Intimate Concern for a Brother

For out of much affliction and anguish of heart I wrote to you through many tears, not that you would be made sorrowful but that you would know the love which I have more abundantly toward you.  2 Corinthians 2:4

But I, I will most gladly spend and be utterly spent on behalf of your souls. If I love you more abundantly, am I loved less? 2 Corinthians 12:15

Paul has been a pattern to me in his intimate concern for the saints and the churches under his shepherding care. He spent and was spent on the saints and wrote to them with many tears. That's a window of how he shepherded the saints. What a wonderful pattern! I only hope and pray that I can learn from brother Paul.

When a brother called me and requested to come and stay with me for fellowship and rest, I could only respond by saying, "Praise the Lord! Welcome!" In fact, I have not been good at giving hospitality at all. Firstly, I don't have that experience, and whenever guests came it was an experiment for me. Those experiments turned out to be my wonderful experiences. 

On the infrastructure side, we don't have enough room to accommodate guests, and we don't have an air conditioner to host the guest as we ourselves have been living all this while without it, despite the hot and humid weather. It was ok for my family as we are adapted to this kind of lifestyle, but I cannot impose this on my guest. Above all, our food too is very simple and we cook mostly a North Eastern style of food while most of our guests are either from the South or from the North; our food habits are opposite. Despite all these, we braved the challenges and cared for intimate concern rather than physical comfort.

Thank God, for this brother, there is a guest room available at the literature office which has not been used as we have not been meeting due to the present pandemic situation. We did our best to make him as comfortable as possible. We also did our best to give him the food that would be suitable for him. It turned out that he liked all the food we gave him, enjoyed it, and wanted more of it despite being a North Indian. This was just the physical care for cherishing him.

On the nourishing side, every day I spent some time with him to fellowship or pray together. Each day of his stay for six days, the Lord gave a fresh message and a burden to release to him. The Lord worked on him so well that he was open from within to receive all the fellowship despite he being a rebel just a week ago. The Lord has his sovereign way of gaining people and recovering them for the church life. From my side, I did all that I could do, to my very best. The outcome, I leave it to the Lord.

In the past, I dealt with rebels against the church life or opposers of the Lord's recovery by defending the truths using the Bible. I fought tooth and nail to prove to the opponents that what we follow is truth, orthodox, and biblically correct. But despite winning the verbal battle using the Bible, they all avoided me or stopped talking to me by not receiving my calls nor my messages. They were defeated in the truth battle but never subdued inwardly to acknowledge the fact. I felt very disappointed that despite showing all the correct Bible verses to vindicate our beliefs and practices, the person themselves was not gained at all. This time, in dealing with opposers, the Lord led me to pray for them and shepherd them. Though I knew how to fight and defend the truths which I dearly uphold, to win opposers is by prayer and shepherding them with an intimate concern. I experimented with this brother. And it worked! And later, after staying for a couple of days, he repented and asked forgiveness for all the misinformation and accusations against the ministry. He even called up and messaged all the brothers he hurt by his accusation and set things right. I myself had taken him to two brothers to fellowship face to face.

After all these, I thought to myself, had I reacted according to his accusations, he would not even dare to call me again, far less, come and stay with me for six days. Thank God for this precious lesson of intimate concern even for opposing brother. He was recovered back and now he started enjoying the Lord through the ministry books again.

Lord, grant me thr grace to have an intimate concern for all the saints.