Article: Who are your Mother and Father, Brothers and Sisters? | Sheeba Robinson, Nagpur

What Jesus Christ said as an answer to this question is, “For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.”

Matthew 12 : 48 – 50,
He replied to him, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” Pointing to his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.”

I want to share with you a beautiful testimony of one of our close friends’ mother, who is from a missionary family. She lives with her son, his wife and their daughter, in the southern part of India. His mother takes care of her granddaughter. Sometimes she does cook for the whole family. Above all, she always spends her life in fasting and prayers.

Now, I’m going to share the most beautiful part.., which touched me a lot.
Once she said to her son and daughter-in-law that “I’m not doing all these helps because you are my children, rather I’m doing these to help a missionary family, who’s busy working for the Lord. So that your precious time should not be wasted in just doing the housework, but you get more time to work for the Lord.”

I salute this great woman of God, and I praise God for her with all my heart, who through her action has shown us the ‘unconditional love of Christ,’ which is very rare to see in today’s Christian families.

I shared this instance, because I find that there is something for us to learn from this. Because we don’t see Christ’s unfailing love in most of the Christian families in the whole world now-a-days.

It can be possible in one way..

As this woman of God shows an example, ‘we should see our family members, relatives, friends as our fellow brothers/ sisters-in-Christ, because God sees us so.’
When we are living in a family, we respect our parents, but what about our siblings we grew up with, of course we love, care and trust them, but do we respect them too or do they respect you… It’s not a question, just try to think hard about what I’m trying to say here….

If we just start with trying to learn to see our family members, cousins, friends as our fellow bro/sis-in-Christ, then it’ll become very easy for us to respect them and not to hurt each others’ feelings as well.

‘This is what Jesus Christ wants from each one of us.., doing the will of the Heavenly Father..’

Please read Matthew 25: 34 onwards…
In 34th verse, it says, King will say, “Come, you who are blessed by my Heavenly Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world.”

In the 40th verse, The King will reply, “I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.”

What does it mean?

It means that ‘seeing our family members, siblings, cousins, friends as our fellow believers’ and the things we do for them, helping them in all the possible ways, praying for them, encouraging and supporting them when they are struggling in family matters, marriage, with children, financial area, in growing spiritually, in ministry and so on… By doing all these things for them, ‘we are showing Christ’s unconditional love to them.. and along with this, we are doing the will of our Heavenly Father…’

Let me conclude here with a task and as a challenge for all of us to take this point of view seriously. I think we must not forget this ‘when we fail to see our family members/ people close to us as God sees them, we won’t be able to respect them, we will be keep on hurting them knowingly or unknowingly, and by doing so, all the more we will be hurting God’s feelings as well..’

I pray for all of us that may God help us to understand that God looks at each person as individual being and we should not hurt anyone but try hard to live a life pleasing in His sight. Amen, God bless you!

Sheeba Robinson, Nagpur