← The Wake-Up Call
The Wake-Up Call
Kingdom 101: See the Vulnerable, Poor, and Weak
00:20:33
In this episode, Dan Wilt opens with a heartfelt message, encouraging listeners to embrace the new week with gratitude and faith. He emphasizes the importance of community and support among believers, reminding them that Jesus is always present. Dan shares a personal story about a man named Tom, highlighting the power of seeing individuals as unique image bearers of God rather than categorizing them. This narrative serves as a reminder to approach others with compassion and understanding, recognizing their personal stories and struggles. Dan continues by discussing the significance of spiritual gifts and how they can be used in everyday ministry. He encourages listeners to lean into their unique gifts with humility and to engage with those around them, especially the vulnerable. Through personal anecdotes and reflections, Dan illustrates how small acts of kindness and recognition can have a profound impact. He concludes with a call to action, urging listeners to see and serve other...
Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:04]
A
Good morning Sower Nation. Today is Monday, June 29th in the year of our Lord 2026. I'm Dan Wilt and this is your wake up call. We are beginning another week with our hearts open, our hearts full. Thankful for the love of God that's meeting you, that's meeting me, and then thankful that we get to participate in seeing his kingdom in the world through us by His Spirit at work in his church. So I hope you are waking up this morning encouraged that you are trusting and if you feel like your own faith is waning and your trust is struggling, that is why God gives us other believers to look us in the eye and say there is hope. You can do this. Jesus is with us and I want to say that to you. Jesus is with you today. He's with us as we gather. I'm going to spend a little bit of time at the end of our entry today, just answering a few questions that are coming in through our series and I'm looking forward to doing that with you. And then of course tomorrow JD is going to be joining me for our Taco Tuesday chat after tomorrow morning's entry. So looking forward to that. Wake up sleeper. Rise from the dead and Christ will shine on you. Let's pray our prayer of consecration together as we begin today's meeting with Jesus. Jesus, I belong to you. I lift up my heart to you. I set my mind on you. I fix my eyes on you. I offer my body to you as a living sacrifice. Jesus, we belong to you. We're praying in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Well, today's entry is titled Kingdom 101. See the vulnerable, the poor and the weak. And our text for today is a short one. Matthew 14:14. Hear the word of the Lord. When Jesus landed and saw a large crowd, he had compassion on them and healed their sick. Consider this. A dear man in our congregation who spent most of his time on the street was in front of me in the line for communion. As we neared the person distributing the bread, I could see his hands were shaking uncontrollably. His struggles with substance abuse had taken their toll over the years. I took his hands in mine and we took the bread together. The Lord whispered to me, say his name as if I'm saying it through you. Tom, I said, the body of Christ broken for you. He ate the bread. Then we came to the cup and with my hands still around his, we raised the small cup of juice to his lips. Tom, I said, the blood of Christ shed For you. He drank the cup. Then he turned to me. He knows my name, he said. He gave me a big bear hug right there up front, and we stood in an embrace for a few moments. The early church made a big deal about Jesus seeing people in their situation and naming them. He didn't treat people as part of a group or a crowd. He saw people for who they were, individual image bearers whose lives were made to function optimally in and from relationship with him. So when Jesus is seeing the large crowd, it is not primarily the group we would imagine that he is feeling all the compassion toward. He is, I believe, feeling compassion toward each person in the crowd, which gives him compassion for the entire collection of souls. As dear brother J.D. walt often says, he sees the one. When you're walking down the street, do you see a person on the street as having a name, a mother and father alive, or passed, a sister or brother? Do you lump them into a category like the poor or the homeless or the street people? I come with humility to give my answer. Sometimes I lump people together in my mind as if their name and personhood before God are less important to me than the category I've put them in or that group's impact on my personal or social well being. Jesus did all the things that he did because he saw individuals with names and backgrounds and ancestors for whom they were. It was to these ones that Jesus said the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these. Matthew 19, verse 14. Who within your reach is powerless, who lacks the basics they need to do life either in resources, opportunity or personality. Who is facing the dis ease of poverty by their own choices, who doesn't make those, or by the choices of others. There is injustice in the world who you could walk up to and simply ask their name. Jesus saw a crowd, but he also saw the individual vulnerability in each person's eyes. And seeing them, he had compassion on them and healed all their diseases. A short reflection before we pray again. As I