“When Jesus heard about it, he withdrew from there by boat to a remote place to be alone. When the crowds heard this, they followed him on foot from the towns. When he went ashore, he saw a large crowd, had compassion on them, and healed their sick.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

A devastating hurricane recently smashed its way through my region. The impact on my own community was barely noticeable. We endured a few hours without power and some water seeping in the basement of the church building. A couple of hours west of here, though, was not nearly so fortunate. I recently heard a colleague who did mission work in Libya during and in the aftermath of their civil war say that if you took away the guns and the violence, the worst affected areas look very much like a war zone. To say the response to send and bring relief and help has been overwhelming would be an understatement. One disaster relief organization quickly mobilized to have 2,000 beds available for volunteers to help with the recovery effort and has found themselves having to manage 20,000 applications to help. And the vast majority of this response has come from Christians. Why do followers of Jesus do this in a way that goes so very far beyond what the adherents of any other worldview do?

The fact is that Christians are more generous than non-Christians. They give more frequently, more generously, and more sacrificially than anyone else. They volunteer more hours. They arrive to help with recovery efforts faster. Because they do it so much, they tend to be more organized. When a disaster strikes somewhere in the world, Christians mobilize and go to help sooner and stay longer than anybody else. I guarantee you that it will be local churches leading the way in cleaning up from Hurricane Milton now that it has passed over the Florida peninsula. I know of one church located right where the storm made landfall that I strongly suspect had a plan in place before the storm hit, and is now executing that plan in its wake, even at the expense of its members’ own personal recovery needs.

A few years ago, a member of my church went down to Houston to help with relief efforts after Hurricane Harvey. He was part of a feeding crew the North Carolina Baptists on Mission sent down. He said that all of their efforts were publicly identified as part of the Red Cross’s response to the storm. The Red Cross branding was everywhere. But those mostly weren’t Red Cross volunteers. They were Southern Baptists from Southern Baptist Disaster Relief which itself is nothing more than the combined strength of the Disaster Relief teams from the various state conventions. Nobody does disaster relief better than followers of Jesus.

Again then, why is this? One common suggestion, especially from critics, is that this is the result of our being commanded to do it. That’s not entirely without merit as far as explanations go. The trouble is that the insinuation is that we wouldn’t do any of this unless we had been commanded to do it. Perhaps, but where is the precise command to do the kinds of things we do? We are indeed commanded to love one another like Jesus loved us. But we’re not really ever told how. Nowhere is there a command to help people who have been impacted by a natural disaster of one sort or another. You won’t find a command to take up love offerings for members of the community who are struggling under a financial burden for some reason. There are no instructions to create food ministries or homeless ministries or addiction recovery ministries. Nobody told Christians to invent hospitals. There’s not a verse that says anything about showing up on the ground as soon as humanly possible to help hurricane victims recover from the damage of the storm. The same goes with tornadoes and earthquakes and typhoons and tsunamis and floods and fires and so on and so forth.

So, is there any substance to this suggestion masquerading as criticism that Christians only do any of this because we are commanded to do it? Sure. By simple observation, most people who don’t claim to be followers of Jesus don’t do anything like what we do much less to the extent that we do it. Apparently that command to love like Jesus did really has an impact.

Now, that’s not to say that people who don’t follow Jesus don’t do anything to help their friends and neighbors or give charitably to various causes. That would be silly. Of course they do. And these gestures should receive the praise they deserve. Any Christian who would look at such things with even the slightest bit of cynicism or criticism doesn’t really understand the worldview he professes to hold. We believe that all people are made in the image of a God who is good and generous and kind. Because of that, people are going to at least occasionally do things that are good and generous and kind whether they follow Him or even believe in Him or not. And, if their understanding of the path to what they envision as salvation is dependent at all on how they behave, they may do a lot of things that are good and generous and kind. That’s great. I’d always rather people behave that way than not. That makes the world better for everybody.

But the reason Christians do what they do when the people around them are suffering from the effects of sin in the world (whether they are responsible for those effects or someone else is) is not primarily the result of a command, but of the nature of who we profess to follow. We become like what we worship. That is, we gradually come to reflect the character of the thing or person to which or to whom we give our highest devotion. And because Christians at least profess to give their highest devotion to Jesus, it really shouldn’t be any surprise that we wind up looking like Him relatively consistently.

Now, does this mean Christians are just better people because they profess to follow Jesus? No, and what a silly idea that fundamentally misunderstands one of the most basic premises of the Gospel. Nor does this mean that we look like Jesus all the time. The truth and trouble here are that people who follow Jesus often struggle to make Him their chief point of devotion. As a result, we far too often take on the characteristics of whatever else we’ve substituted into that position. And given that there’s no one and nothing like Jesus, that never goes well. People who have been hurt by the church or by individual believers were hurt because those people and churches had substituted devotion to Jesus for devotion to other things and were behaving like it. Shame on us for such a failure.

But when we do get it right – and we get it right a lot – the results speak for themselves. And the reason for this is that, again, Jesus was perfect. He was kind and generous and gentle and loving and good and compassionate and on and on and on. This story right here is a perfect illustration. Jesus was actively seeking to get off by Himself to grieve after hearing about His cousin’s death at the hands of Herod the Tetrarch. In spite of His efforts, though, the crowds followed Him. His own needs were pressing, but instead of insisting that He get what He need before attending to anyone else, He had compassion on the people who were seeking them out and ministered to them instead. He compassionately put others first, even at His own expense, and worked to make their lives better.

Because Jesus did things like this all the time, and because He told His followers that the one command we have to keep is to love like He did, we follow suit. But even if He hadn’t given that command, by virtue of following Him and making Him our chief point of devotion, we would have wound up looking like Him anyway. The truth is that many if not most of the things you enjoy about the world today are somewhere along the line of history the result of someone professing to follow Jesus seeking to live out His command to love like He did.

You may not agree with Christianity. You may not like Christianity and its followers. You may be totally justified in feeling that way too because of a bad experience you had with some Christians who didn’t look very much like Christ. But if a major disaster lands on your doorstep, you’ll be grateful that you live close to them because they’ll probably be the first ones there to help you recover from it. That’s just what we do. Because that’s what Jesus would have done.