INTRODUCTION:
More than 70 years ago, a preacher
was speaking to us children in church. I don’t remember anything he said except
one line he quoted from an children’s hymn. The line is: “There’s a work for Jesus, none but you can do.”
I looked up the hymn on the
internet, and here is the first verse:
“There’s
a work for Jesus, ready at your hand.
‘Tis a
task the master, just for you has planned.
Haste to
do his bidding, yield him service true;
There’s a
work for Jesus, none but you can do.”
That line has stuck in my mind ever
since.
I’ve often taken encouragement from
the thought that there’s a work for Jesus I can do, and if I don’t do it, it
won’t get done.
In the book of 2 Kings, in the Old
Testament—long before the Jesus taught us that we must love our enemies—we read
the story of a young slave girl who learned to love the man who held her in
slavery and his wife, and how she won an honored place in the history of her
nation.
We read the story in 2 Kings 5:
Naaman,
commander of the army of the king of Syria was a great man with his master and
in high favor, because the Lord had given victory to Syria. He was a mighty man
of valor, but he was a leper.
Now
the Syrians on one of their raids had carried off a little maid from the land
of Israel and she waited on Naaman’s wife.
She
said to her mistress, “Would that my lord were with the prophet who is in
Samaria! He would cure him of his leprosy” (vv1-3).
I. Israel’s enemy Syria invaded her
land and—as usual in wars of that time (and sometimes nowadays)—the villages
were pillaged, the men were killed, and the women and children were taken into
slavery.
A. This girl had experienced
terror. She was cruelly taken from her home and family and made a slave in the
pagan land of Syria.
We don’t know what happened the
rest of her family. Probably her father was killed and her mother and brothers
and sisters and all her friends had also been taken as slaves.
She never saw her family or friends
again.
She became the slave of the wife of
the Syrian general.
But evidently her mistress was kind
to her, and the Israelite girl learned to love her.
It would have been easy to feel
forsaken by God in this foreign country.
No one in her new homeland
worshiped the God of Israel.
She had no Bible. She could have
felt that her God had let her down.
But even in this pagan land this
slave girl kept her faith alive.
B. Her mistress’s husband, the
general named Naaman, had a terrible disease—leprosy: the most dreaded disease
anyone could have in the ancient world.
Leprosy was worse than any other
kind of sickness.
A person who had leprosy was
considered “unclean.” Leprosy was thought to be highly contagious. Nobody would
willingly touch a leper.
People thought lepers were cursed
by God.
This little maid could have
delighted in the sorrow of the one who had taken her captive. She could have
rejoiced as she saw him suffer.
But she didn’t take that attitude.
The slave girl felt sorry for her mistress’s husband and she told her mistress:
“If only my lord were with the prophet
who is in Samaria? He would cure him of his leprosy.”
The name of the girl was forgotten.
The person who wrote Second Kings didn’t know her name to put it into the story.
But she is the hero of the story
because her mistress told Naaman and Naaman told the king and the king sent
Naaman to Israel with many gifts—ten talents of silver, 6000 shekels of gold,
and ten festal garments.
(A talent of silver was worth 9
years wages for a workman. A shekel of gold was worth $500 in today’s money. So
ten talents of silver and 6000 shekels of gold was worth a huge amount of
money—and the festal garments were valuable too. The king must have greatly
valued his general Naaman to offer so much money for his cure.)
II. So Naaman set out with his
gifts and servants to Israel and eventually he ended up at Elisha’s house.
A. But then he had a surprise.
Here he was a big shot important
general, with his servants and horses waiting impatiently outside the prophet’s
house. But Elisha didn’t come out to see him. He sent a messenger to him
saying, “Go and wash in the Jordan River seven times, and you will be healed."
Naaman was angry. He thought the
prophet was mocking him.
He said, “I thought that he would surely
come out to me, and stand, and call on the name of the Lord his God, and wave
his hand over the sore place and cure me! We have better rivers in Syria I
could wash in!”
And he started for home in a huff.
B. And then his servants did
something very brave. Generals are proud people. You don’t give advice to
generals. You do what they say.
But Naaman’s servants must have
loved their master, so they talked back to him. They said, “My father, if the prophet had commanded you to do some great thing,
would you not have done it? How much rather than, when he says to you, “Wash,
and be clean”?
So
Naaman went down and dipped himself seven times in the Jordan, according to the
word of the Man of God; and his flesh was restored like the flesh of a little
child, and he was clean.
(Don’t you wish you could have
flesh like a little child?)
C. Then Naaman returned to the man
of God, and this time Elisha met him.
Naaman said, “Now I know that there is no God in all the earth but in Israel; so
accept now a present your servant.”
But Elisha answered, “As the Lord lives, whom I serve, I will
receive none.”
Naaman urged him, and Elisha
refused. He wanted Naaman to know that God’s goodness is free. It’s not
something you pay for. That’s why God’s goodness is called “grace.”
Then Naaman had a request.
Naaman wanted to worship the God of
Israel, and he supposed that he needed to worship Israel’s God on Israel’s
soil.
So he asked if he could take two
mules’ load of dirt from Israel back to Syria, so that he could spread it on
the courtyard of his house and worship the God of Israel on soil from Israel.
