The Power of Compassion

G'day, thanks for joining the Heights Church podcast today. We hope you enjoy our message.

If you're in the Sydney area, be sure to join us at the Heights Church at Goldstone

Road, Cornstone Heights, Sydney, Australia.

Today's Bible reading is Luke chapter 10, verses 25 to 37.

Luke 10:25–37

The parable of the Good Samaritan. On one occasion, an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus.

Teacher, he asked, what must I do to inherit eternal life?

What is written in the law? He replied, how do you read it?

He answered, love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul

and with all your strength and with all your mind and love your neighbor as yourself.

You have answered correctly, Jesus replied.

Do this and you will live. But he wanted to justify himself.

So he asked Jesus, and who is my neighbor?

In reply, Jesus said, A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho.

When he was attacked by robbers, they stripped him of his clothes,

beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead.

A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man,

he passed by on the other side.

So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side.

But a Samaritan, as he travelled, came where the man was, and when he saw him, he took pity on him.

He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring in oil and wine.

Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him.

The next day, he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper.

Look after him, he said, and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.

Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?

The expert in the law replied, the one who had mercy on him.

Jesus told him, go and do likewise.

This morning we continue our series in Know, Grow and Show.

And we're looking at one aspect of showing Christ to each other in the world.

Now, there's many aspects of that, and one of them is mission,

obviously, that you go out in mission.

The other way is in which things like fair trade market that we have,

where we're showing our passion for fair trade in the world.

The other things that we would have with the catalyst group,

where we show our passion or our commitment towards making our voice known within

our community as far as justice issues go.

But one way in which we show Christ to each other in the world is not necessarily in the actions,

the specific actions that we do, but rather we have a heart of compassion and

we cultivate our heart of compassion.

We've seen images this week of people who are in need.

Our heart goes out for those in the Gaza area who are starving,

the kids that are starving.

And I'm sure your heart went out for a while as well. and you have kind of a

feeling of what can we do?

Can we do anything as we move on from that? Because compassion is not just a feeling.

Compassion is, although it is a feeling, also moves into doing something, action.

Compassion, sister, is often the actions that we perform at the end of it.

It'd be things like generosity and commitment in that sort of sense.

Compassion really is an outworking of love. And love, as you know,

is not just a head knowledge.

It's not just having a heart knowledge like I love you.

It is an action that goes out.

Now, I don't know whether you've been on the receiving end or the giving end

of compassion in action.

Maybe you've bought a meal for somebody who's been in need.

Maybe you've paid forward at Macca's where you pay for the person behind.

And if you have, well, then I'll follow you down the Macca's drive-through later on.

Maybe you've given somebody your car instead of trading it in.

Because trade in, you get next to nothing and you might as well just give it

to somebody. So I've done that. And it broke down a couple of weeks later.

That was Heath, by the way. So next time he comes along. It happened to Susan

and I through the Heights.

The Heights here is incredibly generous, where a person used their frequent

flyer points to get Susan back to Canada. I think it was when your mum died.

Maybe you've just seen somebody in need and just responded.

I'm privileged because often people who are in need come to the church and ask for assistance.

But I'm privileged to give out your money that you give because we have a compassion

fund and I've got to discern what's right and what's wrong and how we can help people as a church.

So I'm privileged in that. So thank you for the opportunity of that,

but you are faithful in giving to enable me to do that.

Bill Hybels, a former minister in the United States, tells the story of a lady in church.

She was hurried in buying groceries because her guests were coming over for

tea and she had to go and buy groceries to come and to make that happen.

But as it seems to happen, she ended up on the slow lane at registers.

And you've probably done that before where you get into the register line,

you go, oh my goodness, why did I get in there? I'm in a hurry.

And in the front of the line was this woman who was rummaging through her purse

and she heard the checkout operator say, what do you mean you don't have enough money?

And her first thought was, doesn't she know that I'm in a hurry?

It might be your first thought as well.

