much that screen costs. But in that moment, if any of them are the praying sort and they were praying, or maybe they’re not the praying sort, but they were still praying, they were probably wishing, couldn’t that screen just kind of reverse? Could we just hit rewind? Let’s put that back up, right? And then it’d be okay. Because that day, it feels very much not okay. And then they’re not just leaving the screen, right? The floor underneath, I’m sure, is damaged, too. I don’t even want to think about it. I mean, what a mess.
Well, let’s say, though, that the screen company said, we kind of wanted to have a demonstration of what happens if you drop our screen. We’re just going to give you a new one. Don’t worry about it. We’ll replace it. No charge. In fact, we have a spare one because we were waiting for the day this would happen. And it’s on the truck. It’s going to be here tomorrow. You think, oh, so good. So then you go and you take your same ropes and you take your same lift and you take your same technique and you hook up the new one and you lift it up, right? Well, no, I think I’d figure out why the first one dropped to begin with, right? Because it’s one thing to have the immediate problem fixed, but you also want to know what the underlying issue is. And both matter.
If you find out what the underlying issue is, but you only have the parts of the screen laying on the gymnasium floor, well, it’s nice to know, but you still need the screen fixed. And at the same time, if you have the replacement screen, but you don’t know what caused it to fall, well, it’s quite possible it’ll happen again. So you need both the immediate problem and the deeper need solved.
And when you think about what we’ve been seeing in this journey through Matthew 8 and 9 that we’re going to wrap up over the next two weeks, that Jesus is calling people to see how both are interlinked. We see it sort of intuitively with something like that screen, right? The deeper problem, how do you hoist it up properly and not drop it? That’s relevant, and so is actually having a non-broken screen. You need both. You put both together, you have a solution.
Oddly enough, though, when we’re talking about our lives and how we interact with God and what we need in our whatever’s burdening us right now, whatever with work or health or family or friends or neighbors or whatever might be the issue today, we have that bucket and we have the bucket of God healing us spiritually. We have these two buckets and we kind of hold them apart. And even when we pray about them, we kind of treat them like, here’s two different compartments of my life, right? Here’s my immediate needs, and here’s that issue with sin that I need God to fix in my life. And what Jesus has been calling the people to understand and what he continues to call us to see is they’re actually related. And if we only deal with one of them, it’s as unsatisfying as only dealing with one half of what happened with that screen in high school.
So let’s pray tonight that we can see more clearly the full picture and that we can help others too as well. Let’s pray.
Father, thank you for this evening. Thank you for your word. Lord, we pray that you would help us to see where it is that we are missing the point, where it is that you have called us to pull the pieces together, to understand how what you’re doing ultimately and what you’re doing immediately are actually the same problem being solved in different parts, and to quit holding them apart, but rather to see the unity in them and thus how we relate to you in regard to them as unified as well. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
I think we can get the idea from all the healing that Jesus has been doing over these chapters that one thing that’s true, and it’s absolutely true, is that Jesus cares about the challenges that we know, the ones that we face, those tangible, palpable, awful, scary, very earthly things that we deal with. He cares about those. Take a look at verse 35, Matthew 9, if you want to turn there. It says, Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness. Jesus cares about the challenges we know.
What’s he doing as he’s going through the towns? Well, he’s healing people, right? He’s continuing to do what we’ve seen. Now, of course, we know that not every person in the Roman province of Palestine was healed during that time. There were people throughout Judea and Samaria that were still suffering, still broken, still people dying. Jesus didn’t come and heal it all in that moment, so everyone in the rest of the world said, well, why is this one little section of the world not having any bad stuff happen in it anymore? He didn’t do that, but he certainly did heal people.
Now, we’ve noted time and again, and this is the right thing to note, that these physical healings were things that were pointing to something bigger. But they were also the very things that they obviously were. Physical ills are an effect of sin. A world without sin would not have them, and so when you’re dealing with someone who’s blind, or someone who’s deaf, or someone who’s, well, demon-possessed, we maybe get that a little bit more clearly, right? Because clearly, spiritual evil, but demon-possessed, someone who dies, any of these things, what do we see? Well, we see physical things that come into the world because of sin, things that have occurred because of the fall.
