Well, good morning, everyone. Nice to be with you.
I think everybody’s pretty well aware that this morning, I’m going to be the first of two guest speakers. So, upon my finishing up here, our brother Lane will have a time with you also.
So it really is indeed a pleasure and a privilege to be able to stand here and just share what’s upon my heart, you know, no more complicated than that. It’s what I believe the Lord has given me, and, you know, just not for me, but it’s for all of us. You know, the Lord speaks to us all.
So anyway, with that, we’ll roll up our sleeves and get started here. Time is of the essence—not much of it.
Last week, if everybody was here, or y’all remember, Kenny got up here. And you remember what he said? He said there were two words that brought him up here. Remember those words?
Fully persuaded.
And that was kind of the seed, the nucleus, of his ministry. But I think it’s just sort of a coincidence this morning that what brings me up here is also only two words. So, how do you like that?
Kenny said, “Fully persuaded,” and my two words are found in John 11:35, and I quote:
Jesus wept.
You’re probably thinking, “Bobby, what could you possibly say about ‘Jesus wept’?” Well, that’s the two words that had popped into my mind. I believe that’s the shortest verse in the Bible too. Am I right?
But anyway, a while back, just seemingly out of the blue, those two words, “Jesus wept,” popped into my head. It just caught me off guard. I don’t know why.
And I just asked, “Lord, what are You trying to tell me? Is this from You? Is there something that I’m missing here? Is there something I need to say? Why these two words? Why ‘Jesus wept’?”
And I simply didn’t know. It just came into my mind, and I kept thinking about it over and over. As the week passed, it just kind of faded behind me there, and I didn’t do anything with it. But I wondered, you know, why these two words? Why “Jesus wept”?
You ever had such an experience like that, where a verse just pops into your mind? You know the Lord’s trying to tell you something, but it just doesn’t seem to develop at the time. And that’s just kind of how I left it.
But anyway, a few weeks ago, Jerry and I were talking, and he happened to mention to me and ask me if I was interested in sharing a ministry time with another brother. And I told him, I said, “Well, Jerry, I don’t know that I’ve really got anything that I can develop long enough to turn into ministry at this time.”
But I said that I would think about it, and he just asked me to pray about it. So I said, “Well, that’s fair and reasonable. I’ll bring it before the Lord, and I’ll see.”
But I did tell him this. I said, “I do have a little thought way back in my mind here that I was going to bring up before the brothers at our next work day,” which was about a week later, “and just present it to them and to the other brothers as we prayed that Saturday morning. Maybe,” I thought, “it could be possibly useful for an opening, if it would be the Lord’s way to begin our time of worship.”
So I told him that, and he said, “Well, think about it and then get back with me.” So I said, “That’s fine. I’ll do that.”
Well, as it turned out, I was under the weather that following week. I had the flu, so I didn’t come anywhere near anybody; I stayed home. So anyway, our work day came and went, and I never really got a chance to present my thought to anybody.
However, this idea of “Jesus wept” was still upon my heart. It just wouldn’t go away, just kind of like a nagging thought. And I thought, “Goodness, you know.”
By and by, I asked the Lord, I said, “Is this something that You’ve got upon Your heart?” And I just prayed about it. It’s kind of like a little tomato plant: this thought began to grow from a six-inch tomato plant that you plant in the first week of May until it kind of developed into a five-foot plant that you would pick hand over hand of tomatoes from, say, the first week of August.
So anyway, that’s what the Lord was impressing upon me, namely this. Now, you can listen to what I’m going to say, if you haven’t been listening. This is the important part here.
I think what the Lord was trying to tell me in this, “Jesus wept,” was that our Lord Jesus was indeed a man of compassion.
Now, I told Jack a few minutes ago, if you got to title this thing this morning, that’s exactly what it’s going to be:
So now, anyway, I want to just kind of tuck away this little verse, “Jesus wept.” I’m going to just kind of set it right here in a safe place for a while, and we’re going to come back and revisit that later.
And I think by then, hopefully at the conclusion of what I share, that verse will become very precious to all of y’all, as it has to me. So we’re going to leave it sitting right here for a little while, and then we’re going to come back to it.
