Well, let's have a word of prayer and we'll get to work. Again, O God, you are great and greatly to be praised. We're thankful to be your people gathered together this morning to think about this issue of empathy. We pray, Lord, as we learn these things. It'll help us to think rightly and wisely about our world. We pray also, God, that as we think these things through, it'll help us to avoid counterfeit compassions and pity, and will spur us on to demonstrate godly compassion and pity. So help our eyes to be awakened to these truths, and to see the counterfeits, and again, to spur us on to godly living for the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray, amen. I'm using a lot of references to current affairs and different events because I want you to see how these things interact with so much of our present culture, right? I would imagine most of you are familiar with Chip and Joanna Gaines. They're stars of the show Fixer Upper. They created the Magnolia brand that's sold in places like Target. They've written books. They own restaurants. It hardly needs to be said that they've enjoyed phenomenal success in their career. And while, to be perfectly honest, they're barely on my radar, from what I understand, they've always been very outspoken about their evangelical faith. But controversy has emerged over one of their current shows on HBO. It's a reality program called Back to the Frontier. And it's basically taking contemporary facts back to the Canadian Rockies and having them live as homesteaders, as homesteaders would have lived, say, in the mid or late 1800s. Now what's caused controversy, at least from their evangelical audience, and by the way, their career was fostered and built up first and foremost from evangelicals. It's expanded beyond that now, but from what I understand, they were the initial audience. Well, the controversy has occurred because they included on their show two homosexual men, pretending to be married, who have twin sons. Incidentally, the show is supposed to be devoid of all things modern. So one has to wonder just how many Adam and Steve couples Chip and Joanna Gaines envisioned homesteading 150 years ago. You go into a little town and, oh, there's a corner, you see the sign, that's where the fairy prairies, that's where they live, you know. No, no, no, no, it didn't exist. Anyway, that notwithstanding, as you might imagine, evangelical Christians almost immediately began to push back against the decision to include this gay couple, right? Because those who actually have a Christian worldview see this as normalizing the kind of sins that God abominates. The reason I'm sharing this, though, has to do with the way Chip Gaines responded to those who sought to correct him. I printed out his text on your handout. He's probably responding here, incidentally, to I'm drawing a blank. Who's the guy from Samaritan's Purse? Billy Billy Graham's son Franklin Graham. Yeah, he's probably responding to Franklin Graham with it. Anyway, he writes And he's speaking to Christians talk ask questions. Listen, maybe even learn Too much to ask of modern American Christian culture judge first understand later or never It's a sad Sunday when non-believers have never been confronted with hate or vitriol Until they're introduced to a modern American Christian Now, there are a couple of logical fallacies in his argument. One is an appeal to emotion, but it's also the logical fallacy of a false dilemma. Here's the false dilemma he presents us with. You either accept that these two gay dudes who bought sons through surrogacy have every right to be on the show, or you're a judgmental, vitriolic, hateful Christian. But you see, those aren't the only two positions one can take. Here's another one. We actually care about them and love them and don't want to encourage them in a lifestyle about which God says they will not inherit the kingdom of God. And instead we want them to flee to Christ to have their guilt and shame washed away and to enjoy peace with God. So it's a logical fallacy. But it's not only a logical fallacy. It's an example of weaponizing pity. He's using empathy to manipulate emotions, which is what we spent a lot of time thinking about last week. And we're beginning to see how empathy can be used for sinful ends. Now, by way of a brief review, you'll recall that when we speak of empathy, we're referring to the modern tendency to make someone else's emotional state own, to feel into their experience so completely that we lose boundaries. And again, this is different from compassion and sympathy, which means to suffer with. We're called to suffer with someone while maintaining the ability to think clearly about what will actually help them. And again, here's how we're thinking about it. As an example, if your friend is drowning and Empathy might mean jumping in the water and drowning alongside them, whereas compassion means staying on solid ground so you can throw them a lifeline, right? The point being, if our empathy is disconnected or untethered from truth, it