A wider burden

While I pray much for family and friends, God keeps laying on my heart to pray for many more. He has led me to print prayer request calendars from the Internet for Christian organizations that are ministering to children and to those being persecuted around the world. As He enlarges my perspective, I’m more deeply aware and affected by world news. Those hurricanes and the way they have affected millions is on my prayer list. So is Las Vegas. So are the many countries suffering from disastrous weather, wars, and various traumatic events.

When I think of Christians who are dying for their faith, I’ve mixed emotions. On one hand, their pain becomes my pain, but on the other hand, could it me that this is God’s way of taking them home! They are with Jesus; how can I grieve? They are forever safe and forever joyful; it is those left behind who need the comfort and grace of God.

I’ve known Christians who lost loved ones. For the most part, the sadness was admitted as “I feel sorry for me.” The followers of Jesus Christ know that the ones they miss so much are in a far better place. They are certain of this because of the promises of God. He says:

“I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life.” (1 John 5:13)

Faith is a sort of ‘knowing’ that cannot be shaken. It is a gift from God, a certainty that drives away all uncertainty about what happens when I die, what happens when others who love Jesus go from this world. It is an unshakable knowledge that they are with Jesus.

For that reason, the gospel becomes our most important comfort. It is a message for everyone; God makes no distinction:

“. . . for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins.” (Romans 3:22–25)

Even though sin must be punished (and all of us are sinners), God put the penalty for sin on Jesus Christ. This removed the threat of judgment . . .

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.” (John 3:16–18)

The gospel also removes the fear of death, making it a portal to everlasting life, a life that believers already have because this life is in Christ and Christ is in us.

Because of this, I know that anyone who believes but is slain randomly or because of their faith, is safe with Jesus. This is a great comfort for the great pain felt because of the mess that our world is in and because of the suffering of so many people. I pray for their situation, for God’s grace to take care of their needs. Most of all, I pray that He will open their hearts to the good news — that they will know eternal life is as close as two words — “Yes, Jesus.”

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Lord, my heart hurts when I write this, and as I pray for so many suffering people. Yet You know far more about their situations than I do. I believe that the grief You feel is projected into Your followers because so many are involved in caring for the needs around them. My role right now seems to be prayer, but I will not put the word “only” alongside it because prayer is far from the least I can do. I know that because You gave me the burdens of my heart, You are also listening and granting the answers to those pleas.