The woman felt that God was prompting her though to pray for the woman's bill.

And she rationalized it, as we often do in her mind, because we hate giving

away money as a general rule.

And she's sure that her husband wasn't going to understand everything that went on.

But she looked at the woman in the clothes that she was wearing and imagined her children.

They might be waiting at home for the groceries that were there.

And she leaned over to the checkout operator and quietly said,

add my groceries to her bill and I'll pay for her.

And that's compassion in action. And for us as Christians, we've got to ask

ourselves, why are we compassionate at all?

Well, the reason, the primary reason we're compassionate at all is we're made in God's image.

And part of God's image and his character is compassion.

God the Father is compassionate. We read in Isaiah 54, 7 and 8,

for a brief moment, I abandon you. God was saying that to the nation of Israel.

But with deep compassion, I will bring you back In a surge of anger,

I hid my face from you for a moment, but with everlasting kindness,

I will have compassion on you, the Lord, the Redeemer says.

And likewise, in the New Testament, we read in 2 Corinthians 1,

chapter 3, praise be to the God of the Father, O Lord Jesus Christ,

as Paul puts this great benediction sort of out there, that the statement out

there, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort.

That's God. God is compassionate. And we should be very thankful that what we

have been given by God and how his compassion has enabled us to walk with him

at all and to travel with him at all.

God's not a tyrant. He uses us for his own agenda and then couldn't care less at the end of it.

No, God is a God of compassion. In other words, as God's people,

as we grow in being like Christ.

It will not only be for our own efforts and our own transformation,

but the Holy Spirit will challenge us so that as the image of God emerges from

us, his character, God's character will be shown in each of us.

Jesus was moved with compassion. Obviously, he's God, so he's moved with the

compassion of him, the ultimate God.

So Matthew 9, 35 and 36, when Jesus saw the crowd, he had compassion upon them,

because they were harassed and helpless like sheep without a shepherd.

So Jesus saw people. He really noticed them.

And I don't know whether you've seen that throughout the Bible,

that is where other people like the disciples, people would come along and ask

for things and they thought that it was an inconvenience on Jesus.

It's going to hold him up. He couldn't get to the place where he needed to go.

Jesus actually saw the heart of people.

He looked through even their needs and he saw their heart of what, needed to happen.

Now, I don't know whether you have had the opportunity for somebody who's just

random to come up and ask you for money.

I'm not talking about necessarily the person who just sits on the corner in like St.

Andrew's Square, where I worked at one period of time and I had to walk by them every day.

I had to come to a point in my mind, what do I do?

Do every single day do I walk by them knowing that they're in need or proposing

that they propose that they're in need? Or what do I do?

How do I put that into action? I couldn't walk by from Town Hall Station to St.

Andrew's Square every single day and walk by the same people and not feel something for them.

And so I asked God to open up my eyes so that I would see them the same as Jesus sees them.

Jesus really noticed people. I wanted to really notice people.

I wanted to know their needs.

And so I started, I can't know their needs without getting into a conversation with people.

And so I spent a lot of my time, got trained early so that I wouldn't be late

to work so I could have conversations with people.

But that's not handling their need. That's really just finding out more about

their needs. So then I was prompted by the Holy Spirit of what I should do,

how I was going to help these people.

So every Thursday, we got together at the Pizza Hut and we had pizza,

all the people who were sitting in San Andreas Square.

And I had to organize with the manager to have tables put outside because they

weren't smelling all that great.

And they had all the stuff that they could, didn't leave all their stuff,

they had to bring it all to the place.

So it was all a big thing. But somehow or other, our compassion needs to lead

to seeing people's real need as Jesus opens up our eyes.

So I'm not just feeling pity for people.

I'm actually feeling compassion in putting that into action.

See, compassion in Greek is not just only a gut level emotion,

but it's a gut level emotion that drives us into action.

Compassion is different than pity. Pity is feeling for somebody.

I feel for their need. I see their need. I feel for them.

