Why Care About People? We Can Choose To Do It

Why Care About People, We Can Choose To Do It

Genesis 18:16-23 Mark 1:14-21 Glenville-11-2012

Today we are continuing our series entitled “Why Care About People.” Last week Pastor Toby spoke on We Can Choose To Do It, next week Pastor Kellie will speak on There’s a Limited Time To Do It, and today I’m speaking on, “We Can Choose To Do It.”

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.

We look at the world and think things have gotten pretty bad. We lost one of our former members last week to a stray bullet from guys shooting at each other in the street. The trial of Jimmy Dimmora left some of us wondering just who can you trust in the world of politics. But what we see around us pales in comparison to what God saw in the cities of Sodom and Gommorah. These were two large cities in the bible where sin was totally out of control. The people were so stuck on themselves, that they only wanted to deal with certain kinds of people in their city. It was against the law to help the poor and the needy. Men would form gangs to go out and rape any new men who happened to enter their town.

Their behavior was so bad, that the sin was crying out all the way to heaven demanding that it be destroyed by the righteousness of God. But God cared about the people of Sodom and Gomorrah. Rather than destroy it, God went looking for a reason to be merciful to it. God said if I can just find 50 people who are at least trying to do right, I’ll spare the whole city for their sake.

Now God told Abraham, look the behavior of Sodom and Gomorrah has so gone against my nature that I must destroy it, but because I care about people, if I can find just 50 people out of the two cities, trying to do right, I’ll spare them all. Abraham started this bargaining thing with God, knowing that even 50 might be too many. So He got God to agree to 45, 40, thirty, twenty all the way down to 10. God went searching for the 10 and could not find them. It was as though God set off a nuclear explosion and fire and sulphur fell down on the city. From miles away, Abraham could see something like a mushroom cloud over the area Sodom and Gommorah had been.

Just think, if God could have had just 10 people on His side, it would have been enough to reverse the course of the destiny of a city. Have you ever thought how many people God needs to reverse the course of this community? How many people God needs to change things on your job? How many people God needs to change people’s eternal destiny.

Everyday people die in their sins and slip into eternity to be separated from God forever. It breaks the heart of God everyday because God cares for people. God would rather be reconciled to us, than send us away to suffer the consequences of our actions.

God will not make any of us obey Him. God respects us too much to try to force us to worship Him. God loves us to know to warn us of the consequences of the choices we make in our lives, that will lead to our destruction. We may think that because we were not as bad behaving as the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, then we are okay with God. But our sin cries out against us just as theirs did.

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.