Devotionals

ELIJAH HE HAD A COMPASSIONATE MAN (MANWARD)

by Henry Jaegers
01/09/21
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THE PREPARATION OF THE PROPHET:

Part Five
By Henry Jaegers

ELIJAH

HE WAS A COMPASSIONATE MAN (MANWARD)

Elijah's name means, “my God is Jehovah”. No one knows how he received that name. We do not know enough about his parents or childhood to give us a reason for knowing. Some claim that this was an assumed name. By that we mean he took that name based upon his intimate relationship with God. How could it be otherwise? And being a true servant of Jehovah, he took upon him the heart of God toward people. Someone once defined the word compassion as meaning “your pain in my heart”. A modern English dictionary could not have described the meaning of compassion in a better way. There is no doubt in rising to his service as a prophet of God, he needed to understand how God felt toward wicked people. He was a man who endured hardness and difficulty. It was all part of the way God was equipping him to do his work. But despite hardness and difficulty his heart was tender toward God and being so is compassionate toward people. We are told that Elijah was a man of like passions and he prayed. Compassionate praying means weeping over the sins in the hardness of men's hearts just as God does.

Men do not become compassionate that instantly. It takes time to understand and it takes prayer and fellowship with God to see men the way God sees them. Sometimes we look at men's wickedness with contempt and in so doing we may inwardly wish God's judgment upon them. But men are lost to ignorance and the lies that they embrace not knowing about their condition or the seriousness of it. We who are God's servants must take time to think and to pray maybe for long periods before we can weep over their souls. If we are unfaithful regard-ing our fellowship with God and are in the habit of forsaking His word compassion is not something that will come easily. Do we believe in our hearts that men without Christ are doomed to spend an eternity without God, without hoped spending eternity in the lake of fire? For the effective servant of God compassion is no longer an option and we must spend whatever time that is necessary to have it. It is something worthy to pray for. One of the ways, that God wills to answer our prayer is when we ask Him to give us a compassionate heart. Have you ever wept over the soul of a lost friend or relative? I believe one of the ways that God prompts us to have compassion is when he gives us a heart that weeps for the lost. The evangelist may seem crude and hard and unfeeling at times but if compassion is missing there is no longer any means to preach. Men are drawn to God when they sense through a compassionate heart that we really care for them and, so we find that Elijah was a man who had a compassionate heart.