actually ends up making us incapable of helping the hurting, right? Glencira, I like the way Dr. Rigney puts this. While compassion will leap from the heights of joy to the depths of sorrow in order to bring healing. So I just want to pause there. He is interested that we be a compassionate people, right? Even at a great cost to itself, it will refuse to be steered by the manipulations of the afflicted. True compassion always reserves the right not to blaspheme. It refuses to concede what should not be conceded, even in the face of great human suffering. It refuses to flatter under the pressure of pity. Instead, it insists on speaking the truth, or at least clinging to the truth, if wisdom directs that it is not yet time to speak. Compassion is willing to be called heartless in its pursuit of the true and lasting good of the afflicted. True compassion is stable and calm, which gives it the paradoxical ability to move toward the hurting without being swallowed by their grief. Again, Dr. Rigney provides a very poignant illustration from Job. You'll remember in the opening chapters of Job, this poor man, he and his wife, they faced terrible loss. They lost their property. They lost their children. Job lost his health. And Mrs. Job, who was no doubt in the midst of terrible sorrows, said this in Job 2.9, Then his wife said to him, Do you still hold fast to your integrity? Curse God and die. So she's basically saying blaspheme God. And most of us would probably say, well, she's in a tough place. But look what Job said, verse 10. You speak as one of the foolish women speak. Shall we indeed accept good from God? And shall we not accept adversity? And all this Job did not sin with his lips. So you see, back to Dr. Rigney's quote, true compassion always reserves the right not to blaspheme. And again, I should say, Dr. Rigney recognizes that this is a bracing illustration. And even in his quote above, he indicates that there may be times when wisdom indicates we don't speak. But the point stands, we still have to stay tethered to the truth. It would have been easy for Job to say, I'm just going to overlook my wife's blasphemy. But he doesn't. And he's commended by God. And I think this is actually very applicable to Chip Gaines. He would rather leave a person in their sin, he'd rather overlook the fact that they're in a lifestyle that's destructive and hell-bound, than potentially say something or do something that might be perceived as unkind or not nice or judgmental. Even if the unkind and not nice and judgmental thing could lead the person to repentance. Any questions or comments so far? Everybody's tracking with me? Don't hesitate to ask questions. All right. Well, Dr. Wigney spills a fair amount of ink to demonstrate where and how untethered empathy can certainly lead to sin. And he borrows extensively from a scholar by the name of Edwin Friedman. Friedman was a rabbi, actually, and a family therapist. And over as many years of practice, Friedman noticed something very troubling. that families, churches, and other organizations that elevated empathy above all other concerns were often the most anxious and the most unable to function and flourish in healthy ways. So for example, while leaders are called to feel and care deeply for others, if a leader prioritizes empathy above all else, something inevitably toxic happens. the most immature and reactive members of the community end up gaining control of the agenda. Here's how Friedman describes it. Empathy is often a disguise for anxiety and a power tool in the hands of the sensitive. Consider how policy debates increasingly get shut down in the civil realm. Not through rational arguments, but through claims of emotional harm. legislator proposes a policy say something along the lines that biological males ought not to compete in women's sports and instead of having an honest moral and thoughtful debate it immediately devolves to something like this this legislation makes trans people feel unsafe your words are violence how dare you cause this kind of trauma to this vulnerable community and so the issue is holds everybody hostage because weak leaders think their highest priority is to manage the emotional distress of the most reactive voices in any particular community. Everybody with me? Can you think of examples in church, in our community, in our body politic, maybe in our family, where empathy is used by the weakest and, in some cases, the most unhinged members of the community to drive the agenda? Any examples come to mind? Too many. Too many? Would children ever use empathy to hold their parents hostage? Can't you envision a three or four-year-old who gets the long pouts and figures the longer he holds the pout the more likely mom or dad or grandma and granddad are going to cave? Right? What is he doing? He's manipulating, exactly. I think from my perspective where Christians fail the most is not calling out sin. That's the big one. And we'll actually really kind of hone in on that more next week, but that's the big issue. And here's the