Welcome to Tuesday! My name is Alan and it is a great pleasure to be sharing these podcasts with you this week. If God is using the podcasts to speak into your life or situation, if they are at all helpful, don’t keep them to yourself. Spread the word, post on social media or make a poster and hang it over the photocopier at work. God’s word is the most precious thing we have to share.

REFLECTION:

Yesterday we asked the question, Do we need – do we really need – a saviour, or are we still trying to kid ourselves that we are ok? In today’s passage – Matthew 9:18-38 – we see some examples of people who are in desperate need of Jesus: a man whose daughter is dead, a woman who has been bleeding for 12 years, two blind men and a demon possessed man who cannot speak. Hear each story at the end of the podcast. Today I am going to focus on Jesus’ heart response to the desperate crowds that press in around him: ch9. v36-38.

When he saw the crowds, he – Jesus – had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.”

I was praying for a friend today whose young child is ill at home. He’s had hospital trips and medication and thankfully this little one is beginning to turn a corner and will get better. Hearing him talk about his baby boy, and describe the last week or so of the illness, it was so obvious the care, the compassion, the love that he had for his boy. My heart went out to him… let’s pray, sure… what can I do?

We live in an age of increasing compassion fatigue. We watch comic relief and laugh along at the sketches, the songs, the dance routines. We are entertained. But then there’s the face of the starving kid in Africa, or the report from the youth project in inner city Birmingham and it provokes a response: “anyone want another cup of tea?”

Maybe we pick up the phone and make a donation but our £10 seems so tiny and insignificant compared to the overwhelming need and brokenness displayed on our TV screens. Why bother?

Or we listen to local radio or pick up the local paper and we see stabbings or large numbers of police called to a school in our city and it’s easy to think ‘what can I do?’ or ‘what I have to offer is so tiny and insignificant compared to the enormous and complex problems of the world.’

There comes a point when our hearts can grow cold. When we turn off, tune out and just stop listening. Where – as the Bible puts it – our hearts become hard. Have you reached that point yet?

Jesus looked out on the multitudes… the desperate, the needy, the hurting, the sick… he looked out on the world that he had created and it was so obvious the care, the compassion, the love that he had for the world. He was deeply moved…

What is our response? Let’s pray about that or… what can I do?

Today as we walk to work, as we ride the bus, as we sit in lessons or lectures, as we take our little ones to the toddler group (or the children’s hospital) we get to look out at the same multitudes as Jesus, the same desperate faces, the needy, the hurting, the sick… Will our hearts be moved? Do we recognise that Jesus is the answer to each and every life, each and every situation that we encounter?

I once took a group of people to spend some time with a friend who happened to be a gifted evangelist. I wanted him to encourage and train this group… to get a bit of what he had got. What was the evangelist’s first lesson to the group?

“Spend one hour walking around. Every person you see, remind yourself that God loves them, that he died for them, that they are so incredibly precious to him.”

Off we went… off I went thinking to myself, “really, is that it!? That’s not going to change the world or see anyone c...