“I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak…” Ezekiel 34:16
It is through the very Word of God that our Savior brings back those who have strayed from Him, binds up their injuries and strengthens their weaknesses. In fact, there is no other way that He does so.
Sure, we were born with an innate knowledge of God, a notion of the eternal, and a yearning for divinity: all with the purpose of our seeking after Our Father in heaven. So we read in Acts 17:26-28 :
And he made from one every nation of men to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their habitation, that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel after Him and find Him. Yet He is not far from each one of us, for ‘in Him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your poets have said ‘For we are indeed his offspring.’
So we are born with an innate something which causes us to seek for God. So often, however, what we do is take that search for God and turn in into a creation of a god of our own liking. And usually the god that we create is simply a better version of ourselves, an image of what we truly want to be. So Romans 1.
And are we ever going to find God by worshiping a better version of ourselves? Hardly.
So God has to come looking for us. And He does so by causing the Word of God to be preached to us in some way. Maybe through the reading of the Bible. The word of a friend. A conversation with our parents. Or a sermon at a church.
“Listen!” is how one of our hymns begins (LSB 833): “Listen! Listen! God is calling! Through the Word inviting! Offering forgiveness! Comfort! And joy!”
That comfort and joy? The comfort and joy announced by the angel to the shepherds when Jesus was born: “To you is born this day in the city of David, a Savior, who is Christ the Lord” (Luke 2:10-11).
A Savior? A Savior from what? From sin. And so from death. And so from the ravages of sin and the fear of death even as we live now!
It is the proclamation of that salvation that our Heavenly Father uses to seek the lost, and bring back the strayed, bind up the injured and strengthen the week. It is a proclamation of comfort and joy!
Your role? Help to put people in the position to hear that proclamation! Invite them to church to hear the Word of God! Give them a copy of the Portals of Prayer! Share with them an idea, a thought from a sermon or Bible study, something along the lines of: “Oh! We were talking about that in Bible study this past week because in the Bible it says…”
When our Savior Jesus appeared to the disciples after His resurrection from the dead, He told His disciples that just as He had been sent by the Father to them, He was sending them out to everyone else in the world (John 20:21).
So someone at one point came to us with the Word of God. Now it is our turn to take it to someone else. Or to bring someone else to it!
