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We are now in our seventh week of walking through our ten core values as the Be in Christ Church of Canada. If you’ve been tracking with the series, perhaps you are noticing that these do not stand independently. Our experience of God’s love and grace shapes how we believe the Bible. This, in turn, shapes our worship of God and our insistence on following Jesus. This leads us both into community and outward to witness to the world. Each value is interconnected with the others. The value we’re considering today is clearly and obviously rooted in the values we’ve already discussed. It flows from them and provides some clarification as to how we believe some previous values should be embodied. We are discussing the value of Serving Compassionately in this Covenant Weekly for June 3, 2025.
 
Serving Compassionately: We value serving others at their point of need, following the example of our Lord Jesus.

A foundation of this value is our commitment to follow Jesus. Jesus is God enfleshed, the exact representation of God’s glory! We, as his followers, want our hearts and lives to be aligned with Jesus’.

There is a word in the New Testament that is only used a) to describe Jesus or b) by Jesus to describe the heart of God. You don’t need a Greek lesson here, but when translated, it often includes the idea of compassion.

  • “felt compassion” (NLT)
  • “had compassion” (ESV)
  • “was moved with compassion” (CEB)
  • “took pity on him” (NIV)

Some of these translations emphasize the emotional response the original word invokes. Others emphasize the action that is a part of the original word.

Several times in the gospels, Jesus is described as having this deep-in-the-gut, visceral response to people’s pain. And this response always comes with a corresponding action. At risk of being crass, I’ll say that this word is associated with a deep in the bowels response, since the bowels were considered the seat of deep emotions. In its purest understanding, this word corresponds to a bowel movement that has both internal feelings and an external response! (Sorry if that is too much information!)

The word is used to describe Jesus when blind men cry out for mercy (Matthew 20), when a leper calls out for help (Mark 10), when he sees a widow in the throes of grief after her son has died (Luke 7), and several times when Jesus is confronted by a needy and lost crowd of people. Jesus uses the word to help us further understand the heart of God in a story where a king seeking to settle his debts responds to the cry for mercy from his indebted servant (Matthew 18). Probably the most familiar uses of this word are in the famous stories of the Samaritan who embodies compassion for the man on the roadside (Luke 10) and the father who runs to his long-lost rebellious son (Luke 15).

In each instance, there is a combined internal feeling and external response. This kind of compassionate service, meeting the needs of those in pain, reflects the heart of God. It is what we value and long to follow. Our desire to follow this is demonstrated in the song lyric prayer, “Break my heart for what breaks yours.”

But let’s be honest about this. It is a hard value to embody faithfully. I think there are a couple of things that push against this kind of empathetic, compassionate service.

  1. This value isn’t mere obedience to a command. It is an invitation into feeling with people - to empathy. Empathy has, in recent days, been described in very public settings as a weakness. I’ve heard it described as such in Christian contexts. But it is exactly what Jesus is embodying here. Many shy away from empathy because it does drive us to a response. And it hurts. Feeling the pain of others is hard. And those who want to embody this kind of compassion will inevitably get burned. This burning can lead one to get calloused or numb. At which point the deep feelings that drive serving compassionately often just aren’t there anymore. And we slide into rote obedience which can be hard to maintain.
  2. A second reason we may push against this kind of empathetic, compassionate service is a sense that we need to feel this deeply about everything! It feels like every time I go on social media, there is another tragedy or struggle that I’m asked to care about and respond to. We used to only be aware of those things that happened close to us. Now we’re bombarded with calls for our compassion and response. I can’t keep up! So I will begin to let some things slide and intentionally not feel or not respond. And when I do that once, it gets easier to do it again. And under the guise of not being able to respond to it all, I can start to not even try to respond to any of it. This isn’t being calloused. It’s being cavalier to the pain of others.

I don’t have an easy answer to these challenges. Our callousness and cavalierness stem from genuine challenges. Perhaps choosing to respond to that which moves us most deeply is a starting place, and allowing that to be where we “serve compassionately.” If we hold onto that, perhaps we can be moved internally in other areas and simply trust God to mobilize those who are more deeply moved than we are for those things.

But we need more than just wisdom and a plan to respond to the things closest to us. We need the continued work of God’s Spirit among us. The prophet Ezekiel, in speaking to people whose hearts had gotten hard, said on behalf of God, “I will give you a new heart, and I will put a new spirit in you. …I will take out your stony, stubborn heart and give you a tender, responsive heart.” We need the life giving love of God and work of the Spirit to work within us to help us maintain soft hearts.

I can’t actively respond to every pain and struggle in the world. We can’t actively respond to all the hard things we’re exposed to. But may we feel deeply for those things closest to us and be moved to serve compassionately where the Spirit of God prepares the way.