The Heart of Jesus is with the Lost

All we need to do is to make ourselves available for God to work through us and to be obedient to Him

Source: PInterest

Many of the homeless and destitute on our streets suffer from mental illnesses, can be aggressive, have alcohol and drug dependencies and these are reasons why we often don't pay much attention to them. Next time you are in your City Centre or walking down the High Street just take a while to watch how many people will cross over the road or walk right past a homeless person without a second thought. The vast majority of us are guilty of this however it is necessary for us to sometimes take a step of faith and to push through the barriers of fear, embarrassment, scepticism and cold heartedness; Isaiah 58:10 ‘and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday’.

It was a great privilege for me to be part of a team of Street Pastors in my City and I will always remember an encounter I had with a homeless man that I still keep close to my Heart even today. One cold winter’s night myself and a colleague were patrolling the dark streets in the early hours of a Saturday morning. We approached an elderly man who was sheltering with his dog in a doorway, as we approached him he was quite aggressive and told us to go away. A few hours later we came across him again in an underpass where there were usually quite a few people in this underpass at that time, but on this occasion it was nearly empty. There were five entrances in this particular underpass. As we walked past him I casually asked him if he would like some dog biscuits for his dog as I usually carried some in my bag. On this occasion he was pleased to receive them and his whole demeanour changed, and he even asked if we could spend some time with him, which we were more than happy to do. He talked a lot about his father in quite a bad way but later admitted his father wasn't so bad. Now my colleague had a good ear to God’s promptings and sure enough he felt God prompting him to tell this man about the importance of honoring your parents and the importance of the commandment the God gave us in Exodus 20:12 ‘Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you’.

Source:PInterest

This appeared to affect him quite deeply and he started to share some personal things about how he got his life into such a mess, and he talked about his deep love for his mother and the last time he saw her before she died which was when she came to visit him in prison!!  Through the tears he asked us to pray for him, he said he was afraid to pray to God himself because of the terrible life he had lived and the many years of pain and grief he had caused his parents. We shared the gospel of Jesus Christ with him and helped him to pray to the God he feared. We explained that God loved a repentant heart and that if he was the only person on the earth his saviour, Jesus Christ would have died for him alone. We helped him to understand that nobody would be excluded from the love of God because we were all part of His creation;

John 15:9 ‘As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love’

Romans 8:38-39 ‘For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord’.

As our time together was coming to an end an amazing thing happened. People started coming into the underpass from most of the entrances. We realised that God had given us a window of opportunity and given us some private moments with Him, where time seemed to have stood still. Almighty God Himself had set the whole thing up just for this man who may have been seen as worthless by society’s standards however this was not the way God saw him. God had moved heaven and Earth for him and used us as His vessels to do His work. All Glory to God. All we need to do is to make ourselves available for God to work through us and to be obedient to Him; Matthew 25:35-36 ‘For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me’.

Remember this; the poor and destitute are still with us, they are still part of society, they are all loved by God who does not love them any less than you or I. How can God use us to show His love to them?  It is something to think about. God bless.

Author: Eileen Greaves

May God bless and enrich your life

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