Why Care About People? God Calls Us To Do It

Why Care About People, God Calls Us To Do It

Hosea 11:1-11 Mark 1:14-21 Calvary 3-11-2012

Today we are starting a new series entitled “Why Care About People.” How many of you have discovered that people can cause you a lot of headaches? How many of you have been tempted at times to just say, “I’m not going to have anything else to do with that person or those people.” Life at times would seem to go easier if we could just get rid of some people. But as Christians we are never given the option to quit caring about people. The option has been taken from us, because God cares about people. God cares about their physical, emotional, and spiritual well being. If you think people have gotten on you last nerve, it’s probably nothing compared to what people have done to God.

Our series will consist of “Why Care About People” 1) God Calls Us To Do It, 2) We Can Choose To Do It and 3) Time Is Limited To Do It.

Let me see if you could be a prophet for the Lord. Suppose God told you to go and marry a man who was a known player with the women going from woman to woman, or God told you to marry a woman who had a history of prostitution. Then after the marriage, there were children popping up all over the place. If you were a woman, some lady showed up saying your husband is the father of my child. Or if you were a man, you were not sure if this was your child or not. How many of you know this would produce stress.

Now suppose your spouse finally got up and left and went and found somebody else to live with. And just when you think you’ve got your life back in order, God tells you, that former spouse of yours has really got hooked up with the wrong people. He or she is being sold as sex slave. I want you to take your money and go buy the person back, and I want you to love her or him more than ever even though she or he has been an adulterer.

Well this is exactly what God told the prophet Hosea to do in taking a wife for himself. God said, I want you to do this, so that my people can understand just how much I love and care about them. God’s people had a way of saying they loved God, yet they gave other things first place in their hearts. Have we ever done that? Each time we chose an action that places our own desires ahead of God’s desire for us, we commit a form of spiritual adultery. Now in the natural when one part is guilty of adultery, we may forgive once or twice, but then, that person has got to go.

But for some reason God would rather be reconciled to us, than send us away to suffer the consequences of our actions. In our Old Testament passage, God was saying, “look I’m the one that provides for them daily, I’m the one who looks out for their needs, I’m the one who gives them life and strength, and I’m the one whose there for them in a crisis. Yet people insist on turning away from me, and doing their own thing. Yet they do not see the punishment and destruction that is going to come upon them when I remove my hand of protection. God cares about people and what is going to happen to them. God goes out of His way to warn us of calamity, but God always leaves the choice to us.

God loved people enough to send Jesus Christ into this world to restore the broken relationship between us and God. You see everybody has sinned and is therefore out of relationship to God. God sent Jesus Christ to pay for our sin so that we could be brought back in right relationship to God. Jesus was crucified to pay for our sins. He died and was buried because the penalty for sin is death. He rose from the dead to show that death no longer had power over him, and that all who died in him would have life.

Salvation became possible for anyone who believe in Jesus, and receives the work he has done on their behalf. Anyone who does not believe and receive will continue on their path of life which ends in death and destruction in a place call hell and the lake of fire. We have the option of freely believing in Christ, or choosing to pay for our sins ourselves.

Because God cares about you, one day God used someone to give you the message about Jesus and you put your faith and hope in Him and today you are a believer. You know that Jesus does a lot more for you than simply give you a seat in heaven. You know that Jesus has taken some of the things that were destroying your life and set you free from them. You know that Jesus has changed you from whom you used to be to who you are now. You know that Jesus is still working in you, changing you, and giving you a much more rewarding life. But you would not have known this if God had not cared about you, and if someone had not cared enough to have told you about Jesus Christ.