And Jesus’ ministry on this earth gave a preview, a preview of what the kingdom’s restoration was going to look like. Here are samples of how the things that seem unsolvable, the things that seem just beyond our ability to deal with, are things that aren’t too big for him.
But we’ve rightly noted, week after week, that if people just thought, well, if only I could see, great. That’s all I need, right? If only I could see. Well, it’s pointing to something more than that. Miracles are pointing to who Jesus is. For example, when we saw Jesus do the healings where he tied it specifically to forgiveness, right? The lame man being lowered down, your sins are forgiven. Why does he say that? Because he wants people not to only focus on that one thing. Not just, oh, now this man can get up and walk. But what more needs to be done?
In both, Jesus is hinting at the compassion that he has and that’s going to be revealed fully in the time to come. That he actually cares and because he cares, he’s going to do something about it. This has been promised throughout scripture time and time again. For example, back to Psalm 103, right in the part that Laura called us to worship with, verse 3. Whoever forgives all your sins, excuse me, who forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases? That’s who God is. Jump over to Isaiah 33. No one living in Zion will say, I am ill. And the sins of those who dwell there will be forgiven. Notice God links the two together in the Old Testament. This is not something novel that Jesus is doing that he says the healing from our spiritual illness of sin and the healing from our physical maladies are both part of his kingdom restoration project. They’re together. And because he has compassion, he’s going to do that.
I think watching Jesus, what we see over and over again is that he’s preaching the gospel, but he’s preaching the gospel, that’s what we’re told here, while healing people. Because he actually cares. And that speaks to how kingdom living looks like. What does it look like for us to be those who live out Jesus’ kingdom? It looks like those who have compassion, both in preaching the gospel, but also in seeing the other needs that are coming up in the midst of that and seeking to be God’s hands and feet in this world on those too. They’re linked together.
I keep a little engine diagnostic tool in my office. We’ve had to use it a few times where someone’s car has been acting up while at church. And it’s handy because you can take it out. And if you ever use one of these things, they’re amazing. You can get one on Amazon for like 20 bucks. And you go out to the car and you plug it under the dash. There’s a little standardized port. You plug it in and it will tell you what’s going on in the car. Maybe it’s a little cryptic if you’re not a mechanic, but it will tell you what’s going on in the car. And sometimes it’ll say something that indicates, you know, you probably didn’t screw the gas cap back on right. Might want to try that again. There seems to be air coming in and it’s probably the gas cap. So it doesn’t say it that straightforwardly, but you can figure it out pretty easily. And so you say, oh, that’s a simple issue. Let’s go check the gas cap. Maybe the gas cap’s bad, right? There’s simple little things like that. And certainly there have been times where I’ve had my engine light come on where it’s nothing more than the fact that I was rushing a little too much at the gas station. Isn’t that relief? So it’s been really handy. It’s nice if you can take it out and say, oh, you know, it’s really that big a deal. We can go ahead and clear that and go on our way. Or you went and got an oil change and they forgot to clear the little reminder that you need to get an oil change. And you think, oh, now I have to go back. Well, you can take that out and you can heal the car, right? You can tell it, hey, it’s gotten an oil change. You can quit complaining now. So it’s a wonderful little thing. And it can take away a current pressing concern by dealing with that current moment. Or maybe you’ll say, here’s the simple thing that needs to be fixed or the not so simple thing that needs to be fixed. And it’ll at least point you in the right direction.
But whether it’s simple or not, whether it’s something that’s safe to clear or not, it will allow you, if you wish, to clear it. Your engine can be about to blow up and I can go in there and I can hit the little clear button. It won’t complain until it blows up. Wonderful, right? Not really, right? If I said to you, I know that engine light’s really bothering you. And I think if you drive your car another few miles, it’s probably going to explode. But so it’s not very peaceful with that light on, right? Why don’t I go ahead and clear it for you? You’ll feel better. You say, Tim, are you nuts? Well, I already knew you were nuts. But are you even nuttier than I thought? Because I want you to help me call a tow truck. I don’t want you to clear the light and everything’s okay.
