I know over the years, man, I’ll tell you what, I’ve laid hands on people with every disease imaginable, highly contagious.  You name it, throughout these different areas.  With no trepidation, never a thought that I’m going to be contaminated, only knowing they’re going to be delivered and made whole, praise God!  Amen?  If God’s omnipotence can raise the dead, transform those leprous bodies, cause the lame to walk and the blind to see,  He can make you a witness; amen?  Selah.  “God can do anything, but He can’t deal with my shyness and timidity and fear of men’s faces and pride.”  Because beloved, it’s those things that keep us from shouting from the housetops what we so freely received; amen?

We have to love souls.  We need a love for souls.  We have to be touched with the feelings of their infirmities.  It says that Jesus looked up and said, “Look on the fields; for they are white already unto harvest” (John 4:35) and said, “Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth laborers (amen?) into his harvest” (Matthew 9:38).  And our instantaneous response should be, “Here am I; send me” (Isaiah 6:8), praise God.  Don’t you want a brokenness and a compassion for all men?  But we see these that are on the fringes of society.  We see the homosexuals.  We see these young kids today that are running around with all these piercings and everything that is anti-society and everything that is, “Look at me,” and then when somebody looks, “Don’t look at me.  Why are you looking at me?”  They just need to be loved, man.  Many of them are there because they’ve never known love in their lives, and here we have the ultimate love experience that is absolutely free to present to them.

“God loves you just like you are.  Look right here in the Bible.  Look, it said, while you were a sinner God loved you (Romans 5:8); amen?  While you were a sinner, He died and suffered on your behalf.”  But be very clear of this one thing: He hates sin.  We have too many people today that are calling themselves Christians based upon God’s goodness and grace, almost a universal salvation thought process.  I want to tell you something, man, there has to be a repentance from sin.  There has to be a turning away from sin.  Yes, God loves us.  Yes, He provided for our deliverance, but there’s some dying on our part; amen?

Dying to our pride, our selfishness, our self-indulgences.  One of the ways to get free from loving yourself and pampering yourself is to go out and start serving these other people.  And so, the reality here in Chapter 16, verse 9 is, it tells us of sin, because “they believe not on me.”  You’re not going to hell because of your homosexuality, you’re not going because of all your sexual perversions, your drunkenness, your selfishness, your lusts of other things.  It’s just because you won’t let Jesus be Lord.  When it’s this kind of a compassion that rises up in us, can you see how that helps our faith when we pray for them?  When there’s a true compassion, when there’s a true brokenness, when there’s a true responding to the law of reciprocity, freely we’ve received, freely we give, then we’ll see a big change in our lives.  In the results of our prayers and also in our boldness to go forth.