Embodying Compassion: Loving Our Neighbors as Ourselves

"Compassion is not an optional trait but a foundational aspect of living a Christ-like life. It's an attitude towards people. See, that's where all of the transformation that comes in growing in Christ's life is focused. It's on what's inside of us. A person of compassion is someone who has become able to love people." [00:16:58]

"Deciding to be a person of compassion is crucial to thinking about loving your neighbor. The Samaritan had compassion. You remember that the other two guys didn't have perfection. That's why they hear the songs. So their problem was not as we often say in preaching that they were so busy that they wanted to get on down the road." [00:17:22]

"The first major step in coming to be able to love our neighbors is being a compassionate person. It isn't like we could sort of go along as human beings do and then all of a sudden turn neighbor love on like a faucet. The foundation is our character as compassionate people, and that means that we feel what others feel." [00:20:04]

"You have to have a firm hold on the adequacy of God in order to allow yourself to feel what others feel. If you're not anchored in that, you can't do it. You'll back away and you'll find ways of articulating your life in such a way that you don't feel that. If you don't feel that, you won't be compassion." [00:21:02]

"The next step I think is practically one of the most important things. You have to decide who's going to be your neighbors. There's a lot of confusion that comes from the old way of thinking of neighbors where neighbors are the people who live next door. No, your neighbors are primarily the ones that are most intimately involved in your life." [00:21:22]

"To whom will you be a neighbor? If you remember, that's how Jesus turned that question in the story of Good Samaritan. The guy said, 'Who is my neighbor?' and he thought he was off the hook. So Jesus turned it around and said, 'Now who was a neighbor to the man in need?' So our question is to whom will I be your neighbor?" [00:22:41]

"Being a neighbor is a considerable undertaking. It isn't something you can just flip off. You have to take people on like the Good Samaritan did. I mean, you look at what he did. He really addressed himself in this person. So being a neighbor needs to really invest in new people." [00:30:56]

"The church is to be a witness of what life is supposed to be like, not with perfection. A church should be like a hospital, people in all sorts of stages of healing and surgery and getting well and going out the door and all that sort of thing. It is a place where people live with one another in healing love under the power of God." [00:33:56]

"Grace is not opposed to effort; it's opposed to earning. Earning is attitude, death of his actions, and you've never seen a person act like someone who's been set on fire by grace. Paul in one of his wonderful statements in First Corinthians 15 says, 'I promise more than all of us,' and then he catches himself, 'Oops, yet not I, but the grace of God that was in him.'" [00:46:31]

"We need to teach people how to be a part of the flowing of Grace in the kingdom of God, and we frankly don't do a lot of that in our churches. Now it's changing. This is one of the things that Lynn, I think, mentioned address. Yeah, there really is change coming on, but we need to be careful and don't carry through with it and make the teaching helpful." [00:47:50]

"The church is for discipleship; the discipleship is for the world. It is where people learn how to live their ordinary life in the kingdom of God, and that transforms the world and nothing else will." [00:48:31]

"Communities of love that are so astonishing that people cannot miss the message that Jesus brings the Trinitarian presence of God among human beings because that's what the intention has always been, that God should dwell in his people, and that's going to happen eventually one way or another. That's his intention, and he will bring it to pass." [00:50:00]