problem when we don't do that, we're actually demonstrating hate, not love. We're showing that I don't care at all about you, rather than demonstrating compassion. Right? You know what? Even as a believer, there've been many, many, many times over the years when I've been corrected. And let me tell you how many times I enjoyed it. Zero. But I always came to believe that the Lord and see that the Lord was using that to make sure my feet were still on that path, that track that's the narrow track that leads to heaven. And when we don't do that, when we don't confront sin, we're saying, I don't care about any of that. I would rather that person be able to hold me emotionally hostage than tell them something that could save their everlasting souls. It is the easier route to, well, the example of the child throwing a temper tantrum. Well, I don't want to deal with their temper tantrum, so I'm not going to take the TV remote away from them because they're going to cry. Then I don't have to deal with the problem. Yeah, the problem is it works. And it works in the church. Well, the book introduces a concept called differentiation. We're going to work out what that means. But basically, a differentiated person is one who can fully be themselves while staying fully connected to others. In other words, they know where they end and the other person begins in a relationship. They can care deeply about somebody's pain without being controlled by it. Here's a helpful quote. Again, this is printed for you. Differentiation is the ability to be fully yourself while being fully connected to people. It's gaining clarity on where I ends and where the other begins. A differentiated person allows space between himself and another. even when that other person is highly anxious or asking for rescue. A differentiated leader is clear on his own values and conviction and is not easily swayed from them. So is everybody sort of tracking with me this idea of what a differentiated leader is? This is an important principle because it's saying that two things ought to function together. First, that a good leader will in fact care and will care deeply about other people. But second, a good leader will care enough that he won't compromise his values or convictions, right? An example that came to mind as I was thinking about this this past week is Galatians 2 when Paul confronted Peter. Obviously Paul and Peter were brothers in Christ. They were fellow apostles. They're partners in the ministry. But you'll recall that Peter had stopped eating with the Gentiles. Why? Because he was afraid. Peter was afraid of the circumcision party. And what's amazing is Paul didn't say, well, that old Peter, you know, he's just so concerned about those Judaizers. He just doesn't want to upset them. So I think I'll just ignore the fact that Peter has separated himself from the Gentiles. No, Peter, Paul does not respond that way. We're told in Galatians 2 verses 11 and 14, when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face because he stood condemned. When I saw that their conduct was not in step with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, this is a public shaming, right? If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you force the Gentiles to live like Jews? Paul certainly loved Peter, and they were co-laborers in the gospel. And that way, he remained connected to Peter, but he didn't let Peter's fear or status control his response because Paul had gospel convictions. Again, this goes back to your point, Paul. If we have gospel convictions and we believe the gospel is true, we will call people out on their sin. That's what differentiated leadership looks like. Questions, comments, thoughts? Jeff? Yeah, and if you remember, if we remember in that passage, Barnabas got all touchy, that even Barnabas was caught up in this as well. And then Paul does the same thing with John Mark. Barnabas is the old mushy gushy guy that says, oh, no, no. And Paul says, no, he failed us. He's gonna, and then, but the result was that John Mark became useful to him. So Paul's efforts were, you know, God used those and rewarded him. Yeah, yeah. Again, one of the things I want to keep sort of beating this undercurrent of a drum, that he's trying to bring us to a place where we can actually care about people well, right? Well, where there isn't this kind of differentiated leadership in an organization, Dr. Rigney says that this kind of wild, untethered empathy can and often does lead to three destructive outcomes. Cowardice, indifference, and cruelty. So first, cowardice. When empathy becomes supreme, It's easy for the community to become terrified of causing anyone distress. That becomes the governing ethos of a particular community. Again, whether we're talking about a home, a church, a business, the town square. And here's the trap. We stop distinguishing between distressing someone and actually harming someone. I mean, the thing is, sometimes truth is distressing. And sometimes growth is distressing. Sometimes consequences to