Doing What Dad's Doing // The Freedom to Share Jesus with Others, Part 4

One of the things that can stop us from telling other people about Jesus, is well, there are so many of them. The task is overwhelming. Where do I start?  Too hard – I’ll just leave it to the experts.

For me, being someone who has come to know Jesus is just the most awesome thing in my life and has been for the last decade and a half. But for a good many years the notion that I have some role to play in sharing Jesus with others, well it was like a millstone around my neck.

I suspect it's like that for a lot of Christians. But when I really spent some time figuring out God’s plan for me in this whole evangelism thing, all of a sudden I discovered a freedom to get out there and share my Jesus with other people.

One of the things that use to really get to me was the overwhelming size of the task. I know so many people who don't know Jesus and yet I don't feel gifted to tell them. It was such a burden. And then, I saw something in Jesus that set me free from that.

There are so many things that paralyse us from sharing Jesus with others and one of them is the sheer volume of effort. It's demanding. We all know lots of people who have never met Jesus Christ. We can't tell them all about Jesus, can we?

I remember being in India a few years back. India is a place with so many people and I'm looking around thinking, "Wow, most of these people have never met Jesus Christ. I can't do all this. It's not me. God hasn't called me to do this. I'll leave it to the experts. That's what the Billy Graham's of this world are made for after all. That's what they do."

And when we take that attitude, when the volume and the size of the task just kind of gets to us and we give up, as surely as God made little green apples, guilt begins to set in. We have this attitude that all of those people out there who need to know Jesus and don't know Him because I know them, they're my problem, they're my burden, I have to do something about it.

"Oh Lord, what am I going to do? There are too many of them. I can't do this. It's too hard. I'll leave it to someone else. The minister will. The evangelism committee with all the street ministry team at my Church or you know, somebody else’s job, it must be, it's not mine."

But you know, Jesus won't let it rest there because He has a plan. He has a plan to use you and to use me to touch people’s lives with His love. And the reason that this niggles away at us and it never seems to ever quite go away is because Jesus has this plan. Question is, how do we deal with the fact that there are so many people who need Jesus? And you and I are just one person each, you know.

There's a wonderful story, if you have a Bible it's in the 5th chapter of John's gospel which is the 4th book in the New Testament. It runs over the first 20 or so verses of chapter 5 of John’s gospel. There's a festival happening in Jerusalem and Jesus goes to a pool near the sheep gate in Jerusalem and there are so many sick and blind and lame and crippled people lying close to the pool. Lot's of them.

And beside the pool there was a man who'd been sick and lame for 38 years. That's most if not all of this guy’s life. Now what does Jesus do when He wanders into a place where there are so many people who need healing? I mean Jesus is the Son of God. Jesus has the power to heal all of them.

What does He do? What would you and I do if we had the power to heal all of them? Well, He sees this one guy who's been sick for 38 years and when Jesus realised that He said:

Do you want to be healed? And the man said, 'Lord, I don't have anyone to put me down in the pool when the water's stirred up. I try to get in but someone always gets there before me.' And so Jesus said to him, 'pick up your mat and walk.' And right then and there the man was healed. He picked up his mat and he started walking around.

Now it was the Sabbath day. Jesus heals this one guy, just one. This was Jesus remember. He could have had a mass healing service that day. It could have been a really spectacular event you know. Why does He only heal one? Well just a few verses later He tells us. Jesus told the people:

Truly I tell you, the Son of man cannot do anything on His own, He can only do what He sees the Father doing. And so He does exactly what He sees the Father doing that day.

That just blows me away. This is Jesus, the Son of God and He says, "the Son cannot do anything on His own." What is it that makes you and me think that we can? If Jesus says, "I can't heal people on my own. I can only do what Dad's doing today and when I see what Dad's doing, I go and do that."

I've heard someone refer to this particular verse, John chapter 5, verse 19, just really simply, "do what Dad's doing." Now why was His Dad, why was God the Father only healing one guy that day? I don't know but that'