For months now I have been writing on three ideas: seek, serve, and send. These words have been a theme for 2026. Disciples of Jesus seek or search for more disciples, they serve one another as Christ serves His church, and they send more disciple-making disciples into a world in need of a Savior.
It occurred to me this morning as I prepared to write another article on this theme that seeking is a matter of the heart. Matthew 9:36-38 says, “Seeing the people, He felt compassion for them, because they were distressed and dispirited like sheep without a shepherd. 37 Then He *said to His disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. 38 Therefore beseech the Lord of the harvest to send out workers into His harvest.”
Preceding a sending of workers in the harvest was a seeing of the need and a compassion for the lost. I heard a preacher use this illustration recently. We can look at our TV screens or mobile device displays and see the image of a starving child in Africa. Flies buzzing around the face, belly distended from lack of nutrition, arms and legs thin and bony. That image should move us. We should care that children like this are dying of hunger. It should compel us to act.
But at the same time, we can see our lost neighbors, family members, classmates, and co-workers every day. We can know they are facing a Christless eternity and not be moved to action. Jesus was so overwhelmed in seeing the people that He felt compassion for them. Compassion is defined as, “a sympathetic consciousness of others' distress coupled with a desire to alleviate it.” It is a visceral emotion. It reflects a churning feeling in the gut.
We can boil seeking for the lost down to techniques and approaches. But if we take the heart of the matter out of our seeking, we are not being like the Savior. As we go, we seek to make disciples because it is a matter of the heart.