circumstances are distressing. But distress is not the same as harm. John Piper calls this dynamic emotional blackmail. I want you to glance here at this quote because it's really quite good. From Piper, emotional blackmail happens when a person equates his or her emotional pain with another person's failure to love. They aren't the same. A person may love well and the beloved still feel hurt and use the hurt to blackmail the lover into admitting guilt he or she does not have. Emotional blackmail says, if I feel hurt by you, you're guilty. There's no defense. The hurt person has become God. His emotion has become judge and jury. Truth does not matter. All that matters is the sovereign suffering of the aggrieved. It is above question. This emotional device is a great evil. I've seen it often in my three decades of ministry, and I'm eager to defend people who are being wrongly indicted by it." In other words, if a person feels hurt by you, you're guilty, period. Right? And in communities where empathy is one of the premier virtues, that leads to cowardice, right? And so what happens is that certain topics, well, we can't talk about this anymore. That's off limits. Not because the topics might be untrue or unhelpful or unimportant, but because discussing them might distress someone, and so we just ignore certain truths and certain realities. And if the topic is addressed, There's the tendency to layer, layer upon layer of qualifications because we're terrified if we say something too clearly, the other person might feel bad. Let me give you an example that I've used before. Those of you who have been around for a while have heard me say this, but I'm sure all of you have actually heard sermons on homosexuality. And if you think back on those sermons that you heard, I wonder how many of them actually began with an apology. Here's what I mean. The pastor's preparing to preach on homosexuality, and he prefaces his sermon with something like this. This morning I'm going to preach to you on homosexuality, and I'm going to say it's a sin, it's not God's ideal, it's not the way he created us to flourish, but I want to be clear. This I want to be clear about. If you're a homosexual, we love you. You're an image-bearer of God. We have many dear gay friends, and we want you to know that you're welcome here." Now you might be thinking, well, what's wrong with that? Well, first off, he's apologizing for something God calls a sin. But the question you ought to ask is, does the preacher preface every single sermon he preaches with that language? So here would be my question. Is this the only sin pattern he preaches on where he first offers an apology? Let me put it this way. Can you imagine that same preacher standing up and saying, this morning I'm going to preach on racism and white supremacy. And I'm going to say it's a sin. It's not God's ideal. It's not the way he created us to flourish. But I want to be very clear about this. If you're a racist and white supremacist, we love you. You're an image bearer of God. And we have many dear white supremacist friends. And we want you to know you're welcome here. You see, Would a sermon on racism receive the same warning label that they put on homosexuality? Probably not. And it's because a misplaced empathy for a particular group of people has created cowardice. And you often hear people say, but we love them so much, we can't bear to hurt them. When in reality, what's happened is that their care is so untethered from God's wisdom and God's justice. that has been easily manipulated by the emotional weaklings in their particular group. And instead of speaking plainly from a place of faith and courage, they speak from a place of fear and cowardice. Any questions, comments on this idea of empathy leading to cowardice? The apology they offer normally is an apology for how the church in general has treated them too. It's like what Chip Gaines said, I know most of the Christians... Did you hear what he said? It's a sad day when the first time an unbeliever is confronted with hate and vitriol. It's from a Christian, yeah. Then they go on to rebuke the Christians there for past whatever it is where they may have mishandled the situation or weren't as empathetic as they should have been. Instead of actually addressing the homosexuality, which he started out talking about, he then is rebuking the congregation for that. Again, it's because he's hostage to the empathy of one of the most reactive groups in the culture. aspect, I think, of cowardice is we're afraid to call out sin because the devil is convicting us, not maybe of the same sin, but, oh, come on, Paul, you're a sinner, who are you to judge, or, you know, that typical horrible response. The devil does that to great effect. This was something I struggled with for a number of years early on in the ministry, right? Because I would come and I would talk about sin and it's like, and I'm doing that too. But it occurred to me that that's the point. We're all acknowledging our need for grace, right? And I do think