Compassion Re-Defined…

// January 27th, 2009 // OUT LOUD THOUGHTS

I guess I’ve been pretty surprised to learn that there are so many Christians living around Ocean Beach, and I say that because I’ve never seen a presence in the community.

I was talking to God about it the other day when I was walking to work, and I sensed God say, “Yeah, there are a lot of Christians here, but they have no influence.”

I would have stopped dead in my tracks had I not been walking uphill at the time. Because I knew God
wasn’t talking about influence in a worldly sense, like legislating morality, keeping a new bar from opening up, or electing President Bush. He was referring to a legitimate Presence in the community. And that is a presence of bumper stickers and Jesus fish, but literally His Presence in us that brings radical change.
There are people who call themselves the followers of Christ, but if they don’t do the same things that He did and if the lives that are exposed to them aren’t changing, then what they are doing is something else.

It all comes down to something very simple: LOVE.

Because I think if we had a focus group or survey of the random sampling of Christians in the neighborhoods around me, I don’t really think that people have raised the white flag of surrender as much as they’ve raised their shoulders and said, “I just don’t care.” Because at the end of the day, the only thing that matters is whether or not we truly loved.

Two big commandments: Love God. Love People.

You see if we truly love people it will force us to act on God’s behalf. People who have to make lame excuses for why they don’t get involved with the plight of other people simply just do not care. It’s much easier to say, that’s not my job, it’s not my calling.

You know when I watch Jesus, I just see Him relating to whatever came His way. Love was His mantra, His belief, His reason, His call to action. He came to earth because of Love. There was no other reason to be here.

I think we forget a lot that we’re supposed to love people. The fact that we’re supposed
to love people like we love ourselves, and some other really difficult things like
loving our enemies, seem like impossible tasks. And there’s good reason for feeling like it’s impossible. Do you know why? Because it is. It’s not humanly possible to love people sacrificially and by choice regardless if they hate us.

Love for people, just like everything in the mission, is based on response. We can only love people as much as we have truly experienced the love of God. That’s why you see Scriptures that tell us to forgive as Christ forgave us, love your wife like Christ loved the Church. Our depth of knowledge and experience is what enables us to respond. I think people who have a difficult time forgiving, have never experienced forgiveness. I think people who are selfish, greedy graspers, who aren’t lovingly generous have not experienced the generosity of God. People who are reckless tyrants don’t know and haven’t experienced the patience and unconditional love of God. The mission is fueled by love from God for us. It changes us, and the overflow of that love is redirected toward the world.

We all know that we’re supposed to care. We know we should love people. I think maybe we underestimate love. We don’t realize how it could change the world, or how a fuller expression of it could change us.

Do you think you know God? Do you think you know His love?

For years, I ran past this verse as I read through the book of Matthew. It never jumped out to me because I hadn’t really experienced God’s love for me, nor knew how that could impact me to change the world.

Matthew 9:36
“Seeing the people, [Jesus] felt compassion for them.”

In the book, Organic Church, Neil Cole brought this verse to life:

“…The busier I get, the less I care about others. When Jesus saw the crowds, He saw more than an obstacle getting in the way of His mission. He saw His mission, and He felt compassion for them. For Jesus however, His body reacted to His compassion. It was an immediate and physical response. He felt it. Actually, in the original language this is one word: splancthna. The word for compassion is quite descriptive; it literally means “bowels.” There is good reason for using this descriptive word. When you feel really emotional, where do you feel it? The first time we men picked up the phone to call a special girl and ask her out, we felt it in our splancthna. When the doctor has crushing news from the results of your blood test or biopsy, you feel it first in your splancthna.

So when Jesus saw all the people, His breath was taken away. He was hit in the solar plexus. He was bent over in discomfort.

The Bible reveals why He felt compassion for them. It is because He saw them as distressed and downcast, like sheep without a shepherd. The two words translated “distressed” and “downcast” are also highly descriptive. They are violent words. Distressed can be translated as “harassed,” or even as molested.” The word downcast is a wrestling term that can be translated as “pinned down by force.”

If we really saw people like this, there’s no doubt we’d be motivated. We’re so hesitant. We’re so, frankly, uncaring that we don’t get involved. We’re afraid; we’re too busy; we don’t want to be inconvenienced; or we don’t want to involve ourselves in personal matters.

If there was a child across your street that you knew was being molested, you would get involved. Fear, being late for work, being inconvenienced, getting too personally involved would not be a concern of yours. 90 year old grannies would march across the street with a walker and kick the front door down to save the child.

What kind of Jesus followers would we be, what kind of impact, how world changing would it be if became people who felt the expression of love that Jesus has for each person on the planet. Do you think that could make a difference? I do. I know I want to love like that. I have to admit I’m not there yet. But I’m asking God to work that in me. It’s not possible up to me, but by His grace and the power of His Spirit, it can happen.

And it can happen for you as well, when you experience His love, when you get to know Him, when you quit trying to force it and lean in to His grace and rely on His power.

You see, I look at the world – everywhere God’s Kingdom hasn’t been announced – that is, everywhere there’s not freedom, everywhere there is brokenness, people hurting, hungry, taken against their wills, oppressed – you know you don’t have to even look at Africa or some 3rd world country to find that. Those people are your neighbors, they’re my neighbors. I pass them on the street. I buy milk from them.

One of my own friends said that we shouldn’t make people think that our calling is their calling. I have no idea what that meant. All I know is, to be a Jesus follower, you have to care about the same things He cared about. You have to love everybody sacrificially. And it’s in those places where the world-changing kinda stuff breaks out.

It’s when and where we would be people who are unexplainable. People being people who they just couldn’t on their own. Not weird. Naturally Supernatural.

I don’t know. I just have this belief is this burden in my heart for whole communities that could be changed if we saw those communities like Jesus did, if we’d pray about the same things that He’d pray about, if we’d ACT on the things that He would act on.

If we’d make that unseen reality, real.

Then we’d be telling a great story with our lives. The world would change.

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