continue to say, I tell these stories from my own life so I can get behind the veil of how they feel in the moment. And my goal there and my dream there is so that we can consider together how we might feel and realize that this is for normal people. This all the things ministry people like you, people like me, you may have certain gifts in motion in your life that I don't have. I may have some working in my life that you don't have. I do believe God will use us in many different ways. Sometimes right in the middle of what we Sense is a common gift that God often uses us in. But often I find he'll use us in all the different kinds of gifts because we're all followers of Jesus. So in this moment with my friend and my punchline here of Jesus seeing the one, I just wanted to illustrate that quickening from the Spirit was very simple in my heart. Say his name, say his name to Him. And I got to say it twice in our Eucharist, our communion line as we take it together. And in saying it there was a deep sense of being known and loved and valued that happened in my friend and I would just encourage you as we move into all the things ministry that we would be aware together that the people that God is sending across our path, they need to be seen by God and need to know they are seen by God. And so we can take that place, one human being to another, and simply give voice to someone's humanity in a moment. And that is part of all the things day ministry in the power of the Spirit. Often I've had the experience in working with those who are vulnerable in society. Our church through the years and the churches I've been in have been highly invested in caring for those who are in need. We've developed food and clothing stores and all sorts of things that became primary and reference points for our entire city in caring for the vulnerable. But in that process, we would always train all our leaders, see that person, see the one minister to their need. And in my own life I have many stories related to this and you may have some stories yourself, but even if you have no stories, I would encourage you instead of seeing a street person as a street person, see them as a human being with a name and just ask the Lord. As we looked at in our last few entries, what can I do? What are you inviting me to participate with you in in this person's life and your gift. Be generosity in the giving of resource. Your moment with Jesus there might be invite them to a moment of encouragement, a moment of prayer, or a moment simply of conversation because people feel seen when someone engages them in back and forth conversation where it's clear that someone's really listening. So let me just drop those ideas off with us as we look to seeing the vulnerable as Jesus sees them in our sphere of influence. So let's pray our prayer together today. Lord Jesus, give me eyes to see the crowds as you see them as individual image bearers. And whether someone is poor in spirit or poor in resources, show me how I can be a vessel of healing to them. In the name of Jesus, I pray Amen. And here's your journal prompt for today. Write down the first group of people who come to mind that you may tend to see negatively as a group rather than as individuals. Write that down in your journal. Then begin to write a prayer following it. It could just be one sentence. Write a prayer that you could see an individual within that group as a person with a story rather than just as part of a crowd. Then write a prayer for the individual. We're getting out of just seeing groups, lumping them all together. We want to see as Jesus sees, see the one, have compassion on the one, and then see the group as many individual souls. Okay, so that's the prompt for today. And so our activation is going to take us a little further out. And I'm going to speak to a few questions after this. Our activation is today. Let's see the individual in the crowd. Ask someone today, perhaps a person living on the street or someone who is struggling in society, what their name is and then share yours. Follow that up with another question. Ask them more about themselves. You can simply leave it at that conversation, or the Lord might take you all the way to the place where you ask, may I pray for you? And I do believe we don't want to say, just be warm and well fed and walk away. We want to be able to give resource when we can. Because in the Gospels, Jesus says, you know, when, when you saw me hungry, when you saw me in need, when you saw me needing clothing, you cared for me. So we want to have eyes to see ears to hear what God is inviting us into, and let that be a part of our all the things growth in this season and in this summer. So having said our activation, we're going to sing our doxology as we do on Mondays together here. But a few questions have come in and one of them particularly moved me and I thought it would be a good time to spend just two or three minutes to talk about it. And it's this idea that, you know, Dan, you sound in these stories like you and others, whether it's JD or other spiritual leaders, like, you're kind of advanced and we're just at the beginning. And you, as you're listening, you might find yourself anywhere on the spectrum of you've done this a lot or you've done this not at all. Some of the things that we're talking about. What I'd like to say here is that my dream in this series is to normalize spiritual gifts, to get them off platforms and out from behind microphones and these amazing stories that we go ooh