The Lord knows what you need even before you know you need it. Consider Adam. The Lord made him, breathed life into him and then set him in the garden and gave him all the trees and plants to eat. Did the Lord tell Adam to decide on how he wanted to decorate the garden and which fruit he was hungry for? No, He made Adam and provided for Adam. Likewise the Lord didn't leave Adam to figure out which tree was the one that would kill him. The Lord spoke His Word to Adam to warn and protect him. When the 4,000 were following Jesus around and had been with him for three days, do they start complaining? Do the disciples decide these people need to eat? No, it is Jesus who has compassion on them and before they even ask feeds them so fully that there are baskets full of leftovers! That is how the Lord acts. He knows, dear Christians, what you need before you do. He intends to provide what you need for this body and life because He has compassion on you. He knows that you need, above all else, these two things: His Word which saves you and your daily bread which sustains your body. In Jesus, we see His promise to provide both for us so that in Christ we may never be in want.
Our Lord does the same thing for your salvation. When Adam and Eve went ahead and ate from that tree, did the Lord say, “I'll just wait until Adam owns up and tells Me what he did?” No, the Lord comes to Adam and confronts him and delivers the promise: the Seed of the woman will crush the serpent's head. For this fallen world, does the Lord wait on us to come around? Does God say, “Well just as soon as those sinful people realize how bad they've ruined things, then I'll come up with a plan?” Does He conclude, “Well if I wait long enough, they'll come back and realize they need me?” Does the Lord wait for us to make the first move? He does not. But rather in His divine and Fatherly compassion sends His Son, born of a woman, born under the Law, to redeem us from the curse of the Law. God the Father sends His Son and Jesus is born to save us. Jesus Christ comes to us without being welcomed or expected, without being asked or invited. Of His own will, in obedience to His Father's will, Jesus comes to save sinners. Does He ask for our help? Does He wait for us to tell Him we need Him? Nope. He comes and lives. And dies on the cross and rises. He suffers for us without our having asked Him to. He died for our sins without our having wanted Him to. He rises from the dead without our having told Him to. Because before we even knew we were sinners, indeed while we were still sinners, Christ died for the ungodly to rescue us and give us life.
And on it goes into the delivery of that salvation. Most of you here became Christians when you were babies. Did you ask your parents? You couldn't even talk! Yet while you were still unable to recognize everything going on around you, the Lord saved you by the washing of the water and the word. Now, some of you may have been baptized when you were older. Yet nevertheless that too was God's work. For it was the Lord who, before you even realized what was going on, led you to hear His Word and believe it, and to be washed at the font. It was your heavenly Father working out all things for your good and your eternal salvation. Did Jesus wait until His disciples knew what was going on before He gave them His body and blood to eat and drink? No. Neither do we wait until a child supposedly understands everything. No, even our little ones are given Christ's body and blood because they need it and because the Lord's compassion is to feed them with His own body and blood for the forgiveness of sins. Whatever it is, from the daily bread we need for this body and life, to the forgiveness of sins which saves us from death, to the means of grace which give it out, it is always our Lord having compassion on us, always our Lord coming to us, always Christ doing what we need even before we know or ask! Such is God's compassion to us that He doesn't wait on us but feeds and saves us when we need to be fed and saved!
Now what joy that we are set free from our slavery to sin! St. Paul says that we are now slaves to righteousness! Know what that means? It means you never have to wait for your neighbor to ask for help but instead just help them! It means we don't have to get caught up, as the world does, in waiting for others to deserve our help or ask for it. That's slavery to sin: I'll only do for someone else if they do for me or if they're big enough to ask for it. Kids, wouldn't it blow your parents mind if you saw something around the house that needed doing and just...did it!? Husbands, do you really need your wives to beg you five times to get that thingamabob in your house fixed? What if you just did it without being asked? Does the church council really need to stand in front of us one more time to bug us to get something done at church when we could just pitch in and take care of it easily? Do our neighbors and friends and loved ones really need to come with shame to beg our forgiveness or can we treat them as those whose sins are already forgotten, put away and taken care of!? You see what freedom Christ has given us toward one another by His salvation? Because He has saved us without our even bothering to ask, He also teaches us to love others without their asking us to do so. Amazing! But such is the new life of having been set free from sin!
How is that new life given to us? How do we stay in that new life? How are we protected from becoming slaves to sin once again? It's all there in the Word. The Word. The water. The preaching and teaching. The body and blood. Why were those multitudes following Jesus around for three days? They stuck by Him because they wanted to hear His Word. They recognized in Jesus an authority that wasn't like the scribes and Pharisees. They heard in His teaching not more rules that they'd never ne able to follow but forgiveness, life and salvation. They received from Christ the good news that their sins were being put away from them by His salvation and He was the one to rely on for everything in their life. In short, this Jesus whom they heard was the One who could actually save them and actually provide for them. But notice something: they were so wrapped up in hearing Christ that it was Jesus who had to stop and feed them. That should be our attitude toward God's Word: that it is something so precious that we could never do without it and we must hear and learn it more than anything else in this world. And do they starve because they want the Word of God? No, Jesus takes care of that too. Because He's the Lord and that's the kind of Lord He is. He won't let us down in this life or for the life to come. He's got it all covered every which way.
So know this, brothers and sisters in Christ: Your Lord knows what you need even before you ask. He knows your sinfulness and He knows your needs and wants. He has provided everlasting victory over your sin and death and He'll make sure you've got at least a few cans of beans in the pantry, too Your Lord has rescued you from being a slave to sin and has made you a slave of righteousness for the sake of your neighbor. Now, free in Him, there is nothing and will never be anything that you lack. For the one who dishes out bread in the wilderness is Himself the Bread of Life who feeds you with Himself now and forever. Whatever it may be, before you can even think to worry about it, your Savior's got it taken care of. In the Name of Jesus. Amen.
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