A Heart for the Lost (Luke 19:41)

And when he drew near and saw the city, he wept over it.
– Luke 19:41

What a picture. Jesus approaching the city of Jerusalem. Seeing a people who have rebelled against his Father, a people who are about to crucify him. And he weeps over the city.

Luke 19:41 challenges us to develop a heart for the lost.

You can just picture it. Tears flowing from his eyes. Jesus weeping, crying over people who are separated from God the Father, which leads us to the reality that Jesus’s Spirit dwells in us, which means to the extent we are walking in step with his Spirit, we will find ourselves weeping over people who are separated in their sin from God the Father.

So I would just ask you, even as I asked myself, when was the last time you or I wept over people who don’t know the salvation of God? When was the last time we wept over the cities where we live… Over the communities around us? When he saw the city, he wept over it.

When was the last time we wept over the lost in the world? Over the unreached? And obviously there’s no way to manufacture this kind of weeping. Only the Spirit of Jesus can supernaturally produce it in us. But if there is not weeping in your life and my life over those who are lost, then surely we need to pray that God would make our spirits more like the Spirit of Jesus.

Luke 19:41 encourages us to pray for the lost all around us.

So let’s ask for this right now. Oh God, we praise you for your compassion, for those who are apart from you. Jesus, we praise you for your love for us that would drive you to the cross to pay the price for our sin in love for us, with compassion for us, with longing for our salvation. All glory be to your name.

And we praise you for your Spirit inside us now. And we want to live, oh God, out of the overflow of the same Spirit of Jesus we read about here in Luke 19:41. So God, we pray, make us people who even now and even more so in the days to come, who weep over the lost as we think even right now about family members, friends, coworkers, classmates, people we know, we can see their faces, who don’t know you.

God, we pray for your heart for them. We cry out to you for their salvation and we pray that you would produce in us Christ-like tears for them, Christ-like crying for them. And not just for the people we know. God, we pray for this kind of perspective of the cities where we live, the countries where we live.

God, we pray that you’d give us your heart for the cities around us, the country around us. And God, we pray for your heart for the nations, for your heart for the peoples of the world, particularly unreached peoples that don’t know, haven’t even heard about your love in Jesus.

Prayer for the Bengali-speaking Indian People

God, we pray specifically for Bengali-speaking Indian men, women, and children, 2.4 million of them, many of whom have scattered and live in many different places outside of India, including 350,000 in the United Kingdom, others in the United States. God, we pray that you give us your heart for people from the nations who are around us in whatever country we live in.

Lord, we pray for the spirit of Jesus to be our spirit in such a way that we weep like he wept in Luke 19:41. God, please produce this kind of compassion in us that leads us to cry out for them and leads us to share the gospel with them no matter what that may cost us.

God, to boldly proclaim the good news of your love for them in Jesus and the one who longs for their salvation so much that he gave his life for them. Oh God, we pray that you would help us to become more like Jesus today in light of Luke 19:41. In his name we pray, amen.