Compassionate and Kind

Ooh, she plans the best dates. I would say you plan the best dates. Yeah. You’re very creative. We both plan good dates, I guess. I will say, before we got married, he planned the best dates. Like elaborate dates. I’ve delegated that. Yep. Now it’s my turn. I don’t plan as much as I should, to be honest. But when I do, I do go above and beyond. Oh, yes. To try and, you know, plan something big. All the bells and whistles. Yeah, but she’s the better. You do get help, though, from some of the women in our small group. This is true. This is true. He has found some amazing concert tickets. When I’ve been sent by my previous employer to different parts of the world, actually. And he also has a habit of bringing home a single flower that, you know, not the typical rose like a bird of Paradise or something else quite unique. And it will be on the table in a bud with some baby’s breath on the side, and a very sweet card. That’s his style. You know, there’s many ways that we’re different. Our dates are not different. Our ideal date is going out and being together, having conversation over a good meal, going for a hike, all of those things we both like and that’s about as much as we plan. Since our kids have gotten a little older, we don’t go out very much, but we like to take the kids and the grandkids out for birthday dinners. And so that’s kind of a big deal. And we usually let them choose. For example, last week we went out with our grandson and his friend, who are both vegans. So they found a restaurant in Minneapolis where they could get what they wanted and we could get some real food. I like to think I planned good dates. Um, They’re always fun. I planned a date to go hiking at Oxbow Park, and I didn’t check the weather at all. This was when we were dating, when we were dating, and we showed up and it was raining and everything was completely. I was wearing nice shoes. She was wearing nice shoes and like a skirt. She didn’t tell me what we were doing. And, um, she started crying as we were heading there. She was like, what are we doing? We were in the parking lot. Yeah. And then I still tried to convince her that we could do it. I was a bit emotional, I was stubborn, we learned from it. We didn’t go hiking that day. No, no we didn’t.

Oh, man, I we didn’t mean for these videos to become confessional booths for the guys. I feel like that’s what happened somehow. So although I have to say, Howard is killing it with that single flower move that he’s got. That is that is a good takeaway. The takeaway is this be like Howard, don’t be like Grant. Somehow Grant Boyce became the archetype for what not to do in your relationship. So every time he pops up on the screen, I’m like, oh, what is he going to say? Like that Michael Jackson eating popcorn meme? I’m like, whoa, what’s he going to say? Oh, I wouldn’t have said that, right? Dates are fun. We’ve set up two date nights for you. September 21st. October 12th. Bring your kids here to the church. You heard about that earlier in the service. So come do that. They’ll have fun. We got a little rally for the couples. That’ll be fun as well. Take advantage of that. And remember, fellas, be like Howard.

So this morning we’re going to begin looking at the characteristics of Christ. Christ’s characteristics and how when we apply them to our lives, they transform our relationships. They transform our marriage when they are at work in us. And last week we looked at the pattern of spiritual transformation. So the pattern, remember, is this first, a sinful person puts their faith, puts their trust in Jesus, and then and then he or she begins a spiritual renewal process that includes killing the old sins and putting on the new characteristics that are in Christ. Now, if you hear that, if you hear me say that, and it just sounds to you like God is saying, just try harder or do this, don’t do that. You’re missing a very important part here, and that’s that we can’t do this on our own, okay? We can’t do it on our own. Everything that we’re going to talk about for the next five weeks, we do not have the power to do on our own. To get the marriage you want you don’t need to be a better person. You need to be a new person. Spiritually you have to be made new when you put your trust in Jesus Christ as the Savior who died for your sins and as the Lord of your life, now who is going to guide you through your life, you’re not made into a better person. You’re made into a new person. Spiritually what’s happened is your dead soul has come to life again. So before you were you were mired in sin and you weren’t able to break free of sin. But now you’re truly alive and able to please and worship God. So Paul’s words are that our old self has died when Jesus died, and our new self is alive because Christ is alive. Listen to this chapter three, verse three. He says in his words, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. So once your spirit is alive in Christ, you are now enabled by your union with Jesus to love the Lord with all of your heart, soul, mind and strength. Before you couldn’t do that. But now you can do that. You can now put your eyes on Jesus and you can see what your new life should look like. And if Jesus is your Lord, you will want to. If he’s your Lord, you will want to put your eyes on him and see what your new life should look like. You can now see that sin is still clinging to you and you are enabled to put that to death. And if Jesus is your Lord, you will want to. That’ll be the desire of your heart. Look at how Paul puts it. This is right in the middle of the list of those things that we are to put off and put on, he says. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator. Now I want you to notice how Paul reasons here. He takes a very common sin. Okay, this is his example sin. He takes lying. Lying to each other. Is lying to each other a problem? Yeah, we lie all the time. Lying is a huge problem in our world. We can lie to ourselves about why it’s important for us to lie to our spouses. Because we won’t hurt them that way. We lie so much it seems, in this world. So it’s a huge problem. But Paul doesn’t say, stop lying because it’s a huge problem. He doesn’t even say stop lying because it’s not right. Because it’s wrong. It is those things. Those are both true. But look at Paul’s reasoning. He says, stop lying because it’s not who you are anymore. It’s not you. He goes beyond the behavior. He goes down to the objective spiritual reality and the identity of that person. You used to be a liar, but you’re not that old person anymore. You’re a new person. You have a new self, and the new self needs to be clothed with the righteousness of Christ. And so you need to take off the old clothes of a liar that you used to be, and put on the new clothes of a truth teller. Why? Because we worship the God of truth, that’s why.

