We are going to be concluding our time in Matthew chapter 9 this week as the gospel writer begins to transition from the accounts of Jesus’ miracles and into His discipleship ministry. Jesus is going to begin focusing on His disciples, the 12 who we will read about next week in chapter 10:1-4, the men who will become His apostles. His ministry up to this point has been focused on the crowds, on preaching to the multitudes, on performing miracles. The word about Jesus is spreading throughout the land and our Lord recognizes that He is going to need some help. Let us begin this warning by reading our passage, Matthew 9:35-38.
“Jesus was going through all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every kind of disease and every kind of sickness. Seeing the people, He felt compassion for them, because they were distressed and dispirited like sheep without a shepherd. Then He said to His disciples, ‘the harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Therefore beseech the Lord of the harvest to send out workers into His harvest.”
We see in verse 35 Jesus going through the cities and villages teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel and healing every kind of disease. He had been traveling all throughout the hills and valleys surrounding the Sea of Galilee. Everywhere He went, He met the people and ministered to their needs. We see three basic elements in Christ’s ministry in this first verse.
It begins with Jesus teaching in the synagogues. The Jewish people gathered at the synagogue every Sabbath and usually two other regular times during the week in addition to all of the feast and holy days throughout the year. Every time they gathered, they would read from the Old Testament and then someone would explain the meaning of the passage. Essentially, they would preach an expository sermon on what was read. It was customary to allow a visiting rabbi or distinguished guest to give the exposition or the sermon and Jesus took advantage of that all over Galilee. Whenever and wherever the people were meeting, when it came time for the sermon Jesus would stand and interpret the Old Testament which had been read.
The second thing Jesus did was preach the gospel of the kingdom. Up in the hillsides, down by the sea, in houses, in the streets, wherever the crowds were gathered Jesus was announcing the coming of the kingdom. He was affirming that God was the king and that He was offering citizenship in His kingdom to all those who would come to Him with a humble and contrite heart. Poor in spirit, mourning over their sin, gentle, hungering and thirsting for righteousness, filled with mercy for others as they were filled with the mercy of God. The beatitudes. He would warn them of the narrow way but of its blessedness. He was proclaiming salvation.
It was a kingdom that the Jews understood would be one of blessing and freedom from suffering. And Jesus was giving them a picture of that coming kingdom by healing every kind of sickness and every kind of disease. He was wiping out illness and suffering everywhere He went. Hundreds upon hundreds of miracles that Matthew brushes over with a sentence time and time again. 4:23 is almost exactly the same as 10:35, going everywhere teaching, preaching and healing all who were ill. We see it again in 8:16, “He cast out the spirits with the word and healed all who were ill.” John says at the end of his gospel (21:25) “and there are also many other things which Jesus did, which if they were written in detail, I suppose that even the world itself would not contain the books that would be written.” We only saw a tiny sample in the last two chapters that Matthew recorded for us.
Why do we have these miracles? First, because Jesus was fulfilling prophecy about His ministry, about the ministry of the Messiah. He was proving His message and His authority came from God, verifying His claims and teachings. He was so different from all of the rabbis and all of the scribes and all the Pharisees that the people were accustomed to hearing. He was saying things that were the polar opposite of tradition. He was attacking the tradition and the Pharisees that burdened the people with man-made laws and rules and regulations that corrupted the truth. He will accuse the Pharisees in chapter 15 of invalidating the Word of God for the sake of their tradition. His miracles made it clear to all who saw them that He was from God no matter what lies the Pharisees tried to spread as we saw in verse 34.
The second purpose for the miracles of Jesus, and our 3rd aspect of his ministry, was to demonstrate the loving tenderness of our Heavenly Father. Jesus wanted the people to know that God was not distant and uncaring, that He was not cold and legalistic as the Pharisees had made Him out to be. God is sympathetic, He is tender, He is loving, filled with kindness, filled with mercy. Jesus was God incarnate, God made flesh and He was making it clear to all the kind of compassion that God has for all.
When Jesus looked out on the crowds, He saw a people who were desperately in need. People who were distressed and dispirited. He was not fooled by their false sense of religion. They were lost and broken in their sin and under the weight of a legalistic system that could do nothing but destroy the hearts of men. The scribes and the Pharisees who claimed to be the shepherds of Israel were nothing but wolves. We will see in chapter 23 more of Christ’s accusation against these false shepherds, “you shut off the kingdom of heaven from people… You travel around on sea and land to make one proselyte; and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as yourselves.”