In those days people believed that
each country had its own gods. Naaman wanted to worship the God of Israel, and
he wanted to worship him on Israelite soil.
He said, “From now on I will not offer burnt offering or sacrifice to any god
but the Lord” (v17).
D. Something greater happened to
Naaman even than getting cured from a terrible disease. He had met the living
God. He had experienced God’s love and he determined to worship the Lord for
the rest of his life.
I think he invited his slave girl
to worship with him.
But I don’t think she was a slave
any longer. I am sure she became one of the family now—much loved by her master
and mistress, who had now become as father and mother to her.
APPLICATION
We hear of the needs of the world--
hunger… sickness… homelessness… the terror of war…and especially the need for
people to know about Jesus.
We grieve because we feel so
helpless.
We read about the great men and
women of God who had great gifts to do his work and great success, and we get
discouraged…
But God says, “My son, my daughter, I only expect you to do what you can.”
“Little
things are little things, but faithfulness in little things is something
great.”
How useful we are depends on our
attitude and our love for God. The little maid may have thought that there was
little she could do, but she did what she could, and it made a big difference.
Whatever
we do for Jesus lasts for ever—whether anyone else remembers it or not.
Think about it; everything that is
good about you has come from God…but
it has come through someone else…from
kind words… generous actions… good examples…
Everything good in my life came
from someone else—from a friend… a teacher… maybe from the example of someone I
admired, maybe from the author of a book
The same is true of you.
When we serve Jesus, our actions
bless others…who bless others…who bless others…And so the good deed goes on and
on—forever. That is why whatever we do for Jesus lasts forever.
Every Sunday morning I used to listen to Dr.
Oswald Hoffman, on the Lutheran Hour, on the radio.
In one of his messages he told this true
story.
A girl in the seventh grade went to a school
party. But nobody greeted her or talked to her. She sat by herself in a corner
wishing she hadn’t come. A wise teacher noticed and came over to her and
pointed out to her that there were other lonely people at the party just like
her. She suggested that the girl talk to them.
She spent the rest of the evening seeking out
the wallflowers and offering them her friendship. By the time the party was
over she had had a wonderful time.
Dr. Hoffman said, “That girl was serving
Christ. She had begun to come to Sunday school all by herself, but in the end
she won her entire family to Christ.”
This story appeared in The Cedar Rapids Gazette on January 31,
1992. I saved it because I was so impressed with it. It illustrates my point
that it is sometimes the little things that are the most important.
It was in the early 1980s. Jay Raemont was a
high school student in McHenry, Illinois. Jay recalled that he didn’t belong to
any groups. He was a dork. He wore his older brothers’ clothes. He was tall and
skinny and had bad skin. He was the kind of person the bullies of the school
picked on.
Jay recalls that one sunny afternoon as he
was leaving school he decided to cut through the smoking lounge. (Incredible as
it seems now, in those days some schools designated a room for students to
smoke in, in order to discourage surreptitious smoking elsewhere.)
Anyway, as Jay walked into the lounge, he was
surrounded by thuggish students he calls “burnouts.” He says, “I was all by
myself; I thought I was a dead dork.”
“Suddenly,” he says, “out of nowhere a girl
named Cindy MacDonald walked up to me. She was one of the most popular girls in
the school. Pretty, cheerleader—everything. Right in front of those guys she
put her arm around me and said, ‘What took you so long? I’ve been here since
2:30.’ And with that she took my hand and we began to walk toward the parking
lot.
“Halfway there she let go and walked the
opposite direction. She said she had to go to cheerleading practice. She didn’t
even know me, really—she did what she did because she didn’t want me to get
pushed around. I never really thanked her.”
About ten years later (at the time the
article was written), Jay was 27 and working in the electrical contracting
business. Cindy MacDonald had become an emergency room nurse. Jay saw her name
in the newspaper over an article she had written about a need for her nephew
who had a rare disease. He needed a small bowel transplant, which would cost
the family $800,000, which they didn’t have and insurance wouldn’t pay. Cindy
was pleading for help from the community for donations.
When Jay saw the name of the girl who had
befriended him, he decided to help get the word out. He doubted that she
remembered him, but he remembered her. He had found out long ago what kind of a
person she was and he wanted to help.
Cindy MacDonald was overwhelmed when she
learned of Raimont’s involvement in the effort to help her nephew.
She recalled, “I did go to high school with
Jay, but I don’t recall helping him out on that day, but it sounds like
something I might have done…I’m so grateful that he’s taken it upon himself to
get the word out.”
Bob Greene ended his article with the address
to which readers could send money for the fund to help save the child’s life.
That compassionate, impulsive action by the
pretty, popular girl resulted in a generous action years later by the recipient
of her kindness and the saving of the life of a little boy.
Cindy MacDonald had done something
incredibly kind and thoughtful—and it made a real difference in the life of a
classmate she didn’t know. And she had forgotten all about it.
Just so, some of the most important
things you have ever done—things that have made a difference in the lives of
people you’ve forgotten—are things that you forgot about long ago.
But God remembers. And some of
those people remember too.
We
are not able to do any great things for God, but we can do little things with
great love.
There’s a
work, ready at your hand.
‘Tis a
task the master, just for you has planned.
Haste to
do his bidding, yield him service true’
There’s a
work for Jesus, none but you can do.
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