And it's like looking at television and seeing all the stuff that happens that's

presented before us, discerning what is right and what is wrong and feeling

for people. That's pity.

That's the definition. Pity is feeling sorry for someone, someone suffering

or misfortune, but it's often from a distance.

And I can make, in some ways, a person seem weak or below me if I look down

on them that their plight in life is something I don't know how they got to,

don't know how they arrived there.

They've arrived there, and I feel sorry for them that they're at that place in life.

And if I did that at St. Andrews Square, it is amazing the amount of things

that you come to know about people when you get into a conversation.

I talked to one guy who was a professor at university who chose to live on the

street for all the circumstances that happened in his life.

Did I have looked down on him that he was below me? No.

Pity rarely moves us, though, to action, and often there's a passive feeling of sympathy.

Oh, that's sad. but we don't step out into their world and share their burden.

But compassion is different.

It's not feeling for somebody, it's feeling with somebody.

Compassion is not just a feeling of sorrow for somebody, but it's entering into

their suffering with them.

It's that empathy, a desire to help and to journey with them.

It's about coming alongside somebody as an equal, sharing in their pain and seeking for their good.

That's true compassion. always will move us to action, helping,

comforting, or standing with a person as I see your pain and I want to help

carry you through your journey.

Jesus didn't turn away. He stepped in and moved to action in teaching and healing

and feeding and touching the absolute untouchable.

So in Mark 1 and Mark 20, Jesus touches the leper, the man who no one else would

go near, banned from religious ceremony and venues, an outcast from society.

So for Jesus just to touch him, totally overrode any cultural,

religious, or social boundaries that ever existed in that person's life.

And from that point, he was with him.

Now, what does compassion do? It marks Christ's followers.

In 362 AD, Roman Emperor Julian, who was called Julian the Apostate because

of his absolute antagonist way against Christianity, wrote a letter to the high

priest of Galatia and said this,

why do we not observe how the kindness of Christians to strangers has done most to advance their cause,

it's disgraceful that the impetuous Galatians, who are Christians,

support not their own poor, but ours as well.

All men see that our people lack aid from us.

He then lists a whole lot of things in his letter of what Christians were doing

and concludes, each of these things, I think, ought to really be practiced by us.

In other words, Julian, the emperor of Rome at the time, saw Christians and

how they were compassionate against the poor in all sorts of different ways

and said, we need to be like them.

It marked them as Christians.

An emperor who was vigorously discriminated against Christians,

there was something about compassion and its sister, of course,

the generosity that Christians showed that was a unique witness to the gospel.

And it's not surprising that even those who are against Christianity see that

compassion and generosity mark those who follow Jesus.

Colossians talks about that. Therefore, as God's chosen people,

holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion and kindness and humility

and gentleness and patience.

See, compassion for the Christian isn't optional. It's part of our clothing.

As we mature in Christ, as we get to know Christ and we mature in Christ,

as the Holy Spirit does his work in us, we'll be clothed with compassion.

It flows not necessarily from a choice that comes separate from our identity,

but it's the very identity that we have that will outwork.

We are love, so we love.

And it's the posture of the heart of the Christian that sees suffering and responds to,

We live in a fast-paced world, don't we? Distracted culture,

and it's easy to overlook the needs that are around us.

We have phones in hands, we have heads down, and often too busy.

But compassion requires presence and attentiveness and listening to the Spirit

as He guides and directs us to the people that we need to be directed to.

And it won't be easy because compassion takes sacrifice and commitment.

And you might think to yourself, well, I have to have my eyes open.

I have to be listening to the Holy Spirit.

I have to be attentive to how he's working and how he's connecting in life.

But let me say that God will bring people to you and he has brought people to

you already in your workplaces, your neighborhood, in your friendships,

in your sporting groups.

The people who are around you, the people who are shopping with you,

the people who are walking a dog down the park.

And I say this because that's what happened to me this week.

It had nothing to do with me.