and ah over and instead to normalize them, to say what I truly believe that anything that I've done with my particular ways that God has gifted me or used me, you can do too. Because I deeply believe that the only reason that God gives more opportunities is because we're practicing. Along the way, we're leaning in. In my own journey, I've had lots of opportunities to lean in or lean out. And many times, by the grace of God, I've chosen to lean in and obey. And it's given me another opportunity to see God at work, opportunity to discover, wow, Dan, you really don't hear the Lord's voice as clearly as you'd like to. Or it's given me an opportunity to say, wow, look at what God did. Which is intended to bring greater humility. Not us getting gifts on business cards, but rather us recognizing that spiritual gifts as the name capital S, spiritual gifts are from the Spirit. They're for the work of Jesus. And we as apprentices are those through whom Jesus is doing his ministry. As I said that Wimber said many, many, many, many years ago, you and I don't have a ministry. We all have the ministry of Jesus. And I would say that another way. You and I have unique personalities and ways. God works through us. But along the way, as we all do, the ministry of Jesus to each one is given a gift for the common good. The scripture says as we're acting in those gifts, we can just incrementally take another step, another step. Or maybe I should go the other way, another step, deeper. We're learning, we're growing. Remember that image of the waves? I said, we take a risk, we recede a little bit. Take another risk, we recede a little bit. Stretch that out over decades of our lives and we're beginning to move somewhere. So when we have our kingdom question, may I pray for you? That is one easy inroad into opening someone up to talking about what Jesus might be about in their lives. But there are other ways that that can happen. And again, you don't have to be an extrovert for this. I'm not an extrovert. I'm a very high on all the tests, the Myers, Briggs, et cetera. I'm a very high introvert. I just tend to be an expressive one. And I do love people. I like to encourage people. So I lean into my gift of encouragement. You may have another gift. Again, we're exploring that in the book Convergence you might have other gifts through which God moves through you. I would say lean into the gifts God's given you. Always couple them with that humility and gentleness that Jesus self describes with compassion, the fruit of the spirit, and then act just on the next small thing that the Lord brings before you. So if I could just say this word of encouragement to you, this is as much about you as it is about me or anyone else that God uses in different ways in the world. These are choices that we make in moments with Jesus. And we at every moment can say, yes, I'm going to lean in. I sense you doing something here, Father, or I'm going to lean back. And the other thing I want to say, and this was another question that came in, is that we want to over time here with seedbed and through the wake up call and other means, we want to keep equipping the saints for the work of ministry. So we're going to keep developing, developing resources to help you pray for people, to help you learn to discern on your journey, to learn all along the way how to more fully engage in the all the things ministry that Jesus invites us into. So we're on that. We're going to be sharing some Holy Spirit stories coming up. We're going to be talking about this more and more in our new room conferences and in all the new room gatherings that we do that are more equipping gatherings like we did with John Thompson on Spiritual gifts this year. And we're going to be just actively leaning in because this is about waking us up to Jesus. That is our mandate at seedbed, waking you up, waking you up to the love of Jesus, to the person of Jesus. And then through our own ongoing awakening to Jesus love for us, we then move in love in the world. And we want to keep training, we want to keep learning. We're creating books and resources and so many other things to keep serving you in that way. So that's part of our sense of mandate at seedbed. All right, let's sing our Doxology for today and move into the fields that God has given us to move into today. Okay, well, let's sing together as we do every Monday. We're going to worship together with the Doxology. It is hymn number 682 in our great Redeemer's praise. Let's worship together as we move out into the field of our day. Praise God from whom blessings flow Praise him, O creatures here below Praise him above, ye heavenly host Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost Amen Amen. Well today as you walk through the streets of your town or your city as you encounter people along the way who may be poor in spirit, may be poor in resources, may be vulnerable, might be in need, in those moments just recognize as a friend used to say, one day you're the have, one day you're the have not. Let's reach out to those who are in the have not phase knowing that we ourselves have been touched by Jesus in our have not moments and other people and let's love and serve with all that we have to give. As Peter said, sometimes we don't have the resources to give but what we do have, we give in the name of Jesus. Let's love people in Jesus name. Be his healing agents in the world world. All right. Blessings. Grab those seeds and I'll see you on the field for the awakening. I'm Dan Will.