When we divide the needs that we have before God, we’re kind of doing that, though. Sometimes we treat it that there’s only this pressing physical need, right? I need to be healed of an illness. And that seems like a lot bigger than an engine light. And in the moment, it is. But in the scheme of eternity, it’s sort of like that engine light. And so if we fall into the trap, well, this is the thing that really matters. I’m going to deal with this. And we clear that light and we just send people on their way and we don’t actually deal with the bigger underlying issue. It’s sort of like saying, oh, drive down the road. It doesn’t matter. It might explode someday. You’re okay, though. Won’t be bothering you. No, no, that isn’t helpful at all. It’s not, in fact, compassionate, is it? If I know some harm is coming to you and I make it so you don’t have to worry about it, even though it’s going to still happen, that is not compassion. It might, in fact, be the opposite.
Jesus knows our engine lights. And as he’s going through the land preaching the gospel, he’s turning off engine lights for people. He’s allowing them to go back to their day-to-day life and not be hampered by this thing that in the moment is in the way. But he’s doing it in a way that’s also pointing them to the fact that everybody has some fatal issue to the engine, something that is going to blow up. And so simply clearing the light isn’t enough. It might allow us to operate for today, but it isn’t enough. Nonetheless, it’s okay to bring those things to him, right? Jesus has that little controller, and he’s willing to clear the lights for us.
If you go to your mechanic with one of those simple issues and it just needs to have the oil change reminder reset, he’s not going to look at you and say, well, why don’t you just drive around with it telling you you need your oil reset? There’s no problem there. No, he’s going to reset that little bitty thing that’s getting in the way, that’s confusing you on where you are and how things are going to work. Because that’s his job. He cares about that. At least you pay him to care about that. Well, we don’t pay Jesus, but Jesus cares about the little things. And even the things that feel big to us, but he says really in the grand scheme of things, they’re little. He still cares about them. And these healings reassure us of that. Even when they’re meant to point to something bigger, they’re not inconsequential to Jesus as they are either.
You ever fall into that trap that you wonder if you can bring the little things of life to God or if you’re just bugging him. He says, no, even if it’s just an oil change reminder, bring it to me. I want you to bring those things to me. I just don’t want you to think that’s everything. And so we see over and over again in Matthew 8 and 9 is Jesus doing this healing ministry. What’s he doing? He’s constantly healing that immediate need, some more serious than others. But he’s always pointing them to the deeper spiritual need that’s going to be longer lasting too, right? When you have a bad tank of gas, it’s a problem. It’s not good. But more than likely, it’s not the whole history of that car. And whatever issues, no matter how severe in this life that we bring to our God, when we look at them at that eternal scale, they’re not that big. I’m not saying they don’t feel that big to me because they do. But they’re big enough for God. He can handle the little things and the big things. He just says, remember, I’m telling you, you also need an overhaul. You need to let me rebuild the engine. Don’t just have me turn off the light and say you’re good for another 3,000 miles. Because at some point, the gasket’s going to blow. At some point, something really bad is going to happen.
Jesus cares about the things that haunt us and bother us, the big and the little, the stupid, and the really genuinely 100% real problems. He cares about all those. We can bring all those to Him. But every time He interacts with people, He’s also reminding them, He also cares about something deeper for them. He cares about the cause. He points them to the solution, which is Him. Verse 36. When He saw the crowds, He had compassion on them because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.
This isn’t about skipping compassion. Sometimes we hear that. Oh, Jesus is saying, you really need to be concerned about the matters of the kingdom. True. So we don’t really care about those pesky, earthly issues. Sometimes we do that to ourselves and we do convince ourselves, well, I’m not even going to pray about this because God has bigger concerns. God’s Word doesn’t say that. He doesn’t want us to think that. Sometimes the littlest, really in some ways most absurd things that bother us are the things that we most need Him to help us through in the moment. He just wants to make sure that we keep our eyes on the broader problem. That the problem is both physical and spiritual, both earthly and heavenly. It’s all together. How do we do that? Well, it’s not by alternating between those two because we don’t do a very good job of that. And throughout Christian history, we haven’t done a very good job of that. It’s that we need the one who can do it for us. We need a shepherd. It’s that we need the one who can do it for us. We need a shepherd. And that’s the problem. Jesus diagnoses the problem. Why does He have compassion on the people? Because they are sheep without a shepherd. Not that they are people who have too many physical maladies. Not that they’re just sinners in need of a Savior. It’s the whole thing. There’s no just there. It’s the full effect of sin all the way from the littlest physical issue to the biggest, darkest spot on our heart that keeps us away from God. All those things are things that we don’t know how to deal with. We certainly don’t know how to help other people deal with them. But we’re brought to the shepherd who can. We need someone to shepherd us.