So today we’re going to start looking at these new clothes that we’re called to put on and how they affect our marriages. And these are for all relationships. He’s not specifically talking about marriage in this passage, but we’re going to apply this specifically for marriage. If you’re not married, there’s going to be a lot here for you, but we’re going to apply specifically to marriage. There’s a list of Christ’s characteristics to put on that runs from verse 12 to verse 14. So we’re going to move right through this list each week, looking carefully at each piece of godly clothing. And we’re going to compare that list with the put off, put to death list that runs from verse five to verse nine, but we’ll use 12 to 14 as the framework for this series. So that means today we’re going to start off by looking at compassion and kindness. What does it mean to put on compassion and kindness? Specifically in the relationship that we have with our spouse and right out of the gate, I am under deep conviction here. Did not take long for that to happen to me. See, because compassion means to suffer with someone. Okay. So co with passion suffering so co passion. You have compassion when you suffer with someone, it means someone struggling and hurting and you join them in that struggle. Kindness is the attitude that you bring when you show compassion. So kindness is using gentle loving words and actions. So if you if you put them together, compassion and kindness means seeing someone who’s hurting and in need and meeting them where they are. Taking on the burden of that need yourself and doing so in a careful, gracious, loving way. I am the archetype for how not to do this in your marriage. This is a struggle for me. But as a new creation in Christ, I have seen the Lord mold and shape me to be far more compassionate and kind than I used to be. And he’s using my wife as the prime avenue for my own spiritual growth. To see your marriage flourish, you both need to put on the compassion and kindness of Jesus.

Here’s how we’re going to do this. First, we’re going to look at what Paul means by compassion and kindness and what it replaces in the old way of doing marriage. And then we’re going to look at the compassion of Jesus and how his example is played out in marriage that is increasingly Christ like. So let’s start in verse 12. Put on then as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. Again, I want you to notice the order here. I’m only emphasizing this because Paul spends so much time emphasizing and reiterating this point. You put these things on why? Because of your new identity as those who have been hand-selected by God to be holy, because Christ is holy, and that you were selected to be beloved because Christ is loved by the father. It’s because of this new status that you have before God in Christ, that you then put on these characteristics. And the first two items in the list that he mentions are compassionate hearts and kindness. If you read this in the New Living Translation, it combines these two traits into the phrase tender hearted mercy. I do think that these are listed together in the list because there’s so much overlap between them. This is the quality of seeing someone who is hurting and finding yourself inclined to come alongside and to help. But in coming alongside of this person, you don’t do it with coldness. You don’t come alongside and help but with judgment, like you’re somehow better than this situation or this person. You do it with kindness because you genuinely care about the well-being of the other person. And so compassion is how you feel and what you do when you come alongside someone, you join them. And kindness is how you carry that out. It’s the opposite of the anger and wrath from the put off list up in verse eight. Wrath is judgment against another person. That’s what wrath is. It’s judgment and then enacting a punishment against them for what they’ve done. Anger, of course, is the attitude that we bring when we’re being wrathful. We’re very familiar with anger, with the emotion of anger, because it’s a very common emotion. We’re less familiar with the problem of wrath. But technically speaking, the moment that your anger drives you to act out to, to punish, to condemn another person, you’ve actually moved to wrath. Anger drove you to wrath. We usually just continue to call that anger, but it’s actually wrath. And you can see this very clearly when you consider God’s wrath, which is mentioned in verse six. Let me take you there. This is from five and six put to death therefore what is earthly in you sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. On account of these, the wrath of God is coming. So these sinful lifestyles of the old self have to be put to death in the Christian, because, well, they rightly judged and condemned by God. They are rightly receiving his wrath. Sin that is not covered by the substitute sacrifice of Jesus is judged in the future by God’s justice, and it’s punished in the future by God’s punishment. That’s God’s wrath. And when we’re talking about God’s righteous wrath, that’s a good thing. When we’re talking about our wrath against other people, it is clearly evil because we’re not righteous judges. We are deeply flawed people. We don’t see with God’s omniscience, we see with limited, often sinfully self-centered perspective. So while God’s future wrath against sin is totally good and it is totally appropriate, our wrath against others isn’t. We’re never told in Scripture. Isn’t this amazing? We are never told in Scripture to take on the role individually of bringing God’s wrath against another person. Never once are we instructed to do that. There is a sense in which the nation or the government serves as an extension of God’s justice and his punishment, but that’s a completely different sermon. That’s another topic altogether. We’re not instructed as individuals in Scripture, in all of the Bible to bring any type of punitive justice against another person. Jesus himself did not bring final condemnation and act with wrath toward sinners. He will. He will. That’s coming. But we are clearly instructed to leave that in the hands of God.