I'm walking down the park and the way I write sermons generally is there's generally

three points or four points or five points.

And you might think, why don't you make it three points?

But I write a point and then I go for a walk and I think about the next point

And I come back and I write about the next point.

And so this particular sermon, that's like 15 points this week.

I walked a lot. Now, I walked a lot and a guy comes over to the fence and says,

how many kilometers do you walk each day?

And I said, well, on Tuesdays, I walk a lot. I said, my congregation thinks

I should walk less, but I walk a lot.

And he goes, what do you walk for? I said, well, I walk and think and walk and

think and walk and think.

What are you thinking about? Well, I think I'm a minister down the road,

down here at the highest, and I write a message to people.

And so I go away and I think about the next point that I'm writing about.

He says, you're a minister. He says, can you bless me?

Sure. I can bless you. And I said, what's going on in your life?

And at that point, he burst into tears.

And he talked about how his journey was a massively difficult journey and how he moved.

He just moved into the area and he's walking his dog.

And he sat there all day because he just couldn't bear to go home because of

the stuff that was happening at home.

And so I prayed for peace that passed all understanding for him.

And he talked to me about how he used to go to church, but he can't go to church

anymore because all the stuff that's happening around him.

He feels as though God doesn't want him to go back into church.

He's a guy who became angry and did stuff in life where he just thought,

God doesn't want to hear me anymore.

And so I stopped and listened.

Nothing to do with me. The guy came over and said, what are you writing your sermon about?

I said, compassion. And he said, it's a bit like that parable,

that guy that stopped and helps. He said, you stopped and helped me.

And I went, my goodness.

I just wanted to go for a walk to think about my sermon. I didn't want sermon

illustrations that were connected to it. So that was unreal.

Then after I prayed for him, I moved on and went through the car park.

This guy got out of the car and with his dog, Missy, this little baby Labrador.

And Missy came up like maybe most baby Labradors does and just hung around and

sniffed my dog on my legs and all this.

And he said, oh, I'm going to walk the dog. He said, what are you doing?

I said, I'm walking, thinking, walking, thinking, walking, thinking.

He said, what are you thinking about? I said, the sermon. He said,

what are you writing a sermon about?

And he said, I said, compassion. And he goes, our world needs compassion, doesn't it?

And then he kept on walking, his dog, and I kept on walking around the thing.

And I thought, God, bring as many people as you want.

And help me to see how to answer people. And it's the same for you.

It won't be easy. It will take sacrifice. It will take commitment.

There's an old German guy called Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his book that talks

about how compassion and acts of compassion and kindness needs to exist even

when it's inconvenient.

This old German guy is dead now, but in his book, The Cost of Discipleship,

which, by the way, is free on the web, says this, We must be ready to allow

ourselves to be interrupted by God.

God will be constantly crossing our paths and cancelling our plans by sending

us people with claims and petitions.

We may pass by them preoccupied with our own important tasks.

But when we do that, we'll pass by the visible sign of the cross to others.

And that's pretty much what the Good Samaritan is all about,

the passage that was read for us so well by Jeremiah.

There are many points in that passage, and I've spoke about that in series called The Stories of Jesus.

But really, it's the priest and the Levite who saw the wounded man who passed

by the Samaritan that stopped, helped, paid for, followed up,

had compassion that cost him something. That's for sure.

It cost him his time, his effort, his money, his energy.

And Jesus says, you and I need to go and do likewise.

Who is it in your life that you need to stop for?

Who is lying on the side of the road? Who are you tempted to pass by?

Who's hard to love but still is in great need.

We need to think about that. I need to think about that. And as a church,

we need to think about that.

Because as a church and as individuals, we are called to live compassionately.

As we said, because God is a God of compassion and he's compassionate towards us.

We read in Psalms, Psalm 103, And three, the Lord is compassionate and gracious

and slow to anger, abounding in love as a father has compassion on his children.

And we have received infinite compassion through Jesus.

