TEEN TREE 
OF LIFE
The Doctrine of Compassion
Part 3
January 19, 2020
Before you begin, ask yourself a very important question: Do you believe that Jesus Christ died on The Cross for all of your sins? If you answered yes, you will need to be sure that you are filled with The Holy Spirit. How do you do this? You name your sins to God The Father in His Son’s Name. This is called Rebound. As a Christian, you must rebound any time you sin. This is taught in 1JOHN 1:9: If we confess [name] our sins [directly to God], He [God] is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Now, if you have never believed that Jesus Christ died on The Cross for all of your sins, all you have to do is say to yourself that you believe in Him and you are saved! The Bible verse which teaches us this is ACTS 16:31: “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved.”
The Holy Spirit, through God’s Word, makes God’s Compassion and Mercy real to us. SO, without growing in God’s Grace and Knowledge, we’ll never understand how very merciful and compassionate He is. We will never recognize the impact of knowing His Word in our day to day experiences; and we will never be able to show Divine compassion (love) to others.
Have you ever noticed how people tend to put emphasis on their own brainpower? They think that learning how to solve their own problems by reading self-help books and watching television shows like Dr. Phil is going to improve their lives! They also think they can then take what they’ve learned from the books and television show to help others with their problems. There’s nothing wrong with being proactive in helping to solve your own problems and to help others with theirs; however, the things we learn from the world are insufficient without the love and compassion we learn about in God’s Word.
As Christians, we need to get to a point in our lives in which we are passionate about showing Divine compassion to others, with our purpose being to help and comfort them. This is especially true for the other believers, members of the body of Christ, in our lives. In his final address to the Ephesian elders, Paul reminds them one more time about his own example of being free from greed and of working to provide for his own needs and more importantly for the needs of his co-workers. He had also demonstrated to them how they, too, should shepherd God’s flock. This is what Luke reported Paul saying to the elders in ACTS 20-32-35: And now I commend you to God and to the word of His grace, which is able to build you up and to give you the inheritance among all those who are sanctified. I have coveted no one’s silver or gold or clothes. You yourselves know that these hands ministered to my own needs and to the men who were with me. In everything I showed you that by working hard in this manner you must help the weak and remember the words of the Lord Jesus, that He Himself said, ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’”
Showing Divine compassion to others in order to help and comfort them – especially the other believers in our lives – is a requirement of being a member of The Royal Family of God. Giving more than his own example, though, Paul told the Ephesian church elders to remember the Words of Our Lord and Savior Jesus who said: “It is more blessed to give than to receive.” Because of our Old Sin Nature, we’re naturally takers – not givers. But by God’s Grace, He wants us all to grow into to be givers. As we do, not only will others be blessed, but so will we!
Our Lord served His generation with compassion during His stay on earth. MAT 9:36-38 (New International Version) is a great example of this: When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.” This verse teaches us that we need to see as Jesus saw and feel as He felt. This will enable us to live our lives as He did. Presumably, Jesus and the disciples saw the same scene: the approaching crowd of people. But Our Lord and Savior saw them with different eyes than the disciples did. He saw the great need of lost people – unbelievers.
There was probably nothing unusual about the crowd that approached Jesus and the disciples that day. There may have been a few more sick and disabled people than in a normal crowd, but no more than there had been on previous days. But the disciples probably thought, as they did on another occasion when the needs were overwhelming, that they should send them away. Look at what was recorded in MAT 14:15 (New International Version): When Jesus landed and saw a large crowd, he had compassion on them and healed their sick. As evening approached, the disciples came to him and said, “This is a remote place, and it’s already getting late. Send the crowds away, so they can go to the villages and buy themselves some food.” But Jesus saw them differently because He felt compassion for them. God’s Compassion cannot deny those who are in need. If you wish to serve your generation, like God The Son did, you need to have the Mind of Christ. The Mind of Christ is compassionate!
