Follow The Leader, Becoming A Better DiscipleSample

COMPASSION

Love begins with compassion, feeling for other people even when you are unable to feel with them. You don’t have to agree with what a person says or does to feel for them. All you have to do is view them through Jesus’ eyes. When you do, you will see people who struggle against their own sin nature, just like you do, who need a relationship with the Father like you have, whether they are lost and still need to put their faith in Jesus for salvation or are already saved and are just experiencing the kind of pain and frustration that comes from disobeying God.

If you have trouble feeling compassion for people, allow God to show or remind you for just a moment where you would be without Him, without the peace that being in right relationship with Him brings, without the promise of Heaven, without the Holy Spirit’s reassuring presence in your heart, guiding you, teaching you, comforting you.

Whether or not you are able to muster up the kind of compassion for people that Jesus felt, you are still responsible for loving them the way that Jesus loved them, extending mercy and grace in the form of agape love, love that has nothing to do with the merit of the recipient, but with the noble intentions of the giver.

Not sure how to do that? Look at God’s example. He demonstrated agape love to us in sending His Son Jesus to die in our place. We had no merit; we were sinners. Holy and perfect, He had noble intentions, our salvation for His glory. He demonstrated grace, treating us better than we deserved to be treated, and mercy, deflecting punishment we deserved onto His Son.

Just do the same. Treat people better than they deserve to be treated, reserve judgment, and leave the heart work up to God.

• If God treated you the way you deserve to be treated, where would you be?
• Do you love others the way God loves you?

Read Matthew 9:35-37 and John 13:34-35.