Christ saw the damage, the hurt, the spiritual pain and suffering and felt the compassion of God. It is a compassion that go so far beyond our understanding. And that is what I want to look at next, the compassion of Jesus. We see in verse 36, “seeing the people, He felt compassion for them.” We see that over and over again, the compassion of Jesus, the love and brokenness mingled at the sight of the effects of sin both temporal and eternal. We use the word “compassion” in English, and it is such a beautiful word. It comes from Latin and it means “to suffer with, or to suffer alongside.” To feel the emotional pain of the person who is suffering, even if we would be otherwise unaffected by the situation. The Greek word here is splanchnon, and in the noun form it refers to the bowels, the guts. Turned into a verb it literally then means “to feel it in the bowels,” “to feel it in the guts.”
We have something of a similar expression when we are talking about an emotionally painful event, usually a very sudden one. If you get a terminal diagnosis out of nowhere or a loved one suddenly dies, we talk about getting a “gut punch.” You know that feeling. When the emotion is so overwhelming you feel it in the pit of your stomach, it can even make you nauseous to the point of getting sick. That is what this word is describing. Jesus looked out on the crowds of people who were coming to Him and He was so distraught over their state it felt like a punch in the gut.
You see God cares more for the worst sinner than any human parent could love the most devoted child. God cares and loves beyond anything any human could ever experience. Then you take that God and you put Him in a human body, and you let Him experience that kind of love with our human frailties it would devastate that body, and that is exactly what it did to Jesus. Jesus was devastated by the sickness and death that He saw around Him, wrecked by the physical manifestation of sin. People wonder why He cried outside the tomb of Lazarus moments before He called him to walk out of the grave and back to life; because even though Jesus was going to fix it, our Lord saw the pain of death and separation in the eyes and hearts of Mary and Martha and it drove Him to burst into tears.
Now take that and multiply it by eternity. All of the pain, all of the suffering of life here on earth is nothing compared to what the lost will face in eternity. This is a God who, as Paul writes in 1st Timothy 2:4, a God “who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” We will see in Matthew 23 Jesus weeping over Jerusalem. A city, as He says “who kills the prophets and stones those who were sent to her! How often I want to gather your children together, the way a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were unwilling.” We cannot imagine the pain of a God who loves His people so much, who would do so much for them, who would be rejected by them over and over and over again to then to descend to earth and become one of them only to be beaten and crucified at their hands.
Isaiah called the Messiah a man of sorrows acquainted with much grief. That grief went so far beyond the suffering He would undergo at the hands sinful man. It is a grief of the parent watching a wayward child continually living in rebellion, causing his own distruction, amplified by eternity and multiplied again by every person who walked this earth in darkness. We do not have a God who is apathetic, a clockmaker who set the world in motion and walked away. We have a loving Heavenly Father who feels our pain, who suffers with us more deeply than we could ever understand.
Jesus then switches metaphors from sheep without a shepherd to a harvest waiting for workers. “Then He said to His disciples, ‘the harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few.” This is a phrase that is often used but rarely understood in its context. In the Old Testament whenever the metaphor of reaping a harvest was used it was almost always a negative metaphor. It was picturing God coming to judge the wicked, to reap a harvest of wrath against evil doers. That would have been the first thought of the Jewish audience when God and Harvest are spoken of together.
Jesus takes that picture and instead makes into a harvest of people unto salvation. The Pharisees saw the people as merely chaff to be burned away, but Jesus saw among them the people that God the Father had appointed for His kingdom and who needed to be brought in through the preaching of the Word; to be saved from the reaping of judgement.
Jesus was saying, “I cannot do this by myself, I have been traveling to every town and every synagogue, and I am healing diseases but we need to pray for workers to join me.” We will see next week that this is no accident that this statement comes right before Jesus appoints the 12 apostles and gives them authority over unclean spirits and sends them out to preach; giving to them permission to participate in the harvest.
I want you to notice something about the prayer that Jesus commands. Jesus did not say “go,” He did not say “go out and begin the harvest,” He did not say “sit down and strategize, plan out how you are going to do this.” He said, “beseech the Lord of the harvest to send out workers into His harvest.” Pray for workers. The same one who will be conducting the harvest of judgment will be the one saving people from it. We are to pray that He will send workers to prevent the people from falling to that judgment. That same God who is bringing judgement desires nothing more than to save all from it.
There is a sense of urgency and fear for all those who were lost. But in that urgency, in that desperation He does not say “get out there quick as you can,” He says, “pray.”
Now, does that mean we are not supposed to go out? Are we supposed to sit around praying that somebody else will go out and do the work? Not at all. There are two things that starting with prayer first will accomplish. The first is that it builds a fire within the one praying. A compassion for those who are lost and a desire to actually get out and begin the work. We are told to go, right at the end of Matthew’s gospel be have the Great Commission given to the disciples and all who would follow them in the ages to come. “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you.” That applies to all of us, we are all responsible for the work. We do not just appoint a few ministers, a few workers. It is not just the pastors paid by the church and the evangelists whose books we read and sermons we watch online, this is a command to all of us.
