Every Soul Stands Before God

 Strangers and Citizens: God’s Heart for Justice and Mercy | Day 13

Good morning, beloved friends in Christ! Have we ever stopped to consider how Jesus treated someone everyone else had already written off?

In John chapter four, Jesus sat down at a well in Samaria. No respectable Jewish teacher would have been there. The Jews despised the Samaritans as a group—they were considered half-breeds, heretics, unclean. Centuries of hatred had built walls so high that “Jews do not associate with Samaritans” (John 4:9, NIV). The entire group was dismissed. Rejected. Labeled.

But Jesus didn’t see a Samaritan. He saw a woman. A real person with a real story—a broken past, five failed marriages, a life of searching for something that would satisfy. And He offered her living water. He offered her Himself.

Or consider the Roman centurion in Matthew chapter eight. Roman soldiers were the occupying force in Israel—oppressors, enforcers of pagan rule. As a group, they were feared and resented. Yet when one centurion came to Jesus begging for his servant to be healed, Jesus didn’t see an enemy uniform. He saw a man of extraordinary faith. “Truly I tell you, I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith” (Matthew 8:10, NIV). Jesus commended a Roman soldier’s faith as greater than anything He’d found among God’s own people.

Do we see what Jesus was doing? In a world that sorted people into categories—Jew and Samaritan, Israelite and Roman, clean and unclean—Jesus looked at individuals. He saw hearts. He responded to each person based on who they actually were, not on the label the world had placed on them.

This matters deeply for us today. Haven’t we felt the pull to do exactly what Jesus refused to do? To look at a group and decide we already know everything we need to know about every person in it? We hear about one officer who made a terrible choice, and we’re tempted to distrust them all. We hear about one immigrant who committed a crime, and we’re tempted to fear every stranger. We see one protester behaving badly, and we write off everyone who disagrees with us.

God speaks to this through the prophet Ezekiel: “The one who sins is the one who will die. The child will not share the guilt of the parent, nor will the parent share the guilt of the child. The righteousness of the righteous will be credited to them, and the wickedness of the wicked will be charged against them” (Ezekiel 18:20, NIV). God judges individuals. He doesn’t condemn a son for his father’s sin or credit a father with his son’s righteousness. Each person stands on their own before Him.

And Paul reminds us: “So then, each of us will give an account of ourselves to God” (Romans 14:12, NIV). Not an account of our group or our political party. Each of us—individually, personally—will stand before God and answer for our own words, our own actions, our own hearts.

If God sees individuals, shouldn’t we? The immigrant our neighbor fears may be a believer fleeing genuine persecution. The officer our friend vilifies may be a faithful servant doing an impossible job with integrity. The person on the other side of the debate may be a sincere Christian struggling to apply Scripture to a complicated situation—just like we are.

And here’s the Gospel truth that levels every one of us: none of us stands innocent on our own. “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus” (Romans 3:23-24, NIV). Every immigrant, every officer, every protester, every citizen reading this devotion—we all stand as sinners before a holy God. And we are all offered the same breathtaking grace through Jesus Christ.

That’s what Jesus offered the Samaritan woman at the well. That’s what He honored in the Roman centurion’s faith. Not group membership. Not the right label or the right nationality. Faith. Individual, personal, heart-level faith in the living God.

When we start seeing people the way Jesus does—one soul at a time—it changes everything about how we engage in difficult conversations. We stop demonizing. We start listening. We hold people accountable for their own choices without condemning them for someone else’s. And we remember that the person across from us, no matter what group the world puts them in, is someone Jesus loved enough to die for.

Prayer

Heavenly Father, thank You for the way Jesus saw people—not as labels or categories, but as individuals You created and loved. Forgive me for the times I’ve written off an entire group of people without seeing the hearts within it. Forgive me for the lazy judgments and the comfortable assumptions. Teach me to see the way Jesus sees—the Samaritan woman at the well, the centurion kneeling for his servant, the tax collector ready to follow. Remind me that I too will stand before You as an individual, accountable for my own words and actions. And thank You that when I stand there, I will stand clothed not in my own righteousness but in the righteousness of Christ, who saw me in my sin and loved me anyway. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

Jesus looked past every label the world created and saw souls. He saw the woman at the well. He saw the centurion in enemy armor. He saw us in our sin. And He loved each one enough to give His life.

“The Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7, NIV). May we learn to look at hearts the way He does.

Praise be to God the Father, who sees every heart and judges with perfect righteousness! Praise be to Jesus Christ, who looked past every human label and gave His life for each of us! Praise be to the Holy Spirit, who works faith in individual hearts—one soul at a time, by grace alone!

To God be the Glory!

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