When we grasp how deeply God loves us, even in our sin, even in our weakness,

he has freed us to not be confined by our sin and confined by our weakness and

confined by our lack of whatever we might put in place,

but he has freed us so that we might can have compassion and grace on others.

And the cross of Jesus, as he went to there, we see the ultimate act of compassion

where Jesus gave his all for us.

Ultimately, we not only need to give people a hand out, we also need to give

people a hand up so that they can see the hope that they have in life through Jesus,

that walking with God, he gives them a vision of what life could be like walking

with him, even through the circumstances that is there.

C.S. Lewis writes about compassion and states that compassion is more than just

kindness. Lewis argues that true compassion isn't simply about feeling pity

for somebody, someone suffering.

It involves a deeper commitment to their ultimate good, even if it means confronting

them with difficult truths or challenging them to change. In other words, giving them a hand up.

Kindness that is merely feeling or easily manipulated and sometimes can be potentially

harmful doesn't consider the long-term well-being of the individual.

As a church, we want to be people who give people a hand up and are able to

see beyond their circumstances.

We want to deal with their circumstances so it's not straight in front of people's

faces, but we want to give them a hand up so they can see others. But it's not selective.

If we look at the parable of the Good Samaritan. It's towards all people,

those we know and the stranger on the street.

Deuteronomy 10 talks about the stranger on the street and how Israel was to look beyond that.

Moses writes about it and says, he, or God, defends the cause of the fatherless

and the widow and loves the foreigner residing among you, giving them food and clothing.

You are to love those who are foreigners.

For you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt.

And for us, we were once alienated from God, strangers to the presence of God

and the promises of God, but we have been brought near by God.

Why? So that we can be agents of God's grace to others.

Jesus himself takes up the concern for the stranger in, I think,

one of the most powerful and challenging readings of the New Testament.

So as I close, listen to this and allow the Holy Spirit to open your heart about what that might be.

When the Son of Man comes in all his glory, who is Jesus,

and the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne and all the nations

will be gathered before him and he will separate the people from one from another

as the shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.

He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.

Then the king will say to those on his right, Come you who are blessed by my

father, take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of this world.

For I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat. And I was thirsty,

and you gave me something to drink.

I was a stranger, and you invited me in.

I needed clothes, and you clothed me.

I was sick, and you looked after me. I was in prison and you came to visit me.

Then the righteous will answer him, Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed

you or thirsty or give you something to drink?

When did we see you as a stranger and invite you in or needing clothes and clothes you?

When did we see you sick or in prison and go and visit you?

Then the king replied, I tell you the truth, whatever you do to one of the least

of these brothers and sisters, of mine, you did to me.

We need to ask God to open up our eyes this week so that we can see people.

We need to slow down so that we're able to respond appropriately to people,

not only in giving people a hand out so to help them in their time of crisis,

but so that we might be able to respond appropriately so that we can give them a hand up.

We need not just to feel but to

act and maybe that action is just a

word of encouragement maybe that action is just a phone call from

to somebody to ask how they're doing and how they're traveling maybe

it is a meal maybe it's a visit maybe it's committing

in prayer the journey

that you've heard but most of all we need to understand that compassion might

be the door to the wonderful full message of Jesus and how he has had compassion

on us and has saved us from our sin so that we might have compassion on others. Let's pray.

Lord, help us to have eyes that see others like you see them.

In our world that rushes by, help us to stop, to look at that person who's in need.

Help us to listen to your Holy Spirit so that we might respond appropriately,

with your grace and your compassion.

Help us, Lord, to make that call or give that meal or offer that,

even if it's going to mean sacrifice, Even if it's going to mean inconvenience,

help us, Lord, to see the greatest need of people so we don't do these things

of compassion just so that we can share the message of salvation,

but we also might understand the greatest need of people is to walk with you,

to know you, to grow with you, so that together as a church,

we might show Christ to each other and our world across the street and around the globe.

And I pray this in your name. Amen.