This is why Paul in Romans 12:19 says, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God. The reason we don’t bring wrath is because we can trust that the good righteous judge will. And that frees us. That’s why it’s possible for us to show compassion and kindness to everyone, even including our enemies, we can show compassion and kindness. God is going to bring justice to every sin. Either that sin will be paid for by Jesus, or it will be paid for by the sinner. And in both cases, we are freed up to show compassion and kindness to everyone, everywhere, in every circumstance. But these are hard clothes to wear. These are hard clothes to put on for a lot of us. And it can be especially hard in marriage. I want you to think about marriage from a little different perspective this morning. Just think about that relationship for just a moment. I want you to think about it from a little different perspective. When we think of marriage we tend to think of two amazing people coming together to make a family that’s even better, even more amazing than they were individually. We think two people with different strengths, working in tandem to produce a unit far greater than the sum of its parts. Two people with a half heart necklace that found the perfect complementary soulmate in this crazy old world, right? That’s how we talk about it. That’s how we think about marriage. But just for a moment, you’re going to love this. I want you to think about it a little bit differently. Did I mention I don’t get asked to do many weddings? Just for a moment, I want you to think about marriage as two very self-centered people who know how life works best coming together to create a relationship where each one knows exactly what the marriage should look like and how the other person needs to act to make it happen. Okay, based on all my information about the scriptures and the world and my eyeballs, I think that second way of looking at marriage is probably a lot closer to the reality of what marriage is more like. I would say that it’s a lot closer to reality than the first. When I do premarital counseling with couples, I try to help them see the reality of what they’re entering into by comparing their union to the merging of two lanes of traffic. I say, you’ve been traveling for a long time in your own lane. You’re going your own speed. You’re making the adjustments. You can do everything you want, set the temperature just the way you want it to be. Right. You got that cruise control right where it’s supposed to be. You make you do the passing when you want to. You have been traveling along just fine. You’ve been cruising along for some time now, but everything is about to slow down. Things are about to get backed up. Temperatures are about to rise. There may be honking. You’re going to have to allow each other to merge. So that’s what’s going to happen, you’re coming in, two lanes are going to become one. You’re going to have to allow each other to merge. There are times when you’re going to feel like you’re just crawling along. There are going to be times when you feel like you’ve come to a full stop. You’re not going anywhere now. It just it just seems like everything has slowed down completely. And because there’s this inner desire to see your marriage become the perfect relationship that serves your needs in the way that you think it should, you won’t always feel inclined to be compassionate and kind. You see when we show compassion with other people, people who are not our spouse, when we do that, it is usually does not affect us directly. That compassion doesn’t usually affect us in our lives. If I take time to carefully help someone here at the church, for instance. That usually only lasts for the time that I put into it, of course I care about the person out but help along and then you go do other things. If it costs you something to be compassionate and kind with someone struggling in your extended family, a cousin, a brother, a parent, you can put that time in, but usually there’s distance there. There’s usually some sort of a boundary there so that it doesn’t cost you too much or affect you too directly. You can just go home, but your spouse is at home. Your spouse is at home when you get there. Your compassionate heart toward their struggle affects the very home that you live in, and their sin is probably against you. Their struggle is probably with you. With your spouse compassion and kindness have to be shown in a context where you are very much affected by that compassion that you have to show. Because here’s what’s happening, their sin is exposing your sin. That’s why that’s why the arguments happen. Their sin is exposing your sin. Their struggles affect your life. Compassion and kindness is a sacrifice in marriage. Rachel and I experienced this during the pandemic. Remember the pandemic? For those of you who are only three years old, the pandemic was a time when everyone stayed in their house for an entire year, convinced that either they were going to die for sure or the government was brainwashing everyone. It was one of those two things. There was nothing in the middle, right? You remember that? That was fun. I think we’d all agree that it was a difficult period in world history. This is kind of a strange the thing to say. But it was a world event, and it was a strange time in world history. I heard it recently described as a unique time because everyone in the world had the same problem, they said, which I think is pretty close. We all had the same problem, but I would tweak that slightly to say this everyone in the world had the same stressor that created millions of different problems. We all had the same stressor. Everybody had this thing drop into your life. Same stressor, millions of different problems. And in our house, the pandemic drove a wedge between Rachel and me because we had very different levels of fear. The pandemic presented rapid change and the unknown. Information came out slowly. The rules changed daily. No one quite knew what we were supposed to do. And Rachel and I are very different people when faced with change and the unknown. I tend to thrive in it. It doesn’t bother me at all. I don’t fear it at all. Rachel dislikes change in the unknown very, very much, and it stokes her fear. That’s just how she’s built. So when she became very fearful of a danger that you can’t see, she started doing all the things that we were being told to do to stay safe. And she became very judgmental of everyone who didn’t do those things with her. And I then became very resentful of her methods because they were driven by a fear that I did not share with her. It was a very difficult time for the two of us at a relational level. Now, I’m telling you this story because I missed an opportunity church. I missed an opportunity. See, I had the opportunity to grow by leaps and bounds in Christ like compassion and kindness. But instead, what happened was my lack of both compassion and kindness was totally exposed by this. With anyone else. I would have been compassionate and kind. If anybody else were struggling with this very .same thing I would have been compassionate and kind with them. But I wasn’t with Rachel. Why? Because her fear affected me directly. It changed my home, and I allowed my anger to be stirred by it. Because her fear impacted me, I resented it. And instead of seeing it as an opportunity to come alongside someone with tender mercy and help her through a difficult time with kindness, I chose wrath. Friends, if you’re married you live side by side with the person God will use most to bring about your spiritual transformation. That’s who it is. God will use this person the most to bring about your spiritual transformation. No one else will present you with as many opportunities to see yourself plainly for who you are. Any time you read a list like this, you come across it in Scripture, a list of godly characteristics, anytime you do this and you want to assess how you’ve grown in Christ or where you need to work, your mind should first go to your spouse. You say, well, I’m very compassionate toward people in need. I’m a very compassionate person. I have good feelings toward people, and I come alongside and I try to help. That’s fantastic. Are you sacrificially compassionate when your wife’s need requires you to change course and make choices for her sake and not yours? Where’s your compassion then? Is it growing then? You say, I’m very kind or I’m very kind to everyone. I feel like I’m doing really well with kindness. People call me a kind person. Okay. Are you kind to your husband when you don’t get your way? And his choices directly affect how you think life ought to be? Are you kind, then? Because that’s where the test is. That’s where the real test is. See, we’re not just being told to be more kind and compassionate. We’re being told to put on the kindness and compassion of Christ. Seek the things above where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. That’s where our eyes should be looking to find the kind of compassion and kindness that we’re supposed to show each other. We don’t get to define it. Jesus defines it for us. Paul will say this explicitly in the very next verse when he talks about forgiveness, he says to forgive as Christ has forgiven us. So we look to Jesus and His forgiveness to know how to forgive. We’ll talk about that in a few weeks. At the end of this passage, he says, let the Word of Christ dwell in you richly, and let the peace of Christ rule in your heart. See all of these character traits, all of these qualities, they’re not just empty categories that we can fill with any type of content we like. Jesus is the content. Jesus is the content who defines every trait. So if we want to know what our compassion and kindness should look like, we need to look at Jesus being compassionate and kind. Twelve times in the gospel accounts of Jesus life, we find the verb for showing compassion, and they’re all in reference to Jesus. One time, someone else asks Jesus to be compassionate, but the other 11 times are descriptions of Jesus internal feelings of compassion and how they move him. Of those 11 times, nine are Jesus feelings of compassion when he sees one of two things. People who are sick or crowds who are in need of a shepherd. It’s people. People always drive Jesus compassion. Their brokenness, move him to compassion. It’s people who are hurting and in need of something. Jesus steps in and it makes Jesus compassionate and kind. Let me show you one of them.

