1.31.09
Meeting Their Needs
Down the
long, dusty road on their way from
Because of their long
journey, they were all hot and sweaty. The dust clung to them. They were weary,
but Jesus was at the height of His popularity and the great crowd of people
pressed close to Him. They were jabbering endlessly. Asking questions. Seeking
favours. They could be heard a mile away.
“Hey, what’s all the
noise?” blind Bartimaeus asked his friend as they sat by the highway begging.
“I don’t know,” answered
his friend with a puzzled tone in his voice.
“Let’s ask somebody
else,” they agreed.
“It’s Jesus,” a passer-by
informed them.
“You mean Jesus of
Nazareth, the fellow they claim can heal the sick and the blind?” Bartimaeus
excitedly asked.
“That’s the One,” came
the reply, “and I'm not going to miss seeing Him for anything. Good-bye.”
The crowd came closer and
closer. Excitement filled the air. The noise became intense.
“I can’t believe it,”
shouted Bartimaeus to his friend. “This just has to be my lucky day. I’ve got
to get to Jesus. I know He can heal me.”
“Hey, Bart, there He is,”
cried Bartimaeus’s friend, “but how will you ever get His attention?”
Dignity was dismissed.
“This is it,” said Bartimaeus. “I may never see Jesus again. I want to be
healed.”
So, seeking to drown out
the noise of the crowd. Bartimaeus yelled at the top of his voice, “Jesus, have
mercy on me! O Lord, son of David, have mercy on me!”
“Cool it, man! Calm
down!” retorted some of the crowd to Bartimaeus. “You’re making too much noise.
There are so many others here you don’t stand a chance of getting to Jesus, so
just relax and keep quiet!”
But Bartimaeus was all
the more determined to get to Jesus. He couldn’t see, but he could yell. He
cried out all the louder. Hear his voice rise above the din of the crowd. It
rang out like a great clarion call. “Jesus, O Lord, Son of David, have mercy on
me! Jesus, O Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me!”
And Jesus stood still.
And the crowds stood
still.
And a great calm settled
down over them all.
The winds and the waves
couldn’t stop the Saviour. Neither could angry mobs. Crowds of people couldn’t
stop Him either. But a lone, blind beggar did.
And Jesus with His great
heart of compassion asked for Bartimaeus to be brought over to Him. “What do
you want me to do for you?” Jesus asked.
“Lord,” Bartimaeus
nervously replied, “please give me my sight.”
And Jesus did. “Go your
way,” He said, “Your faith has made you whole.”
Immediately Bartimaeus
could see and he followed Jesus along the way (Mark 10:46-52).
With Christ, a person’s
salvation usually came as a result of His having first met that person’s felt
need.
If Jesus had anything
like a standard approach it was more likely to be a question such as the
following: “What do you want me to do for you?” or “Do you want to be made
whole?” or “What is your deepest need?”
Christ's
method alone will give true success in reaching the people. The Saviour mingled
with men as one who desired their good. He showed His sympathy for them,
ministered to their needs, and won their confidence. Then He bade them,
"Follow Me." Ministry of Healing, 143
“You
never know till you try to reach them how accessible men are; but you must
approach each man by the right door.”
– Henry Ward Beecher
If we are
friends to people, and take time to listen, we will discover the right
door. We will learn what is important to
them, what their need is.
People
can tell when we desire their good. They
can feel our sympathy and our genuine caring.
We may be
thinking, “This person needs to be saved.
This person needs salvation in a big way.” That may be true, but you must first meet
them on a level that is meaningful to them.
The Woman at the Well
(John 4:1-30)
Jesus didn’t use a canned
approach to reach this woman. He didn’t
ask her if she died tonight did she know where she would spend eternity. Jesus cared enough to take in her situation.
Her felt need was
emotional. She needed understanding and acceptance. She was emotionally damaged, but she had a
brave exterior.
Psychologists say that
every life a person touches he either builds a bridge to that person or a wall
between them. And Jesus, being a great bridge builder, bridged the great social
gap between them by simply asking, “Please give me a drink.”
Of course
what follows is a conversation of give and take, in which Jesus tells her about
her true personal life and He identifies her deep pain and despair. Now, we would simply listen to this woman,
and we would learn what her situation was.
The Holy Spirit would also give us insight about her as we listened.
But the
same thing would result. The woman’s
felt need of acceptance and understanding would be met, and she would be more
willing to listen to our words of faith.