it's a weapon that the enemy of our soul wields with great effect. And sometimes it'll be wielded at you. Oh, I know your son. I know of a situation. I don't know if you're thinking the one I'm on. We had a, I won't give you the names, but we had a brother here. He had been married for many, many years. His wife died. He had been single for a number of years. He got remarried. Really nobody even knew he was dating anybody. It was sort of like he popped into congregation one day and said, hello, I got a wife. And that lasted for about a year and a half. And she started not being in church. And after like a month or two, he's like, oh yeah, I'm divorcing. my wife, and so I went to him and confronted him with it, and his first response was, but you're a sinner too. Yeah, so people do that, and people say that stuff to pastors, like it's going to give you carte blanche. In my case, you're just going to rile me up, so then you're probably not going to like what you're going to get to answer. I'm just kidding, mostly. Any other questions about this issue of cowardice? Well, the second destructive outcome I mentioned that Dr. Rigney points out, where there isn't this kind of differentiated leadership, is indifference. And specifically, untethered empathy can lead to indifference that actually flows out of selected empathy. Now, it's going to make sense as we work through this, but here's the paradox. Empathy is supposed to make us care more about people. But you see, here's the problem. Because we're finite beings, we can only empathize with a limited number of people at any given time. We just don't have the emotional bandwidth to do much more. And so empathy kind of functions like a spotlight. It illuminates some people's suffering while it ignores other people's suffering. We can't help that. One scholar calls this empathetic myopia. We get a kind of empathy tunnel vision. We see the suffering of the people in our spotlight, but we become blind or even callous to those who might be suffering outside of the spotlight of our empathy. Everybody with me? And here's the troubling tendency that this leads to. The more intensely we empathize with one person or one group, the more indifferent we tend to deal with others. So it's not just that we fail to notice them. we can actually become hard-hearted toward other suffering. This happens because of our emotional capacity. It gets exhausted by the intensity of empathizing with a chosen group that we've decided to give all our attention to. And so once we've spent all of our emotional energy sort of feeling into the person, we have nothing left for anybody else. And even worse, when someone else's pain doesn't fit the story that we've built around the people we are empathizing with, we actually push it aside, right? I'll give you an example. Go back to 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, the whole stuff with George Floyd, some of those things. The big language that you were hearing is, cops are just shooting down unarmed black men in the street. And I think the highest number that that's ever been is 22. And again, these weren't 22 dudes who were just nice guys cruising along on their bicycle and the cop drove up beside them and popped them. These were thugs and miscreants who were attacking cops and they got shot for their trouble. But here's the problem. The mantra became Black Lives Matter. That's who we have to have empathy for. And if you spoke reality into that situation and said something like, do you know how many policemen get shot every year by black criminals? There was no room for that, right? All their empathy went in a single direction, right? Well, the pushback was all lives matter. And the people that were saying all lives matter, the black lives matter people said, you're using hate speech. What? You people are nuts. So we end up dismissing, you know, when we're laser locked on one group, we end up sort of dismissing or minimizing other groups completely. Think of it this way. If we recognize person B suffering, would complicate or challenge our empathy for person A, then we just stop seeing person B as a human being, certainly as somebody who's suffering. And so all this by way of saying what may have began from a place of deep care for people ends up transforming into a cold indifference or even hostility toward others. Ben? thought about all of this. Kind of the point you're making is that we only have so much empathetic or sympathetic bandwidth. And Elizabeth and I kind of saw this happen when she started staying home and stopped working. What we noticed is that women have actually a strength when it comes to compassion and sympathy that men don't have. And the purpose of that is for them to be able to channel all this sympathy, good empathy, compassion, pity, whatever, channel it into their family. And they create a place where it's just that there's life and there's growth and there's flourishing of family. Joy. Joy, right. So it's actually a strength, but what she found is that when she was out in the