Now, it’s true that over time, God has sent people to lead His people, to teach His people spiritually, and that those people are under shepherds, sent to go and shepherd people. And so, one of the implications, and we see this more directly in other parts of Matthew, but one of the implications here is that those who are commissioned to do that in this time, the Pharisees and the Sadducees, the scribes, all these careful students of God’s Word, they’re not doing a very good job of it. Because as Jesus looks at the people, He doesn’t see a people who aren’t getting the full effect of shepherding, who have inadequate shepherds, who have mostly good but sometimes failed shepherds. No, He sees a people without a shepherd. Because for all that those religious leaders are doing, they’re not actually shepherding.
As we see that conviction towards them, it’s a reminder of what we’re called to do. Because as we receive His shepherding, and we receive His comfort, what are we supposed to do? We’re supposed to be agents of that comfort too. And we’re not going to get it right. But the fact that the Pharisees didn’t get it right doesn’t mean we just give up. It means we look to the one who does get it right and say, Jesus, use me to do the things that you know need to be done. Help me to be a shepherd. Not the shepherd, but a shepherd. Working for you. Serving you.
And Jesus says, well, if you want to do that, follow how I do it. This is hard. This is really, really hard. Because we’re not all gifted to do, even in human terms, all the different things that need to be done. That’s why we work together. Why we’re a body of Christ and not a bunch of little bodies of Christ. We need to do this together. And we need to have Jesus constantly correcting us where we’re going to get out of tune. It’s not quite right.
One of the key components as we’re going to do this is to remember that in everything we do, especially in Acts of Mercy, there’s still a teaching component that’s necessary. We don’t want to be those who turn off the engine light and say, you don’t really… I know you have that little light flashing that says you’re a sheep without a shepherd, but here, let me just take care of your immediate need. Don’t worry about it. Sometimes we’re tempted to do that. We see that, for example, sometimes in medical missions. Wonderful thing, but go somewhere in the world, help a lot of people with medical issues, and yet forget to tell people about Jesus. I’m not saying all, or even most, but certainly many medical missions have done that over the years. What do you see as a result? You see people physically healed who still have the engine light, maybe not blinking, but the underlying thing that was supposed to trigger it is still just as bad as before. We need to make sure we hold it together.
It’s not really taking care of someone. It’s not really showing compassion to someone if we forget that combination. If we take care of someone’s physical need, but we forget the spiritual, but neither the other way around. James 2.16, perhaps the most famous passage on this. If one of you says to him, go, I wish you well, keep warm and well fed, but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it? I don’t know that we’re going to trust a mechanic who says, I know it keeps telling you you need your oil changed, but I fixed the big engine problem just to have it flash at you. I don’t really care. You’ll just remember 3,000 miles, you’ll be fine. No, you say, but can you still go ahead and clear? I know it wasn’t the serious thing, but can you still clear it? This is still distracting me. It blinks at me, and it distracts me as I’m driving, and now I’m trying to remember how many miles I need to go, and all these other things. How many miles do I need to go, and all these highfalutin fancy smart cars now are supposed to tell me that? I’m not supposed to have to worry about that? Can you just reset the thing?
A lot of times we can go the other direction. We go and we tell people, you know what, you really need a Savior, and we say, feel warm. Or are we actually putting a coat on someone? We need to do both. That’s what Jesus does over and over and over again, and he’s modeling that here. He doesn’t let the lesson part, the teaching part, be detached from the healing part, but he does both. He could have just preached to the blind men, for example. You’ll see someday. Sing Amazing Grace. It’ll be written someday. It’ll really fit you. So just sing about how you once were blind, and now you see, because you see spiritually, you already are seeing it better than a lot of people. Have a nice day. No, what did he do? Did he preach to them? He also healed them.
