The Gift of Christ’s Compassion

The word compassion means literally to suffer together with. When we think of God’s compassion, His mercy that faileth not, this is what the Cross reflects. The Cross reflects Christ’s decision to enter into the suffering of humanity, to suffer not just with us, but also for us, carrying the chastisement for our sins on His shoulders that is now our peace. As He did so, He chose to keep silent. Not to defend His purity and righteous standing, but to instead bequeath it to us in His silence, laying His life down for us, while we were yet sinners, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.

Likewise, Christ calls us also into this compassion, to let others judge and condemn us for standing in the righteousness of God, to remain silent and to lay down our lives, becoming of no reputation, for the very ones deeming us unrighteous. But this is where we can end up doing so, from a pedestal, self-righteously pitying those who are judging and condemning us because they do not realize we are in fact blessing them in our decision to remain silent. We can forget how far we too have fallen.

Christ, however, did not pity us, as He walked to the Cross. His silence was broken open with weeping in His deep compassion for us.  Christ willingly entered into our human suffering to feel the crushing weight not just of our sin disease, but also the separation we feel from God, every time we sin. He felt the full weight of that separation from His own Father, so that He can now minister to us from a place of deep empathy, not pity or sympathy at a distance, but empathy, entering into our pain, the pain of feeling utterly abandoned, to lead us out of our sin and that pain of feeling abandoned, through His mercy.

It is His compassion that then sets us free from our sin. For, we begin to realize He has not abandoned us, but in fact invited us to join Him in His suffering. By His wounds – stripes – we are healed. This is what unfolded for me this week. My self-righteous pity and sympathy was broken open into Christ’s compassion.

The first step of obedience to the Holy Spirit’s promptings came in reaching out, breaking the silence of pity to offer a with-ness in suffering to the very one who had deeply wounded me. When this was not received, but condemned, I wanted to throw a pity party. But that is when Christ’s compassion broke through to flood my whole heart with mercy. 

I went to bed and woke up to the Word speaking. Christ gave me a vivid vision of the person I had extended His mercy to. This vision was from the distant past, from before I was born, and that very picture had me weeping and weeping and weeping in compassion for the person in question. Now, I am walking to the Cross, laying my reputation down for the one I love, no longer from a place of pity for them, but deep empathy. And neither do I now feel the need to seek sympathy from others, in the wounding done to me, but rather to invite them to pray with me, in deep compassion, for the one who is wounding me and others.

The intercession of Christ brought the breakthrough. Shortly before I went to bed, He had convicted me of my pity party, which was really hiding my self-righteous anger. He led me to pray, together with friends:

May God continue to send out His Word that breaks down the walls of division between us in the Body. May a little child lead us all, as the little girl in Mouse-Kins! And may it lead us into awe and wonder, warming our hearts at God’s humble ways.

May He continue to lift away that self-righteousness and shame in us and our loved ones, where we cannot yet see it.

In that picture God gave me of the one wounding me and others, I saw not just that person, but myself, 9 years ago, as I came face to face with the gravity of the wounding done to me as a child. In that wounding, I, just like the person in question, turned toward sin to numb the pain of that wounding. 

I hurt myself and others around me in doing so. I deemed God to have abandoned me, when in fact, I had turned my back on Him, not seeing that He was so very present to me in that very wounding. He was present to me when no one else was. He wanted me to see and know that while man had abandoned, failed and deeply wounded me, He never had.

As I came face to face with that wounding, God revealed the need for me to stop idolizing the very ones who had deeply wounded me. But to do so meant facing the deep pain of their abandonment. I felt it was wrong for me to “judge” them, because they had not realized what they were doing to me at the time. But God showed me that it was not judging them to simply admit and feel the very real pain of what was done to me. It was not wrong to admit that sin, whether it is done to intentionally hurt us or not, is so very wrong and so incredibly damaging to our soul. 

It also meant acknowledging that these two people I had placed on a pedestal were not perfect. But what I did not realize is that acknowledging this truth and receiving God’s comfort for me in that wounding would in fact birth a true and deeper love for those very two people. After this, they were no longer godlike for me, no longer distant pedestal images, but breakable, fragile, beautiful humans, in need of God’s love and grace, just like me. 

Feeling the pain and receiving God’s comfort for me in that pain, also helped me to receive God’s grace and seek the forgiveness of others, where I too, had failed and deeply wounded them too. Whether I had realized this at the time or not. Just because we didn’t see our wrong doing at the time, doesn’t make it okay. It is still so very necessary, and healing, to admit our wrong doing and seek forgiveness to invite the grace of God to flow and heal what we cannot and put right what we cannot.

Praise God for His mercy that faileth not. Praise God it is new every morning. Great is His faithfulness to us, His children, whom He never leaves or forsakes. May that compassion continually break our self-righteous pity open to flood us with Christ’s intercession for His Body, Church and Bride. May we remember how far we too have fallen.

May we deny ourselves, pick up our Cross and follow Jesus, willingly joining Him in His suffering for us, His Body, that we may be made One in Him, in the Father and the Holy Spirit. May Christ receive the reward of His suffering, as our knees bow and lips profess Him, not our idols of man, self or comfort, but Christ as Lord of ALL.