By Travis McCool
Matthew 25:35 reads, “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in.”
This is a teaching from Jesus — not from me, not from Paul, not from Peter, nor from some random pastor. Jesus taught this, and He said it in a heavy and serious passage.
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“The standard Jesus lays down is the care of the people in our lives who are in need and who don’t fit the regular convenience…”
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Separating the Flock
The passage in Matthew 25 is embedded in the context of the final judgment of the world. Jesus is explaining who are His and who are not, and this passage is His criteria for separating His flock from impostors. What is His metric?
He doesn’t separate His flock based on proper theology or a record of church attendance, although those are important.
The standard Jesus lays down is the care of the people in our lives who are in need and who don’t fit the regular convenience of also being the ones we might hang with on a regular basis if we had our choice.
He specifies this by saying that visiting people “in prison” or who are “hungry” (implying the homeless or inconveniently poor) or total “strangers” are of high value to His criteria for defining who are His and who are not.
These metrics are so vital that He is compelled to put an exclamation point at the end of this section by telling us that those who don’t make time for people like this in their life will be defined as “goats” rather than as “sheep” and will be thus cast into “eternal punishment.”
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“Jesus left His place of comfort and power to step down and live with the broken and hurting.”
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Finding the Outsiders
If hanging with church people is your regular rhythm, and when you serve you do so in the context of more church people, and when you study the Scriptures you do so with more church people, and when you feed others you do so to those who share your convictions, stop and ask: Where are the outsiders? Where are the people in my context who are “in prison”? Who are the “hungry”? Who is the “stranger”? Is my life circular and comfortable? How would Jesus judge my patterns of living?
Jesus left His place of comfort and power to step down and live with the broken and hurting. He lived with those who did not believe in Him so that, by His presence and influence, they might have new life and be cared for. Through that process, people would come to know God Himself.
He did it — not because it was “effective,” lest we forget that the only perfect man to ever exist discipled guys (for three straight years) who ended up denying knowing Him, turned on Him for money, and generally didn’t understand His mission. Jesus did what He did because it was the right thing to do. He set a pattern of living and a way of seeing others that means following Him requires self-sacrifice and leaving our places of comfort to serve “the least of these.”
Follow the patterns of Jesus. Don’t get lost, and don’t be goats.
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Travis McCool is an elder and church planter in the Pacific Northwest Conference of the Free Methodist Church. He is a lifelong native of the Pacific Northwest, and he has been serving in ministry since 2008 and church planting since 2018. He has been married to his wife, Krista, since 1998. They have two sons, Ethan (19) and Connor (16).
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