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Compassion: Part 2
Allen Webster
Topic(s): Christian Life, Love
Links to this entire series:
Preachers need to preach with compassion.
One preacher said, “I have never had to apologize for my position, but I have oftentimes had to apologize for my disposition.” Preachers, like policemen and counselors, can become jaded over time. They’ve seen it all, been in one too many business meetings, moved more times that they wanted. They’ve stuck their necks out for others, only to get their noses bloodied. They’ve tried to believe the benevolence stories again and again, only to find a sham and a fraud behind many a hard-luck story. So to keep from getting hurt again, they built a wall, went into their cave, and put a buffer zone around their heart of hearts.
Before that happens to you, reread these passages on compassion. Take the example of Jeremiah to heart. He had seen it all. He knew about bloodied noses and cold shoulders. Before he ever took his first pulpit God told him that he would have to ignore their dirty looks (Jeremiah 1:8, 17). Like Ezekiel, he needed a head as hard as flint to stay with it (Ezekiel 3:9). The people to whom Jeremiah preached had lost the ability to blush over their blatant sins (Jeremiah 6:15). They resisted to the point that they attacked the messenger—throwing Jeremiah into a pit of mud and leaving him to sink to suffocation or starvation (Jeremiah 38:6). (He was rescued by Ebedmelech the Ethiopian.)
Still, Jeremiah kept a tender heart. He wrote, “Oh that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people” (Jeremiah 9:1). He was pained in his heart for his people (4:19), and promised to “weep in secret places” for their pride (13:17). His knew his “eye shall weep sore, and run down with tears, because the LORD’S flock is carried away captive” (13:17). Jeremiah kept pleading for them to come back to God.
In the New Testament, Paul models compassion in preaching. He preached “with many tears” (Acts 20:19) and told the Ephesian elders to “remember, that by the space of three years” he “ceased not to warn every one day and night with tears” (Acts 20:31). He had “great heaviness and continual sorrow” in his heart (Romans 9:2), and wrote that he had upon him daily “the care of all the churches” (2 Corinthians 11:28). Writing often brought him to tears. He told the Corinthians: “For out of much affliction and anguish of heart I wrote unto you with many tears; not that ye should be grieved, but that ye might know the love which I have more abundantly unto you” (2 Corinthians 2:4). As he wrote to the Philippians, tears must have dripped from his face onto the page when he described the “enemies of the cross” (Philippians 3:18).
Churches today need compassionate preachers in their pulpits. This does not mean we need compromisers. Neither Jeremiah nor Paul ever took one step back from defending the faith, and neither should we. But we can compromise the spirit as well as the doctrine of the gospel (Matthew 5:46–47; 7:12). We do not have to be mean to be sound, nor rough to be right (Ephesians 4:15). Whenever we lose our tempers and say things unbecoming of a Christian, we lose the argument even if we are right. Henry Ward Beecher believed that “compassion will cure more sins than condemnation.” Jesus did too (cf. John 8:1–11).
Compassion In Our Homes
Compassionate spouses strengthen their marriages. “Pleasant words are as an honeycomb, sweet to the soul, and health to the bones” (Proverbs 16:24). There are wives and husbands who go a whole month without a single compliment or an entire year without an act of kindness A biblical case study is Nabal and Abigail (1 Samuel 25:3, 17, 21, 25, 39).
The courtship should continue from the honeymoon stage all the way through to the retirement years (Ruth 2:20). Paul commanded husbands to be not bitter against their wives (Colossians 3:19). This is another way of saying, “Be sweet to your wife!”
We must not excuse our unkindness. We can be kind when we want to be. We are nice to our acquaintances in a church hallway; why can’t we be nice to our own families in our living rooms? We can’t excuse unkindness by saying “I’m just not a morning person.” Half of life is in the morning! What would we think of a person who was nice for the first half of his life but turned into a grouch at age 40? We cannot use the excuse that we are stressed out from work or from keeping the children all day. We should not easily give in to the “I just don’t feel well, so I don’t have the energy to be nice to my spouse.” The Bible instructs us to treat others as we want to be treated (Matthew 7:12) and for husbands to treat wives “as their own bodies” (cf. Ephesians 5:28). Love is longsuffering and kind (1 Corinthians 13:4).
This is the only way to ensure we won’t have regrets later. Herbert V. Prochnow said, “You may be sorry that you spoke, sorry you stayed or went, sorry you won or lost, sorry you thought the worst, sorry so much was spent. But as you go through life, you'll find—you’re never sorry you were kind.” I heard of one man who sat beside his wife’s casket and talked to her all night before the funeral. He paid her many compliments; he must have said “thank you” 50 times, and “I’m sorry” at least that number. But her ears were deaf to his words. He had waited too late. Don’t make his mistake. No one ever regrets being compassionate, kind, and nice.
Don’t wait to put flowers on a casket—give them now!
I’d rather buy a cheap bouquet
And give my wife everyday
Than a bushel of roses white and red
To be placed on her casket when she’s dead.1
Footnotes:
1 Author unknown. Evidently adapted from an old Irish proverb. http://www.gardendigest.com/flowers2.htm