At some points in our history as an American church, we got this better than I’d say we often do in more recent times. If you look back at the 19th century, it’s the story of these two things being fused together throughout so much of our culture. You think about all the institutions in the 18th and 19th century that evangelical-minded Christians went and founded. The hospitals, the schools, the drives against different evils in society where they actually tried to change hearts and minds and saw these things are here and they’re bad, and we should fix them because God’s placed us here. But as they did that, they never quit preaching the gospel in it. The point was never just let’s fix this ill, or let’s have this hospital, or let’s have this school, but let’s have this school that helps people to learn. Let’s have this hospital that heals people, and let’s make sure that people are actually learning about Jesus as we do this.
A wise man observed to me years ago that sometime around the late 19th century, and you can see this pretty clearly, you have this split in Christianity, and you can look at it in different points, but what we typically talk of is conservative theology and liberal theology. You see that split, and each one took half of that, and by and large, the liberal theology went and held on to we need to have hospitals and schools, and we need to help the poor. We need to do all these things. These are really great things that Christians in general had agreed we need to do, but they said these are such great things, maybe we shouldn’t even preach about Jesus because it just gets in the way. If you look at so many of those institutions that were founded a century or two ago, they’re still doing great acts of mercy, but they’re not really merciful because they don’t tell anyone about the deep spiritual problem that they have. They might have it in the name. They might be a Christian organization, but the people go in and out and they don’t know anymore about Jesus from the start to the finish.
And on the other hand, a lot of times, those of us who have held on to the theology more and said no, we need to hold on to the Bible and what’s true in it and that the Bible is the single authoritative word of God and this is what really matters. Ironically, we forget that Jesus actually cared about these things too and in counterpoint, in reaction, sometimes, I’m not saying about us here at Little Hills because we do have a very compassionate group, but sometimes in our broader circle, it becomes the point that, well, we need to make sure we hold on to these spiritual things, so maybe we just won’t do any of the other stuff because it always distracts.
And Jesus says, follow me. I really want to bring it to a point that the liberal area is that liberal theology only sees the physical problems, but the conservative area is that it only sees the spiritual problems. And Jesus says, see my sheep’s problems. I’m a shepherd. I care when my sheep is scared because that sheep thought it hurt a wolf and there isn’t any there and I know that, but my sheep is scared and I need to comfort that sheep. And I care when that sheep is mortally wounded too and needs its shepherd by its side. Jesus cares about it all.
I think that’s why we often struggle with these passages, trying to figure out how do we hold that together and it’s why the church over the millennia has zigzagged back and forth and back and forth. Sometimes we’re very good at compassion in the physical sense and that’s often what we associate with the word compassion. Take care of your physical needs. We’re compassionate. And sometimes it says, well look, everyone’s doing all this physical care but no one’s actually preaching the gospel. We need to focus on the gospel. What we need to see is actually all of it’s about focusing on the gospel if we do it right. Because someday God’s kingdom is going to be fully manifest. We’re going to fully experience it. It’s not just that the kingdom is near and that through the Holy Spirit we experience the communion of the saints and it’s there, but someday we will be in the new heavens and new earth and be in Jesus’ presence and every physical ailment will be gone and every sin will be forgiven and they’ll just be the beauty of our God before us.
And so it only makes sense that those of us who believe in Jesus, who are ambassadors of Jesus, what do we do in this moment, in this time? We try to represent the fullness of what Jesus is doing. That he’s in the restoration business. That’s what he does. That he makes things right. And so what we seek to do is to make things right too. That Jesus isn’t just the shepherd for part of life or for some future problem in life, but Jesus is the shepherd for every single bit of life. May we be those as undershepherds, as those who are commissioned to go and to share his compassion in this world, that we represent him as the Lord of all of life.
Would you pray with me please? Lord, we do pray that you would help us to hold the tension. It’s hard, Lord. Even in our individual lives, we might get that we need to do both, but trying to hold it all together all the time, we can’t do it. We skew one way or the other. But Lord, would you help us to strengthen each other? Would you help us as the people of God to fill in the places where one of us might do one thing more and another might do the other? Would you help us to actually hold to your word and its truth? And as we do that, to see that your word calls us to care about the whole person, that we’re not just concerned with half of a person. You may have real physical beings with real physical problems that need healing, but also those who can find eternal restoration in you and desperately need that more than anything else. Would you help us to not let go of any part of that, but to watch as we read in your gospel about how our God cares about everything that burdens us, from the little things to the big things. And Lord, would you help us to be a people of that true compassion too? We pray in Jesus’ name.
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