workplace, there's all these empathy traps set all over the place. And they target everybody, but especially young women. So when women are out in the workplace, their empathy or sympathy stores are just being drained all over the place. So, you know, they're supposed to feel so deeply for this group over here or this person here. And, you know, my wife worked in the medical field. So it especially happens in the medical field because you are seeing people who are hurting and struggling. And we've seen that in some other young women, too, who are working, where it's like, you're trying to run around and throw all your compassion and your empathy, your God-given compassion and empathy, at all these people all over the place, and you just can't do that. So then these women go home, and they're just completely drained, exhausted, and don't actually have any sympathy for the people who matter most to them. Definitely, different people are going to have different capacities for that. Women almost, well, I mean, even secular psychologists acknowledge women have greater degrees and greater levels of empathy. So that's not even a question. But even in those categories of male and female, people have different capacities. And once that capacity is led, excuse me, has reached its sort of peak, you're going to, You're going to spiral. You're going to either let emotions control you or you're going to collapse. But we all have a limited capacity. The abortion debate provides a really stark picture of this kind of empathy that leads to sort of indifference, right? Abortion advocates often leverage empathy for women in desperate situations. During the governor's race in Kentucky, There was a TV ad that featured a rape victim where she looked into the camera and said, it's printed for you there on your sheet. I was raped by my stepfather after years of sexual abuse. I was 12. Anyone who believes that there should be no exceptions for rape and incest could never understand what it's like to stand in my shoes. This is to you, Daniel Cameron. to tell a 12-year-old girl she must have a baby of her stepfather who raped her is unthinkable. I'm speaking out because women and girls need to have options. Daniel Cameron would give us none, right? So obviously a 12-year-old rape victim deserves our compassion and our appropriate empathy, our care. But when that empathy is used to justify the murder of an innocent baby, Something's gone terribly wrong. You see, the unborn child is invisible. That's just outside of their gaze of empathy. And so the little one has basically become disposable because their empathy is so laser locked in this one direction. And so one person's suffering is used to basically obscure another one's destruction. This is why the pro-life movements fought to make the unborn visible through ultrasounds, images, descriptions of fetal development, those kind of things. But behind the pro-abortion ideology is selective empathy that leads to indifference toward the other group. In this case, indifference toward little ones and their mama's womb. Any questions, comments? We're doing good time-wise. Well, now we come to what I think is probably the most disturbing outcome, where there isn't that kind of strong differentiated leadership, and I keep going back to that. You'll often find empathy that just leads right to cruelty. Intense empathy for one group often ends up producing intense hatred for the other group. And here's how this unfolds. When we empathize deeply with our in-group, It's very easy, in fact, we tend to demonize anyone we perceive as threatening our group. And we no longer see them as people who are simply wrong. Because we're so empathetic with our group, we now see them as evil. And once someone is evil, we feel justified in treating them with cruelty. We saw this play out tragically with the assassination of Charlie Kirk. In the aftermath, something that I found incredibly disturbing happened. Great numbers of people on social media celebrated his death or made callous, mocking comments about his murder. I mean, this is a 31-year-old father who was murdered, and people responded to that with glee. How does that happen? And see, here's the thing, I can almost guarantee you that if you spoke with any of those who reveled in Charlie's death and asked them, are you an empathetic person? Oh yes, I'm very empathetic. And make no mistake, they are. They are. But their intense empathy for their own political tribe, combined with their view that Kirk was an enemy of that tribe, led them to dehumanize him to such a degree that his violent death became something to celebrate rather than something to mourn. that's the pathway from selective empathy to cruelty. And a lot of recent research bears this out. One study found that people who score high on empathy tests actually view outsiders, those who are not of their tribe, more negatively than those who would measure low empathy on these kind of social tests. Again, more disturbing, these high empathy people tend to take more pleasure in seeing