When we
are talking with the people in our lives, we must allow them to share their
needs with us. We must acknowledge those
needs, clarify them, and show a genuine interest in helping.
Zacchaeus (Luke 19:1-10)
Then
there was Zacchaeus, the little fellow who had to climb a tree in order to see
Jesus when He passed by. In spite of the great crowd of people, Jesus saw him
in his tree and came over to talk to him.
I wonder just how
Zacchaeus felt with Jesus looking up at him. He was a tax gatherer and, as
such, was despised by the people. In a sense he was an upper-class social
outcast. You can imagine some of the thoughts and feelings racing through his
mind: “I wonder what Jesus is going to say to me? I'm scared to death. Will he
condemn me too?”
But his fears were
quickly allayed. Sensing Zacchaeus’s deep social need and a need for a friend,
Jesus quietly said. “Come down, my friend, I would like to go home with
you for dinner tonight.”
When Jesus met his felt
need, Zacchaeus, of his own initiative, confessed his sin and promised to make
restitution to all he had cheated.
Jesus first met his need,
then it was very natural for the man to respond to the Holy Spirit’s work in
his life. This is something that we need
to remember. When we are kind to people,
and we actually care about them, and we seek to meet their needs as best we
can, it creates an openness and a trust and a desire to know God.
The Man at Bethesda
In
One of those many people
lying on his bed beside the pool was a man who had been crippled for
thirty-eight years! One day Jesus came to him and said, “Would you like to be
made whole?”
The impotent man replied
pathetically, “But, sir, I don’t have anybody to put me in the pool when
the waters are visited. And while I am struggling to get there, somebody
else always beats me.”
Then Jesus said to him,
“Rise, take up your bed, and walk.”
And the man did. Jesus
had healed him – and left without even telling the man who He was or why He
healed him.
It was at a later point
of time that Jesus spoke to this man about spiritual matters
(John 5:1-15). The man’s need was obviously physical and Jesus met him at
that point of need first.
Rebecca Pippert explains
how Jesus “had an extraordinary ability to see beneath the myriad of layers of
people and know what they longed for, or really believed, but were afraid of
revealing. That is why His answers so frequently did not correspond to the
questions He was asked. He sensed their unspoken need or question and responded
to that instead. Jesus could have healed lepers in countless ways. To the leper
in Mark 1:40-45 He could have shouted, ‘Be healed ... but don’t get too
close. I just hate the sight of lepers.’ He didn’t. Jesus reached over and
touched him. Jesus’ touch was not necessary for his physical healing. It was
critical for his emotional healing.
“Can you imagine what it
meant to that man to be touched? A leper was an outcast, quite accustomed to
walking down a street and seeing people scatter, shrieking at him, ‘Unclean –
unclean!’ Jesus knew that this man not only had a diseased body but an equally
diseased self-concept. He needed to be touched to be fully cured. And so Jesus
responded as He always did, with total healing for the whole person.”
You really can’t go wrong
if you are a good friend to someone. A
good friend knows how to listen, and a good friend will try to understand the
needs that the person is expressing.
The Woman Caught in
Adultery (John 8:1-11)
Perhaps
one of the most beautiful examples of communicating Christ’s love in the entire
New Testament is where Christ ministered to the woman who was caught in the act
of adultery.
This whole thing was
designed as a trap for Jesus. He is who
they really wanted to kill. They used
the woman to get at Jesus. They saw it
as a no-win situation for Jesus. They
could condemn Him for having no mercy, or for breaking God’s law.
Not only was this woman
being used, but terribly abused. Most
likely her current abuser was one of the religious bigots in the audience with
a stone in his hand.
So there they stood
around Jesus and the guilty woman. They were like a pack of hungry dogs just
waiting for the signal to pounce on Jesus and devour Him.
What did they care about
the woman? Absolutely nothing. They were using her as a pawn in their game.
“Now, Master,” they
sarcastically addressed Jesus. “this woman was caught committing adultery the
very act. God’s law demands that such a woman be stoned to death. How do you
feel about that? What’s your judgment?”
“Let the man who has
never sinned cast the first stone.”
Their own accusations had
boomeranged on themselves. They weren’t prepared for that answer. The silence
was deafening. And now like frightened puppy dogs, they tucked their
“religious” tails between their legs and got out of there as quickly as they
could.