And I’m actually going to close with a testimony to try to help you understand why this verse did, in fact, overwhelm me.
Now, as we get started, let’s see, we don’t have anybody to put a verse up there, do we? That’s okay.
I did want to read one verse as kind of the foundation of what I want to speak about this morning, and that is Jesus being a man of compassion. Isaiah 53:3-4 says it well.
He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and familiar with suffering.
Surely He took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows.
Now, this is the key verse:
Surely He took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows.
To me, those few words define compassion. They define our Lord Jesus and His character. That is compassion. He was a man of sorrow. He did take up our infirmities. He knew we were suffering sinful man, and we needed a Savior.
That’s our Lord Jesus: a man of sorrows.
Now, as we get started, have you ever wondered—and this is just me editorializing and daydreaming—have you ever wondered, in eternity past, what the conversation between God and His Son may have entailed regarding the fall of man?
Certainly, that event was no surprise to God. God’s not surprised by anything. As tragic as it was, it wasn’t a surprise. Surprising? No. Grievous? Absolutely, yes. Absolutely a grievous time.
And I suppose if there ever could have been a sad day in heaven, if it were even possible, I believe that probably would have been the day of the fall of man—the saddest day. When Adam and Eve partook of that forbidden fruit, they were cast out of the garden, and paradise was lost.
And rather than being the glorious creation of God, they became sinful human beings. A sad day indeed.
But then again, I can imagine God telling Jesus that, as calamitous as things were, God was not willing to give up man. Now, he had messed up. I mean, it was a serious, serious situation. He had lost it all. He chose to walk away from what God had given him. He chose to walk away from that.
But God was not willing to give up on mankind and let the enemy prevail in this. He had invested much into His creation. And on the sixth day, He created the crown jewel of all: man.
And there’s no doubt that God and His Son had a plan to restore mankind to themselves, but it would come at a significant cost, a very, very significant cost, to recover what had been lost.
There would have to be the shedding of innocent blood for the forgiveness of sin, the sacrificing of a Paschal lamb, as it were. And such a Lamb of God would need to lay His life down to redeem that which had been lost.
I have no doubt that at this point, Jesus responded eagerly to the Father, “I will be that Lamb of God.”
Now, why would Jesus do that? Why would He do that?
Remember that in order to do that, our Lord Jesus would have to be willing to break the fellowship that He had had with the Father from all eternity. There had never been a separation between the Father and the Son. This was a serious thing that was before our Lord Jesus.
He would have to become a sinful man and dwell upon this earth, and then lay His life down upon the cross. He would have to become sin for us.
Was man really worth that cost? You got to think about that. I’m sure they thought about it. But praise God, the answer was yes.
Now, why would the answer have been yes? And I think it lies in the character and in the heart of our Lord Jesus. It’s because He was a man full of compassion. We’ve already seen that in Isaiah, that He was a man of sorrows. He knew our standing, knew our condition. He knew the hopelessness that we were in. And only He, only He alone, could bring us back to the Father.
In fact, our Father desires that no one perish, that no one be lost. That’s the heart of God for us. That’s His very heart.
And then, when you think about it, our Lord Jesus could not have responded in any other way. It just wasn’t in Him to say, “Father, I just don’t think I can do it. It’s just too much. I can’t take that separation from You. It’s not worth it. Let’s do something else.”
He didn’t say that. He was willing.
Now, I’ve just kind of laid down the foundation of where I want to go from here next. Yeah, time is going quickly, but I did want to, as we go into the New Testament here, look at some of the encounters that our Lord Jesus had with those throughout the land where He was.
You know, He moved about the villages. He moved about the towns and the rural areas, and throngs and throngs of people were coming to Him. You know, His reputation had been spreading throughout the land.
And so our Lord Jesus, as He moved about—and we look at some of these different encounters—I’m going to call them encounters with ordinary people just like us. He never turned anybody away.
They came from far and wide. You know, He would run into them. They had all kinds of situations, every manner of disease, demon-possessed—you name it. Every condition of man He encountered, but yet He never turned them away.
They were out in the villages and places that He went. They were all there. They had a heart to come to Him.