This is from Matthew. Matthew chapter nine. And Jesus went throughout all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every disease and every affliction. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, the harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few. Therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest. Jesus’s response to the harassment, and the helplessness of the crowd was a feeling of compassion, but then it drove him to a course of action. See, they needed guidance and direction. They weren’t getting that help, that guidance from the Jewish religious leaders around them. They were only getting condemnation from those guys. People didn’t measure up as far as they were concerned. The religious leaders didn’t really care about people. But here’s Jesus. Here’s Jesus sharing entry into the kingdom of God, giving these people hope. And he tells the disciples, hey, I want you to even pray for more. I want you to pray more people will be raised up and go and share this compassionate gospel with other people. Here’s another one. This is from Mark chapter one. And a leper came to him, imploring him, and kneeling, said to him, if you will, you can make me clean. Moved with pity, he stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, I will, be clean. And immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean. So pity here is the same word as compassion. So moved to pity is the same word as having compassion. Do you see how it’s the needs of people that stir Jesus internally? But it’s not just sentimental emotion for Jesus. It’s not just feeling bad. These feelings move him to solutions that help, whether it’s healing a person or preaching the truth to them for guidance or or raising up an army of workers who will go and help more people. Jesus’s compassion is always a prompt for him to take on another person’s burden and to get involved in the solution. He does not despise the needs of the people who need him. He enters into those needs. But in these cases with Jesus, I suppose a husband and wife could argue, well, yeah, of course Jesus had pity on the crowds and on the sick, and then he helped them. Their weakness wasn’t against Jesus himself. You could argue. See, Jesus wasn’t affected directly here. He was just there and he was able to engage. And you might say, well, Jesus could then get away. He could he could take a rest. He could heal. He could move on. I have to show compassion to my spouse whose sin is against me, and I don’t have any place else to go, so it’s different for Jesus.