outsiders suffer than the low empathy people do. Did you hear that? The high empathy folks tend to take more pleasure in the suffering of those outside of their group than people who have lower or maybe what we call normal empathy. So the very people who pride themselves on being the most caring and empathetic are often the ones who feel the most satisfaction when their enemies feel pain. High empathy for us doesn't make us kinder to them. It often makes the person crueler. How many of the people who mocked unvaccinated COVID deaths would describe them as deeply empathetic? Oh, you didn't get the vaccination? You deserve to die. And by the way, that's not a character. There are thousands and thousands of people saying that just right out there. And again, how many of them were deeply empathetic? Most of them. And they're not lying about their self-perception. C.S. Lewis saw this coming some 70 years ago. He wrote, Even a good emotion, pity, if not controlled by charity and justice, leads, through anger, to cruelty. Most atrocities are stimulated by accounts of the enemy's atrocities. And pity for the oppressed classes, when separated from the moral law as a whole, leads by a very natural process to the unremitting brutalities of a reign of terror. So when pity or empathy gets untethered from justice and moral truth, it doesn't stay as mere pity. It transforms. It moves through anger. How dare you hurt the people I care about? And it arrives at cruelty. They deserve what's coming to them. That's exactly how Marxism works its way out in society. Not just the cultural Marxism that we see now, because that's what we're talking about, but the original Marxism. You bash the bourgeoisie because they're oppressing the proletariat, and the proletariat's working so hard. We're oppressed, we're victimized, and we're just trying to make it, pull ourselves up, but we just can't, right? So then you go and end up slaughtering thousands, millions of people. Marx, as well as cultural Marxism, they both relied heavily on the philosophy of Hegel. Those of you who know Hegel may have heard this phrase. Hegel's philosophic theory can sort of be summarized in the idea that If you're looking and you're trying to attain truth or make sense of the world, usually you can divide things up in this way. There's something that's going on that provides you a thesis. There's something that you can identify. And then there's going to be something that opposes that. That's going to be an antithesis. And as the thesis and antithesis collide, there will be a synthesis. And sort of out of that revolution of ideas, will come the truth. And so that's what Marx was trying to accomplish. That's why Marxism, by definition, is revolutionary. He wanted to pit these groups together. And your impulse is exactly right, Ben. And so in cultural Marxism, that's what they sought to do, was to bring groups together so that out of that they could usher in their Marxist utopia, just like we see it in so many different countries. That was a joke. It isn't in any countries working as a utopia. No, no. Another example of this was the murder of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. He was shot and killed on a New York street by a man named Luigi Mangione. And the aftermath, social media exploded with people celebrating his death, making memes about it, expressing support for his killer. In fact, I saw a story just, well, it wasn't this week, it was last week. A woman sent this guy a note and said, you're so handsome and so virtuous for killing him. You're probably going to spend a lot of time in jail, but I'll marry you and wait for you. I'm like, yeah, OK. And again, the people who were making these kinds of claims, they weren't people you would identify as sociopaths. They were people who were empathizing intensely with what they perceived to be the victims of a health care system. And their empathy for the victims was real, and it was understandable. But it was so laser focused that they didn't care the fact that a real man with real children and a real life and real friends was murdered on the street. So, their empathy for one group made them blind to another. Any comments, questions? Well, you know, the murderer of Charlie Kirk, if you look back at his comments back to his boyfriend or whatever, he was very empathetic about, you know, doing this for us and so on. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, that's what he said. I believe one of the statements he said in his manifesto was something to the effect of I can't stand his hate anymore. And in his mind, he was justified in killing him. So he hadn't. And again, by the way, this is why a Christian worldview is so necessary, not just for us, but for in a world that we want to live in. Because if we don't start with this premise that we are, in fact, all image bearers of God, then there will always be some philosophy or some idea that will convince us that they're not worthy of dignity. And that's what you're dealing with. And again, we need that as a culture. Anything else? Well, what's the alternative? If unchecked empathy is so dangerous, what should we cultivate instead? The answer is compassion. It's rooted in wisdom, justice, and truth. Biblical compassion differs from modern empathy in some crucial ways. It maintains boundaries. Compassion means you can care deeply for someone without losing yourself in their emotional state. You stay grounded in reality and in truth. And that enables you to pursue the long-term good for the person who may be having a hard time or suffering, rather than giving their immediate comfort, which may very well be the very last thing they need. Sometimes compassion means saying hard truths or allowing someone to experience necessary consequences because it's tethered to justice. And real compassion doesn't pit one person's good against another. It seeks what's genuinely right and true, and it engages both heart and mind. Compassion feels deeply, but compassion also thinks clearly. It doesn't demand that we turn off our rational judgment. It can say no. Sometimes the most compassionate thing to do is to refuse to participate in somebody's dysfunction or manipulation. Because here's the thing, if they're doing it to you, they're doing it to somebody else. And it's just going to get worse and worse and worse and worse. Remember Friedman's concept of differentiation. That's what compassionate leaders must practice. They can be fully present to someone's pain while remaining fully intact as individuals and grounded upon their own convictions. They don't abandon their values or judgments in order to sort of give credence to another person's emotional state. So for leaders, quick applications. Don't look to the most reactive voices to set your agenda. Care for people without being controlled by their emotions. Maintain your ability to think clearly even when people are upset. And remember that sometimes the loving thing causes short-term distress for the purpose of long-term good. For parents, empathizing with your child's every upset can actually impair their development. Sometimes they need to learn frustration tolerance, not have every uncomfortable feeling either validated or eliminated. Compassion often means allowing natural consequences while remaining present and supportive. For church communities, don't allow emotional blackmail to control your decision-making, and it does happen in churches all the time. People say something to the effect, if you really loved me, you'd affirm my choices. That's manipulation. True love, it does sometimes require difficult conversations and firm boundaries. I'm going to stop there. Any other comments? Go back and read that definition on differentiation, because that's really helpful in thinking through what it looks like to be able to show proper compassion and not to get sucked into this kind of empathy trap that's all around us. So really good stuff. Interesting enough, next week we're coming to the section I actually thought was the best part of his book, what he calls the progressive gaze. That was really, really intriguing. I'll give you a little hint. He's saying a great many Christians make empathetic decisions based on the fact that there's a little hidden progressive on their shoulder, evaluating everything they say and do. Think about that. Anyway. Riley? I think part of the difficult part of applying this whole understanding of compassion versus empathy is when you're dealing with someone who is involved heavily in the toxic empathy and is just steered by their emotions and doesn't even realize they're doing it when they're in that environment is kind of, it's like picking your battles, like what to address and when to address it with them. And do I cause, because this is going to cause a major blow up. So is this the issue that I should pick or is it this one? And I don't know. And is this the right time? Yeah. In other words, there's been many times when my wife and I are having a discussion and it's getting heated and I'm thinking I should say this and I'm like, I better wait till we both have cool heads, then I'll address it, right? And I don't consider that caving. I consider that wise, right? And so certainly there's something we have to practice that way. Oh, my goodness. So anyway, to your point. So, hey, don't let him manipulate you. I don't think he's really got a P. I think it's just I'm sorry. Well, let's pray. Father, we bless you and thank you for your kindness and mercy to us. Again, we do desire to be a compassionate people, to show the kind of pity that the Lord Jesus Christ showed to those who encountered him. But we need to demonstrate that pity and show that compassion, grounded to your moral law, demonstrating truth and justice in our compassion. Help us to think through these things wisely that we might be better disciples of the Lord Jesus. Help us now as we gather to worship you. Help us to lift up our hearts as a sacrifice of praise to you. Describe glory and majesty to your great name. We ask all these things through Jesus our Lord. Amen.