Now, I’m not going to go into depth on any of these. Mainly, what I did was look through the Gospel of Matthew, and I’m going to give you some of the verses and tell you what the stories are briefly.
But as I do this, there’s only one thing I want us to do with these. I want you to follow the thread of compassion. There’s a common denominator in all of these stories.
And I can just give you the verses, and in your leisure, if you want to go down through, sit down, and look at the Gospel of Matthew, they’re pretty much in order. But read each account there. Read each encounter, and as you do that, look at the compassion of our Lord Jesus.
He never turned anybody away, no matter what the sin, no matter what the condition. He was always there to help them in any way He could. What a heart of compassion.
So I’m just going to run through a couple of these, and if you want to write down the verse, you can do that and go back and read the story and just kind of meditate upon it in your leisure time.
The first one I’m going to mention is found in Matthew 4:23-24, and this is the story where Jesus heals the sick.
He healed those suffering severe pain, the demon-possessed, the epileptics, and the paralytics. Now why? Because He had compassion on them, that they may believe that He truly was the Son of God, even their Savior.
Matthew 8:1-3 is the story of the man with leprosy.
A man with leprosy came and knelt down before Him and said, “Lord, if You are willing, You can make me clean.”
And Jesus reached out His hand and touched the man, saying, “I am willing; be clean.”
Notice the compassion of our Lord. He didn’t question why they were in the condition they were in. Sometimes it was for sin. They did stupid things, foolish things, sinful things. It was of their own making.
Sound familiar, doesn’t it? We can all do that. We all have the capacity to do that. But the Lord Jesus didn’t condemn them because of the condition in which He found the man.
I’ll give you another example: Matthew 8:5-7. This is the faith of the centurion.
And in this story, a centurion came to Jesus asking for help: “Lord, my servant lies at home paralyzed and in terrible suffering.” And the Lord said, “I will go and heal him,” and declared it even further:
I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith.
You know, the Lord was always looking for faith. That is the rare thing that would seem to be out there. How seldom did He find faith, even among His own people, even among the Jews. He probably found more among the Gentiles, to be honest with you.
But He always had an eye looking for faith in all of these stories. The compassion was there. He was looking for that response of faith, that we would believe in Him. That’s all He ever asked: “Believe in Me. Believe that I am the Son of God, that I’ve come to this earth to be your Savior, to redeem you back to Myself.” That’s what He wanted. It’s no more complicated than that.
Now, if you continue looking through Matthew, you can find pretty much in chronological order all of these encounters. I’m not going to go over all of these anymore, but for the sake of time, I’m just going to encourage you to look through Matthew.
They are pretty much in order, and just read them, but do it with an eye for the compassion that you see in the Lord. That’s what I want you to see. It’s always there. It’s always that common thread that goes through all of these stories. So I’m not going to go through and read all of these for the sake of time.
Actually, I probably had way too many.
I am going to mention one here that I think is a pretty serious one here. This is found in John 8:3-11: the woman caught in adultery.
We know the teachers of the law were once again trying to entrap Jesus. They always were. They didn’t want Him around. They had no use for Him.
Knowing full well that the law required the woman be stoned to death, having been caught in adultery, they were ever so certain Jesus could not get out of this one. They thought they had Him this time. They thought they had Him on the hook.
But our Lord Jesus declared this:
If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to cast a stone at her.
And He replied to the woman, “Where are your accusers?” She replied, “No one, sir.” Then Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go now and leave your life of sin.”
And our Lord did indeed address her sinful situation, but He did so with a heart of compassion. He didn’t condemn her. And the smart money says she repented because of the gentleness of the Lord. I believe she did.
Now, the last example I’m going to mention here is the death of Lazarus. That’s actually found in John 11:1-44. It’s a pretty long passage, so you’ve got to read the whole story to get the flavor of it.
But in this one, I think we really see the compassion and humanity of Jesus exhibited here. And the reason is, the Lord Jesus was close friends with Lazarus and Martha and Mary. You know that Lazarus was Mary’s brother.
