Individuals Are Important to God

by Ron Klassen

“And wherever he went – into villages, towns, or countryside – they placed

the sick in the marketplaces. They begged him to let them touch even the

edge of his cloak, and all who touched him were healed.” (Mark 6:56a)

In this verse, we find Christ ministering in rural communities. It says he not only ministered in small towns, but that he also ministered out in the country. The word here in the original Greek New Testament is “agros.” Say it out loud and you can almost hear “agriculture.” It means field or farm. As Christ traveled, he took time to connect with farm and livestock workers out in the country.

Individuals mattered to Christ. The God of the Universe cares about one lost person out in the middle of a field. He cares about one lost person in the remote, tiny town of Brewster, Nebraska, (population: less than 20), where my wife and I served years ago. He cares about one lost person in a tribal village in Irian Jaya. God cares about us one at a time. He doesn’t lump us together in bunches and care about us millions at a time. True, he loves millions of people but he loves us, as Amy Carmichael says, not “in the mass, but in ones.”[1]

Think about this. It is an amazing truth. Jim Walton, former missionary in a remote tribe in Columbia, drives its significance home in his autobiography, where he asks: “Why didn’t God call us to more people?...Maybe even some Christians quietly wondered if by putting resources into such a small tribe, they might not be neglecting a larger work…The decision didn’t make much sense to some people, and sometimes not even to us. But we aren’t always able, in this life, to make sense out of everything that God does…God’s reasoning and God’s ways are not our ways...Why bother with the small, the isolated…Why desert the crowds for one Ethiopian?...Why leave the ninety-nine and seek out the one? Unless, of course, the one is me.” (italics added)[2]

Suddenly the one becomes important, doesn’t it?

Tip for Today: If individuals are important to God, shouldn’t they be important to us? Show that God is “for” us by developing personal relationships in our community, helping them with physical needs (Christ set the example by healing the sick), and looking for an opportunity to share the gospel with them.  

Ron Klassen is the Executive Director of Rural Home Missionary Association (RHMA) based in Morton, IL. RHMA’s purpose is to plant and strengthen churches in small town America. Thayne has taken several courses through RHMA.

[1] Quoted in Warren Wiersbe’s book, With the Word (Thomas Nelson: Nashville, Tennessee, 1991), p. 708.

[2] John Walton, Sent to the River God Forgot (Tyndale House: Carol Stream, Illinois, 1995), 14.