Luke 7:13 “When the Lord saw her, He had compassion on her and said to her, “Do not weep.” 14 Then He came and touched the open coffin, and those who carried him stood still. And He said, “Young man, I say to you, arise.” 7:15 And he who was dead sat up and began to speak. And He presented him to his mother.”

That short phrase, ‘He had compassion on her.’ catches our attention and gives us insight into the heart of our Savior. All believers must come before our Savior in humility but we need to also come remembering that He is ‘compassionate’ and that His ‘mercy endures forever.’ It is fundamental to the heart of God to respond to our frail and faltering needs and to forgive us and emotionally strengthen us. Here we see into the heart of God at a funeral procession turned into a celebration. Bernard of Clairvaux summed this idea up well when he said, ‘Justice seeks out only the merits of the case, but pity only regards the need.’ It was compassion, not justice that moved Jesus then and He still responds to our needs in the same way today. Don’t you love verse fifteen the ‘dead sat up and began to speak’? It says this young man who was dead started talking and certainly he had to be speaking about what God had just done. So we still see when Jesus raises people today who are dead in their sins, they also ‘began to speak’ about God. It is one of the signs we expect to see when a person gets saved. They start talking about God in a positive way perhaps for the first time in their life.

“LORD, help us to speak well of Your grace and mercy this day to others.”