What Do You Want Me To Do For You? Pt. 1 — Morning Devotions

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So he’s extremely angry with her and embarrassed politically, and father and daughter become estranged in this story. And just this, this shrieking and yelling at each other, these confrontations. And in one scene, he yells out to her, What do you want me to do for you? And she says, there’s nothing you can do. She runs away from home and the story goes on how in absolute misery she ends up on the streets.

Help in the name of love

And the father, he was absolutely desperate, and he prays for God’s mercy, realising that his love for his daughter Caroline is greater than his anger. So he goes after her. And at the end of the film we see father and daughter working together to battle this terrible disease of drug addiction to offer new life and new hope not only for her but for him as well. Now I’m thinking of that question that the father in anger blurted out. What do you want me to do for you? And I think straight away of another time in history when Jesus actually asked the same question, not in a moment of anger, but he asked the same question to a man named Bartemius. The question exactly the same. What do you want me to do for you? Now this story that you can read for yourself in the New Testament and in actually the three books, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, you’ll see it. Bartemius, a beggar sitting by the road, and that’s probably all he could do. He, he was blind and being without sight, he was cut off from the daily events of life. He couldn’t work. Being in total darkness, he was a burden for his family and society and people didn’t particularly want him around.

People probably threw some coins to him, perhaps enough to buy some bread. You know, back in the days that we’re talking about when Jesus was around, blindness and eye disease were very common in the ancient world, and here was a man whose physical impairment had stripped him of the dignity of providing for himself. And you can imagine he couldn’t provide for himself or the family he had.

And other people took a slightly more critical attitude that he was a dreadful sinner, that God had condemned this man because he was blind. But you know, one thing that he does have is a good pair of lungs. He becomes aware of a large crowd coming that day and that Jesus of Nazareth was in that crowd, and he’d heard probably of this powerful man who had healed others, and he yells out. The top of his voice. Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me. A man in deep poverty keeps his ears open for hope. In other words, he’s saying, Look, Jesus, I want you to do something for me. Well, the crowd, of course, told him to be quiet, stop being a nuisance, but this has the, the opposite effect. It makes him even more determined. So he yells out again, Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me. And we read in the Bible that Jesus stops. He asks for someone to bring Bartemius over to him and Bartimaeus throws his cloak aside, jumps to his feet. What do you want me to do for you? Jesus asks. Rabbi, he said, I want to see.

And Jesus, the Son of God, Son of David, has mercy on Him, and we read the words in the Bible. Go, your faith has healed you. And immediately this man, this blind man’s sight is restored. Do you notice that this blind man didn’t say, I want a rich man to come by here and give me all that I need to eat this month, or I wish you could get my brothers and sisters to help me out, you know, I’m on my own. No, he simply said, I want to see again because he knew that there was a world around him.

He wanted to recognise his friends, and probably he wanted to have some self-respect to earn his own money instead of begging for help. Bartemius, he could have had his sight restored and discovered that his wife was ugly, that he was old. He lived in a dry, barren land, that he was an old, pathetic man dressed in rags. But it’s true, isn’t it, that not to see is not to know.

Let’s Pray

Heavenly Father, I pray that you will help us to live well, that we’ll listen to your wisdom, and that our lives will build others up and not tear them apart. Lord, our prayer is that we will build together to make a better world. Amen.

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What Do You Want Me To Do For You? Pt. 2 — Morning Devotions