Now let’s look more closely at what compassion means. It’s defined as a feeling of deep sympathy and sorrow for another’s suffering or misfortune, accompanied by a desire to alleviate the pain and remove the cause. If you have compassion, you have a sympathetic awareness of other people and their distress, along with a desire to remove or help correct their situation. Compassion also means to handle tenderly and lovingly, to be merciful, to show pity, and to be thoughtfully gentle. When you’re compassionate, you’re showing overt graciousness. But you can only achieve this by having a system of grace-based thinking in your soul. And you can only achieve this by seeing people as Jesus saw them and feeling the compassion He felt. This is something we, as Christians, have to work on daily.
There are three categories of compassion: genuine compassion; pseudo (fake)-compassion; and misused compassion. At any given period in human history, there is only one client nation to God. America is the current client nation. The client nation is in place to provide a place for the Gospel to be preached openly; to restrain the threats to the world, particularly in the end times; to serve as a base from which the Gospel is communicated to the world; and to be an instrument by which Israel is reestablished and protected during the Twentieth Century. In the downfall of every client nation to God, pseudo-compassion and the misuse of compassion are involved.
Both believers and unbelievers exhibit and use all three categories of compassion – so, compassion is not a Christian virtue. An example of an unbeliever having compassion is found in EXO 2:5-6 (The Message Bible) when Pharaoh’s daughter found the baby Moses: Pharaoh’s daughter came down to the Nile to bathe; her maidens strolled on the bank. She saw the basket-boat floating in the reeds and sent her maid to get it. She opened it and saw the child—a baby crying! Her heart went out to him. She said, “This must be one of the Hebrew babies.”
Compassion is not a Christian virtue, though Christians with virtue will have compassion. God is compassionate toward His people and expects them to be compassionate toward others as we learn in King Solomon’s prayer to Him: When your people go to war against their enemies at the time and place you send them and they pray to God toward the city you chose and this Temple I’ve built to honor your Name, Listen from heaven to what they pray and ask for, and do what’s right for them. When they sin against you—and they certainly will; there’s no one without sin!—and in anger you turn them over to the enemy and they are taken captive to the enemy’s land, whether far or near, but repent in the country of their captivity and pray with changed hearts in their exile, “We’ve sinned; we’ve done wrong; we’ve been most wicked,” and turn back to you heart and soul in the land of the enemy who conquered them, and pray to you toward their homeland, the land you gave their ancestors, toward the city you chose, and this Temple I have built to the honor of your Name, Listen from your home in heaven to their prayers desperate and devout and do what is best for them. Forgive your people who have sinned against you; forgive their gross rebellions and move their captors to treat them with compassion. They are, after all, your people and your precious inheritance whom you rescued from the heart of that iron-smelting furnace, Egypt! (1KI 8:44-51 The Message Bible)
God sends messengers to warn, reprimand, and correct His people BUT He does it out of compassion: God, the God of their ancestors, repeatedly sent warning messages to them. Out of compassion for both his people and his Temple he wanted to give them every chance possible. But they wouldn’t listen; they poked fun at God’s messengers, despised the message itself, and in general treated the prophets like idiots. God became more and more angry until there was no turning back—God called in Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, who came and killed indiscriminately—and right in The Temple itself; it was a ruthless massacre: young men and virgins, the elderly and weak—they were all the same to him. (2CH 36:15-17 The Message Bible)
Out of compassion, God will send Bible doctrine to those who desire it, even when there is a famine of His Word in the land: “Behold, days are coming,” declares the Lord God, “When I will send a famine on the land, Not a famine for bread or a thirst for water, But rather for hearing the words of the Lord.” (AMO 8:11) In His compassion, the Lord will find a way to get doctrine to those who desire it, in spite of all the satanic opposition and false doctrine there is in the cosmic system. This is important to remember.
Let’s end this week’s study with this compassionate advice from the apostle Paul to the Corinthians: 2CO 13:8: Test yourselves to make sure you are solid in the faith. Don’t drift along taking everything for granted. Give yourselves regular checkups. You need firsthand evidence, not mere hearsay, that Jesus Christ is in you. Test it out. If you fail the test, do something about it. I hope the test won’t show that we have failed. But if it comes to that, we’d rather the test showed our failure than yours. We’re rooting for the truth to win out in you. We couldn’t possibly do otherwise. We don’t just put up with our limitations; we celebrate them, and then go on to celebrate every strength, every triumph of the truth in you. We pray hard that it will all come together in your lives.
{to be continued}