And the Lord Jesus was away at the time of this; He wasn’t with them. And we know that Lazarus did, in fact, die before the Lord came to him. Of course, Mary was distraught beyond belief and just thought it was all over because the Lord didn’t prevent his passing away.
But anyway, the Lord did come eventually, and He ministered to the family. And this is where that little verse that I set on the table here a while ago comes in.
Now, John 11:35 says:
Jesus wept.
He was so compassionate, so overwhelmed and overcome by the grief of this family, that even our Lord, in His humanity, wept. He couldn’t refrain from it.
So you just see the heart of our Lord, how compassionate He was. And of course, we know He raised Lazarus. He had the power to do so.
But anyway, I did want to just run through those examples real quickly. Go back and look at Matthew. You’ll see all of them pretty much have the same flavor there, where you see the Lord’s compassion.
Now, I wanted to finish here with a testimony of why I believe those two words, “Jesus wept,” came over me.
One evening, my wife and I were just sitting at home eating supper, and when we do that, we kind of watch the evening news and the weather. And when this story came on, I noticed I was listening to it, and it involved a young woman. She looked to be about, I’d say, eighteen or twenty years old.
And she had stolen credit cards from her grandmother and was going to various places—Kohl’s and who knows where—to spend on those credit cards. She had run those credit cards up, and of course, she was quickly apprehended. It didn’t take them long to figure out what was going on. She got arrested.
And she was on TV, and she would soon be standing before a judge in court. I mean, you could just see where this was going, at this terrible situation.
But next appearing on the screen was what really tore me up. There was a picture of this young lady, and I’m not kidding, it just wrenched my heart in half.
I had never seen a sadder, more pathetic countenance on a person’s face as it was for this woman that was about to be convicted of her crime. It just broke me in two.
And even Lynn was looking at it, and she said, “I wish I could just hug this young lady and comfort her.” Of course, there was nothing we could do but pray for her, which we did, and I still do, as a matter of fact. That picture still haunts me.
Now, you would think the normal response to something like that might be, “Well, good thing she got caught. She deserves whatever punishment that’s coming to her. Go ahead and throw her in jail. Let her sit there a while and think about what she’s done. Let it ruin her life.”
You know, the normal reaction of the normal world is, “Let’s get revenge. Throw the book at her. Make her pay for this crime. She deserved it, after all.”
Well, she probably did. But that wasn’t my thought. No, that thought never crossed my mind. Not at all.
Instead, I was broken down to tears for her, and I wished I could do something to help, but I couldn’t, except pray for her.
And in the midst of that, as I was watching that, you know what happened? I was overwhelmed with that thought: “Jesus wept.” It just came on me like Niagara Falls fell on top of my head. And I understood why.
Just as I wept for that young girl, our Lord Jesus wept for me too. And He wept for all of us.
I was just overwhelmed by this thought: had it not been for the compassion of Jesus, His weeping over our lost condition, where would we be?
Where would we be if He hadn’t wept over us and poured out Himself upon that cross?
Let’s thank God. The compassionate heart of Jesus led Him to the cross to redeem us, the guilty ones.
We’re the guilty ones, just like that young lady on TV. We’re no better than her.
Yes, our Lord Jesus wept for us. Now, that’s compassion. That is the heart of our Lord.
I don’t know what else to say. I’m just thankful that that little verse, “Jesus wept,” popped into my head a while back. Now I understand, and I appreciate what the Lord showed me.
It was a hard lesson, a hard lesson to see that TV screen and that young woman suffering like that. But that could have been us.
Thank God that Jesus wept for us too. Let’s pray.
Our heavenly Father, I just thank You for Jesus, for sending Him to redeem us back to Yourself. Lord, but for His compassionate heart, where would we be?
Lord, where would we be if He had not been willing to come to earth, to suffer all He did upon that cross, that we may have our fellowship restored with the Father and the Son?
Lord, I do pray that the limitations of this speaker this morning, or the limitations of our hearing, don’t cause us to miss anything that’s been upon Your heart. Lord, we want to hear from You.
And Lord, I do pray that we will have a greater love for You and just a greater compassion ourselves, as You’ve had compassion upon us.
Lord, how we thank You for this time this morning. And we’re praying in Jesus’ name. Amen.