Feeling God's Heart

Most of us don’t like our heart torn apart with the suffering of others. I have learned that God wants us to feel what He feels about people who are mistreated. Christ teaches us to love one another and live together as peaceably as we can. Even in the Old Testament God said we should be kind to the stranger and the fatherless.

On a trip recently I watched the movie “Dances With Wolves” on the television in our room. Every time I see parts of that movie, my heart is torn to realize how cruel we have been to America’s natives through the years.

The Lakota chief in the movie said, “Our country is all that we have. We will fight to keep it.”

Some of the early settlers were kind to the Indians, but then they wanted their land. Often the Indian tribes fought with each other. They naturally fought to keep the territory they had always lived on. This is the way civilization spreads. We cannot expect anything better from people who don’t know God.

God’s way is to give our lives if necessary to help the ethnic people around us. A physician, Marcus Whitman, and his wife went to the Willamette Indians in Oregon. They suffered loss and were eventually massacred in 1847, but many from that tribe came to know the Lord Jesus.

Most of us think primarily of our own concerns. We do not want to give an inch to people who seem different from us. Of course, we expect them to keep the laws of the land and not become violent toward us. But do we feel God’s heart?

Someday in God’s kingdom (the millennium) people will live in peace. See Matthew 5-7. We cannot change the world through pacifism, but we can see individual lives changed as we live for Jesus and share His Word. God will change hearts around us if we give Him a chance. Until then we must care about individuals and suffer with them if necessary.

Before I went to Laos I worked among the Navajo Indians. They were not perfect, but I learned to care about them even as I shared Jesus with them. So it was not hard to love the Laotians and other Asians I met overseas. We should also care about any Americans living near us in poverty and do something to help them as God opens the way.

By nature we are all sinners, selfish and self-centered. We must learn God’s way. We must be pioneers and be willing to pay the cost to change lives. We cannot change the world but we can make a start.

Maybe I am a dreamer but Jesus was, too. He sounded like a dreamer as He preached the sermon on the mount but He was showing us the way of love and true freedom.

God loves every culture, every ethnic group. Just read His plan in Revelation 5. He is going to reach every tribe and race, every nation and language.

Let your heart be open to feel God’s heart. If you care, you will pray. If you pray, God can change you and also the people around you.

You can’t speak to every person of another ethnic group that you see in the neighborhood or the grocery store, but you can pray as you see their faces. Prayer makes a difference. Prayer will make a difference in us and also in others.

-- Rosemary Watson