But the thing with commands is that we tend to disobey them, ignore them, or turn them into boxes to be marked of in a routine. They often become dulled with time and apathy and begin to look like just another weight added to a burden. That is why we are told to pray for workers. When you are praying for people to be saved, when you have a compassion for them, a desire to see them spared from the harvest of judgment, when you are praying to the Lord of the harvest for their salvation on a regular basis He will begin to stoke a fire in your heart. As you are praying for the Lord to send out workers, pretty soon you are going to feel like maybe you are the person who ought to go and that leads from intercession to involvement. We will see that as Jesus sends out the disciples. But He starts by telling them to pray.
As we look to the example of Jesus, we begin with compassion for the lost; seeing them in their state of distress and despair like sheep without a shepherd. We begin to feel their pain and their suffering; all the more when we think about eternity. That compassion leads to prayer. Prayer for the lost, prayer that God will begin to shine a light into our community and amongst the lost we are surrounded by. That He will send out workers into His harvest. As we pray in line with the heart and the will of God, He begins to align our heart and our will with His and we find ourselves being the ones sent, literally the word in verse 38 is thrown out, we are hurled at the lost with a message of hope and with the light of salvation.
The second thing that this prayer does is forces us to recognize who is in charge of the harvest, who is the Lord of the harvest. You see does not matter how good we are as preachers or evangelists. It does not matter how much we do for our community. It does not matter how much are heart burns for the lost. All our work is utterly in vain unless God brings the harvest. There are no programs, there are no techniques, there are no foolproof ways of preaching a sermon or evangelizing the lost that can guarantee changed hearts. There is nothing that works either in the field or in the church pew unless God brings the growth.
Paul makes this clear in first Corinthians when he is condemning the factionalism that was building in that church. In the chapter 3 he writes, “What then is Apollos? And what is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, even as the Lord gave opportunity to each one. I planted, Apollos watered, but God causes the growth. So then neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but God who causes growth.” We are merely agents in His hands, servants through whom God works and only able to work when the Lord gives opportunity.
God and God alone can add to His church, He is the only one who should receive credit. All of the skill and eloquence of Paul and Apollos was nothing, the Paul as the greatest teacher and Apollos the greatest speaker in the early church, these two combined could do nothing for the gospel without the Lord causing the growth. They did what they could, they served compassionately and fervently.
The sovereignty of God over the hearts of mankind does not mean we stand back and do nothing. Paul still planted, Apollos still watered, but it does mean that we are to continually beseech the Lord of the harvest to bring growth, to make our work effective because without His intervention it is all for nothing. You see it is not up to us to convince people to come to faith, it is up to God to change their hearts. Faith does not come before a changed heart. Choosing Christ does not come before a changed heart. Yes, you are supposed to have faith, yes you are supposed to make a choice for Christ, but you will never believe, you will never choose Him, you can and will never make an honest decision for Christ until or unless God the Holy Spirit first changes the disposition of your heart. Rebirth comes before faith and it is only God who can do that.
Unless God changes the heart, there will be no change. Unless a man is born again, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. In one of the most beautiful statements that any Christian can ever understand and learn to appreciate is in Ephesians 2, “but God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved.”
It is God and God alone who gives spiritual life. And in the moment you received that spiritual life you were also given faith. In that moment you were given the ability and the compulsion to choose God. You may not have understood what was going on, you may have even thought it was your choice from the beginning. Somebody planted the seed, somebody watered that seed, but you were dead and useless in the field until the Lord of the harvest came and caused the growth.
We need to pray that God will change hearts, trusting in the sovereignty of God. Our only hope is the sovereignty of God. Not just the events of this world, not just over the things external to us, but the sovereignty of God over our hearts from beginning to end. People often talk about hope as something that is desperately holding on to what they are unsure of. Wanting, wishing that their hope we be realized. That is not the kind of hope we have in sovereignty of God. We should be continually encouraged by what we have hope in. Our only hope is in the sovereignty of God, and what better place could our hope be in? We are incapable of changing our own lives, we are incapable of changing the lives of those who are still lost and in darkness. No matter how good we are, no matter how much work and effort we put in; the responsibility to save does not fall to us but on God.
As we look out into the world, as we see people who are distressed and dispirited like sheep without a shepherd we need to pray. We need to pray first asking God to change our hearts. To give us the love and the mercy of Jesus. To make us feel the compassion of Jesus for those around us. To feel the need of others in a powerful way, like a punch in the gut. We need God to change our hearts by beseeching the Lord of the harvest to send out workers. We need to pray for more pastors, more preachers, more evangelists, more missionaries and that they will go out knowing that the effect of their labors is not on their ability, not on themselves, but knowing that the harvest is in the hands of God. We ask God to give us a heart for the lost, and we need to pray for God to change the hearts of the lost. Trusting in His promise that He will not send out His Word and His workers in vain.