Welcome to our Together on Mission Podcast, when we seek to be with and like Jesus, as we begin a conversation with Jesus in the morning, through scripture, prayer, and meditation, and then continue that conversation with Him throughout your day. Your hostess Travis Winden, the pastor at the Inland Vineyard Church in Corona, California. In this season, the podcast, we're going to be digging deeper in the scripture each and every day, exploring new ways that we can encounter Jesus and build our relationship with you, so grab your pen, Bible, and a cup of coffee, and let's welcome Pastor Travis. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Daily Together on Mission Podcast.
I was thinking this morning that, you know, it doesn't matter how many times I read the Gospels, how many times I encounter Jesus. He just is irresistible, and I've probably said this before, but it's something I love to say. I think it's a good idea occasionally to think about why the early disciples follow Jesus, and I do like to say that the early disciples did not follow Jesus because they were afraid that if they didn't, something bad would happen to them in the afterlife. I mean, they knew that Jesus would take care of the afterlife because that's part of what it meant to have confidence in Him, to trust Him, to put their life in His hands, but they followed Jesus because they saw Him to be absolutely irresistible, not only fierce, but also incredibly tender, and they deduced that they would be absolute fools to not give up their entire lives and everything in order to put His words and His life into practice.
And so the title of the podcast this morning is Relentless Tenderness. I almost titled this podcast Unbelievable Compassion, but both phrases are great. We're going to go with Relentless Tenderness, and I love that idea of Relentless. It just will not give up.
But that tenderness will not be exhausted. Now, often the question has been posed, was Jesus more like William Wallace, the great hero in Scotland's history, famous movie Braveheart, was Jesus more like William Wallace or more like Mother Teresa? And typically, when that question is posed, the answer that's desired by the poser of that question is, well, William Wallace, right? And there's no question that Jesus had a mission, and he was willing to stand and fight the ultimate battle and achieve the ultimate victory.
And we did a podcast on that recently. He set his face like Flint toward Jerusalem. And this is a very important aspect of the life of Jesus. And Jesus did, at times, get in his disciples' faces and call them to the carpet as he was fulfilling his role as rabbi.
And of course, we've done stories in the podcast of Jesus getting in the Pharisees' faces and fighting those battles that Jesus needed to fight. And, and I do mean and not but because sometimes kindness and fierceness are talked about as being mutually exclusive. But we see in Jesus these two realities making their home together and making great sense together. Jesus was relentlessly tender with people.
He was unbelievably compassionate. In Matthew 8, a leper comes up to Jesus and the leper says, Lord, if you're willing, you can make me clean. And Jesus reached out his hand, touched the leper. I am willing, he said, be clean.
And immediately he was cleansed from his lepercy. And then Jesus said to him, see that you don't tell anyone, but go show yourself to the priest and offer the gift that Moses commanded as a testimony to them. Now, this is not an isolated story, right? We've got the, the woman caught in the act of adultery in John 8.
Be fun to go into that. There's the blind Bartimaeus on the road to Jericho. That would be fun to go into. There's Zacchaeus as Jesus gets closer to Jerusalem.
I mean, so many that Jesus ministered to that he fed that he healed. The list goes on and on. Relentless, tenderness, unbelievable compassion. And the reality is Jesus was relentlessly tender.
He was kind with people. And it made an unbelievable impact in their lives. It made an unbelievable impact in the lives of the disciples. It actually has changed the world.
And we're still talking about those stories today, just like this morning. And notice what's going on in this story. Jesus is stopping and pouring out tenderness and compassion on a man that nobody would stop for. He was noticing and pausing with this man that nobody would notice.
I mean, you didn't run to or toward a leper. You ran away. Jesus is engaging in this moment where it's dangerous, messy, confusing to engage. He is willing.
He says, I'm willing. He cares about this person. And when Jesus says, go show yourself to the priest, offer the gift that Moses commanded. That was like saying, go and participate again in Israel's community because a leper would have been completely isolated and left out and ostracized and not be able to participate in Israel's community because a leper would have been completely isolated and left out and ostracized and not be able to participate in Israel's community.
And so Jesus is saying, I care about you and I care about your place in Israel and your place in the family. And it's easy to miss some of these small, well, what we might call small stories, but they're huge. And it talks about the relentless tenderness of Jesus and the reality is easy to miss these opportunities in our lives. And so let's think about that for just a minute.
And it's not only easy to miss these opportunities in our life with strangers or those that we might encounter randomly or, I guess, not so randomly. But it's easy to miss these encounters with people that we love the most. I mean, think for a moment about someone who you get the privilege of doing life very, very closely with. What does it look like to stop?
What does it look like to take notice? To listen, to engage, even if it's messy, maybe especially when it's messy or when it's vulnerable or when it seems like the same old thing or whatever that might be, to be willing to do whatever it looks like. To do whatever it looks like to care about that person's feelings, that person's experience, that person's pain, that person's past. And of course, relentless tenderness can look like all kinds of different things.
You know, sometimes it might look like validating someone's difficulty. Sometimes it might look like repenting. It's always going to look like stopping and listening. And this is an amazing story.
And let's think about the story along these lines. What kind of person, imagine the kind of person that Jesus must have been for this story to have actually happened? I mean, Jesus must have been the kind of person that was tender toward himself. I mean, that's a home of the podcast.
And Jesus must have been the kind of person that knew God's relentless tenderness toward himself, which is honestly a whole nother podcast, but that's exactly how it works. When we experience God's relentless tenderness, we begin to offer that tenderness to ourselves. We begin to stop. We begin to listen.
We begin to be patient with ourselves. And then we begin to find that we're able to become the kind of people that offer that relentless tenderness to other people, that unbelievable compassion. And this man's life was never the same. Never the same.
Our relationships will never be the same. They'll change dramatically when a heavy dose of Jesus shaped relentless tenderness is poured into them. So let's meditate on this story this morning. Read it.
Enjoy it. Pause. Stop. Thank you.