I mentioned there were two more uses of compassion in the Gospels. Both are from Jesus mouth, used in two of his most famous parables. One of them is the parable of the Good Samaritan, describing how the Samaritan saw the man on the side of the road and went and helped him with all of his needs. His compassion moved him to help. But the other might be the most helpful example of Jesus compassion we have for husbands and wives today. A son demands his father give him his inheritance. He takes his father’s money and he squanders it on sinful living. He dishonors his dad. He dishonors his entire family. So in desperation, the son goes back to the father, hoping just to be a hired hand so he can survive. See, he’s convinced that the relationship that he had with his father will never be the same, that it will always be ruined because of this thing that he did. How is the father who has been directly abused and shamed? How is he going to react to his son’s return? But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion and ran and embraced him and kissed him before he can even say he’s sorry. Before he can even share his plan, the father sees the son who greatly, directly wronged him, and compassion drives him to run out and welcome him back. And Jesus tells us this story because he wants us to know God’s compassion toward us. How God sees us, we who directly in the face of God sinned against him, rebelled against him. How does God see us? What does his compassion look like to us? Our weakness and brokenness has caused rebellion and animosity in our relationship with God. It is a direct affront against God, and yet his compassion and his kindness does not wane. It absorbs the sin. It takes the sin on its own shoulders. The Father does, and it wipes that sin away. How can it do that? Well, on the cross, of course. God’s compassion to us, as those who directly attack him is made possible by his sacrifice for those very sins that we committed against him. So I ask you, do you want Christ like compassion and kindness? Not just do you want to be more compassionate and kind? Do you want Christ like compassion and kindness? The kind that enters into the pain of others and bears their burdens and expresses the love of God. Well, then it will have to be sacrificial compassion. It’s the only kind there is. It’s the only kind that God has. It will be kindness expressed to those who have been unkind to you. It will be tender mercy to those who have wronged you directly. And there’s no relationship where you will have greater opportunity to grow in compassion than with your spouse, whose needs will affect you directly.

Church, I want to challenge you. Married couples here at Calvary, I want to challenge you, me included, I’m in this challenge as well. The next time you disagree with your spouse and that’s coming, that’s probably coming this week. Certainly it’s coming. It might come this afternoon actually. The next time that you begin to disagree with your spouse and your anger begins to simmer and you start to see how you are personally being wronged here, I want you to immediately call on God and ask him to develop your compassion in that moment. I want you to say, God, I need to become compassionate right now. I need to be compassionate and kind. See, your marriage is the training ground of your soul. It’s the context in which you will be tempted, tempered, and tested to become most like Jesus. That’s where God is going to do it. He’s going to use that relationship to do most of that. And so you say, God, help me to see my spouse with the compassionate eyes of God the Father, the same father who came to me in my need, who absorbed my sin on the cross and welcomed me into an unbreakable relationship. Lord, I need that compassion right now so that I can bear the burdens of my spouse. Ask the Lord in that moment to make you more like Jesus, because he will. He will. He listens to his kids. Call upon me in the day of trouble. I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me. Let’s pray.