The Surprising First Prayer Request of Jesus

CONSECRATE Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.  Jesus, I belong to you. I lift up my heart to you. I set my mind on you. I fix my eyes on you. I offer my body to you as a living sacrifice. Jesus, we belong to you.  Praying in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.  HEAR Matthew 9:35–38 NIV Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness. When he saw the crowds, he 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.” CONSIDER It was bound to happen—me calling an audible and changing the text of the day from the one listed in the journal to a different one. It doesn't matter, though, because we are reading the whole chapter every day, right? By the way—for those of you keeping count, there are six alarm clocks in chapter nine (a.k.a. untranslated "beholds"). Sign my petition here to get "behold" back in the Bible. Ready to Gospel?  Jesus is always, ever, and only doing three things. These closing lines of Matthew 9 form a kind of summary or a scorecard of them so far. See if you can spot them: Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness. 1. Preaching. 2. Teaching. 3. Healing.  Yes, he's crashing the occasional wedding and turning up at tax collector parties, doing some fishing guide services on the side, and otherwise garden variety life stuff, but in the midst of all that, he's doing three things which turn out to be one thing.  1. Jesus preaches. He's got one message. The kingdom of God is right here and right now. Wake up! Come on! Here's the vision. Light is displacing darkness. Life is defeating death. New creation is breaking through the chaos. His message, which comes with the power of his authority, heals broken, cynical, jaded, hardened, unbelieving, stoicized hearts by restoring hope, vision, and the possibilities of impossible things. He invites people to choose to belong to him, which is to say, into a fresh consecration of their lives into the new thing God is doing in the world.  2. Jesus teaches. He's got many classes and lessons, yet one overarching curriculum: the kingdom of heaven coming on earth—how it's already here in seed form and coming fully later in harvest. Remember the priority? Seek first the kingdom. There is no second. His teaching is not information but revelation, and it invites the response of one's mind. In fact, it leads to the healing and renewal of the mind. It seems upside down at first until you start walking in it, and it turns all of life right side up. Far from self-improvement, this is transformation, which is to say, transcendent formation. It moves one from the old way of "believe and behave" to the new way of "behold and become."  3. Jesus heals. Everywhere and all the time. Blind see. Deaf hear. Lame walk. Lepers cleansed. Dead raised. Poor restored. He heals the sick. Feeds the hungry. Eats with sinners. He heals hearts, homes, communities, cities, even nations. It's always supernatural and sometimes miraculous, but always healing. Transformation leads to demonstration.  Preaching. Teaching. Healing. Yes, these seem like three things, but they are really only one thing. And here it is: When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.  Interesting Greek word here for "compassion." It's splangkh-NEE-zom-ahee. Don't even try it. It means something like one's heart coming out of their body and going to another person. This is the meaning of mercy—the heart of God for human beings. Jesus is the mercy of God.  His chief ambition is not to make us compassionate but to take it a step further. His goal is to put his own heart for people into us. He knows the only way the mercy of God moves is one person at a time—from one heart to another. It brings us to the surprising first prayer request of Jesus.  "Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.” It's pretty interesting to me that Jesus doesn't call us to pray for the sheep. He calls us to pray for the workers.  PRAY Jesus, it's interesting how you don't ask us here to pray for the harassed and helpless sheep but to pray for the workers. Your concern is that the workers are few. Could it be this is why the sheep are harassed and helpless, because the workers are few? I am so prone to simply ask you to help your sheep. Meanwhile, you command me to feed them. Teach me to pray for workers to be sent while you are training me to become one of them. For your glory, others' gain, and our good. Amen.