Topic: Ministry of Presence — Key Scripture: Matthew 25:40
“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’” — Matthew 25:40
Jesus has a way of upending the categories we use to decide who matters.
In Matthew 25, He paints a picture of the final accounting — the moment where everything is weighed and seen and named. And in that picture, the criteria by which lives are evaluated is not doctrinal precision or public ministry or the size of the platform or the number of people helped or the significance of the work accomplished.
It is simpler than all of that. And harder.
Did you see the hungry person and feed them? Did you see the stranger and welcome them? Did you see the sick person, the imprisoned person, the one the world had deemed least and last and expendable — and did you show up for them? Did you see them at all?
And then, the sentence that changes everything: whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me.
Jesus is not watching from a distance to see how we treat the broken. He is hiding in them.
This is the idea of presence taken to its most radical conclusion. The encounter with the suffering, the grieving, the marginalized, the forgotten — is not a ministry activity that we perform for Jesus. It is an encounter with Jesus. He has placed Himself, by His own declaration, inside the experience of the least. Inside the hunger, the strangeness, the sickness, the imprisonment.
Which means that every time someone shows up for a person in their lowest place — every time a friend stays in the room, every time someone shows up with groceries without being asked, every time a counselor or a pastor or a caring presence simply refuses to look away from the weight another person is carrying — something sacred is happening. Something that is not merely human compassion, however beautiful human compassion is.
It is an encounter with Christ.
I think about this passage often when I consider what BRKN Soul Care is trying to do and be. Not because the people who come here are the least of these in some condescending sense — they are not lesser than anyone. But because they are often the ones the world has passed by. The ones whose grief has gone on too long for the people around them. The ones whose suffering does not fit into the categories that typically attract support. The ones who have been told, implicitly or explicitly, that their needs are inconvenient.
To sit with the unseen is not a small act. It is, according to Jesus, an encounter with the divine.
The ministry of presence is not glamorous. It does not come with platforms or metrics or visible outcomes. You cannot easily quantify what it means to sit with someone in the weight of their grief and simply refuse to leave. You cannot put a number on the value of being the person who stays when everyone else has moved on.
But Jesus can. And according to Matthew 25, He values it as though it were done to Him personally. As though every act of faithful, unhurried, costly presence is a gift placed directly into His hands.
This is the theological foundation of everything BRKN Soul Care is built on. Not the accumulation of credentials or frameworks or outcomes — though training and competence matter and are taken seriously. But the conviction that the person sitting across from you in their grief and their brokenness and their exhaustion is someone in whom Christ is present. And that the act of seeing them, really seeing them, and staying with them in it, is one of the most sacred things a human being can do.
It also means that the work of soul care is not something that belongs only to professionals or trained counselors or ordained ministers. It belongs to anyone willing to show up. To anyone willing to see the least and last and overlooked person in their life and refuse to look away. To anyone willing to carry a friend on a mat, or sit on the ground for seven days, or lower someone through a roof, or unbind someone from their grave clothes.
These are all the same act, dressed in different clothes. And they are all, according to Jesus, acts done unto Him.
Who in your life is waiting to be seen? Who is the person the crowd has moved past? Who is carrying something that everyone around them has decided is no longer their problem?
Show up. Stay. See them.
What you do for them, you do for Him.
If this resonates with where you are today, BRKN Soul Care is here. Book a free Introductory Conversation at brknsoulcare.org and take the first step. You don’t have to carry this alone.