Jesus was left alone with
the woman. He knew she'd been used. He understood her deepest need and gently
asked her, “What happened to your accusers? Where did they go? Isn’t there
anyone left to condemn you?”
“No, Lord,” she replied,
“they’ve all gone.”
Then Jesus made a simple
but profound statement: “I don’t condemn you either. Go, and don’t commit this
sin anymore.”
The crucial issue to see
and understand in this situation was not that Jesus won, nor was it that the
woman was set free. The profound dynamic in communicating His message in this
story was this: Before Jesus told this woman to go and sin no more He first met
the basic need in her life, the lack of which was causing her to sin.
In meeting her needs,
Jesus could realistically say to her, “Go and don’t commit this sin anymore.”
We tend
to see sin as only the external act. But this external act is merely the tip of
the iceberg. Sin is anything that falls short of the perfection God planned for
us. It includes all of our damaged emotions, our wounded personality, our mixed
motives, our unresolved inner conflicts, and our supercharged repressed
negative emotions. These are the pains that keep us in bondage to ourselves and
cause us to act out in sinful ways. These are the barriers that alienate us
from God, from others, and from ourselves so that we no longer know who or what
we fully are. Sin is the whole iceberg, not merely the external tip.
Because of this, when
Jesus ministered to the woman caught in adultery, He dealt with her whole
person not just her sinful act. As already noted, before He took away her act
of sin He first met the basic need in her life, the lack of which was driving
her to commit sins. Jesus loved and accepted her. When He did this,
I believe, for the very first time in this woman’s life she was loved and
accepted by a man for whom she was rather than for what she had to offer. Jesus
knew her sin and her weaknesses. He understood her fully and loved and accepted
her unconditionally. In so doing He confirmed her personhood and her womanhood.
In other words, the needs that her own father did not or could not meet, Jesus
met. In meeting these father needs Jesus could then realistically say to her,
“Go and don’t commit this sin anymore.”
Or take the person with a
drinking problem, a lying problem, a stealing problem, a drug problem, a gossip
problem, or any other kind of sin problem. Behind the external act of sin lies
a deeper fault, problem, or sin. The external act of sin is merely the symptom
of the deeper sin. And when a person is hiding a deeper sin or fault, he tends
to commit – and confess – a lesser sin all the more vigorously.
We must seek to
understand and meet the basic needs in peoples’ life, the lack of which are
causing them to commit sins.
We must to seek to
understand them, to learn why they do what they do, and then attempt to meet
their deepest needs – the lack of which are causing them to commit acts of sin.
This takes true commitment to Christ and commitment to people and their growth.
We are sinners. We approach all people as sinners who have
been able to have our needs met in Christ.
We are no better than anyone else.
Instead of being turned off by people’s sins, we should see those sins
as symptoms of a greater problem, a greater need. We must care enough and love enough to deal
with the deeper causes. That’s what
Jesus did.
Nicodemus and the
Thief on the Cross
Jesus
always met each individual at his or her point of felt need – regardless of
what that need was. In fact, there were
only two people mentioned in the entire Gospels whom Jesus met directly at a
point of spiritual need. These were Nicodemus and one of the thieves who was
crucified with Him. The thief on the cross, about to die, understandably
confessed his sinfulness to Christ and asked for mercy. That was indeed his
felt need.
Nicodemus’s felt need was
also spiritual. Being a religious ruler of the Jews he was puzzled about Jesus
and His relationship to God. He was searching for spiritual answers.
Knowing Nicodemus’s felt
need, Jesus didn’t ask him if he wanted to be made whole. He knew that
Nicodemus was concerned about his own relationship to God and the matter of
eternal life. So ignoring Nicodemus’s initial statements, Christ came directly
to the point and simply stated, “Nicodemus, unless a man is born again, he will
not even see the
Whether a person’s need
was physical, social, emotional, or spiritual, Jesus always met each individual
where he was in terms of his or her spiritual understanding and always started
at their point of felt need.
Love, understanding,
acceptance, and forgiveness. That’s the message of Christ. It’s the greatest
healing power in the world. It’s the message that our broken world so
desperately needs. And that’s the message every one of us can share in our
daily interactions with people.
Being a Christian and
being an effective witness for Christ is to experience God’s love, acceptance,
and forgiveness, and to communicate this to every life we touch.
“Do this,” I can almost
hear Christ saying, “and you will be one of my witnesses indeed.”