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few Bibles that are in front
of you. Matthew is going to be towards maybe about 60% in your
Bible. Matthew, it's the first book
of the Gospels. It's the first book of the New
Testament. Matthew chapter 9. And I want you to, if you haven't
gotten there and you want to pick up a Bible, we're going
to walk through a couple passages. we're going to point out some
things, so hopefully you'll follow along. There in Matthew chapter
9 verse 35 through 38 is where we're going to read. So we read
this passage that if you've been in church any time it's a familiar
passage, but I want to point a couple things out to you this
morning. We look at verse 35 and the Bible says this, you
can follow along in your Bible and I'll read it aloud. And Jesus
went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues,
and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every sickness
and every disease among the people. But when he saw the multitudes,
he was moved with, what's that word? Compassion on them, because
they fainted and were scattered abroad as sheep having no shepherd. Then saith he unto his disciples,
the harvest truly is plenteous, but the labors are few. Pray
ye therefore, the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth
labors into his harvest. begin with a word of prayer.
Father, we love You. We thank You for the day. And we thank You for
this time. Lord, the work here, the rest of the work in this
service is up to You. I just pray, Lord, that we would
understand this word that You have put in Your Scriptures for
us to understand. Help us, Lord, to learn from
it. Help us, Lord, to have the compassion
that Christ had in Father, that we would learn so greatly how
important this is in our life, and how as a result we can take
action on that as well. Lord, I ask that You bless this
time. Bless Your people. Thank You for being here. Thank
You for them being here this morning. And Lord, I just pray
that You would work in our hearts today, in Jesus' name, amen. First, I want you to see compassion
defined. Compassion defined. When you
look at this passage in the scripture, that word compassion, it appears
many times in the Bible. And the Bible was translated
from, the New Testament was translated from Greek. And so the Greek
word here, I'm not even going to try to say it because I don't
know that my mouth can form the sounds that are supposed to express
the word. For any of you Greek scholars,
I can share it with you afterwards. But that word that's translated,
compassion, is a very interesting, interesting word. It's important
to understand this meaning and first, what you do in the scriptures
when you come across a passage like this, to understand the
scriptures, what you do is you look through the Bible and you
see where that word is found to help understand it more deeply.
And so we're gonna walk through, there's plenty of places in Matthew
that we can look to. So turn over if you would, hold
your place there in chapter nine of Matthew. turn over a couple
pages to Matthew chapter 14, and in verse 14, I'll read it
for you, and if you see it there in the scriptures, I'll point
it out once we get there. Matthew 14, 14, this is talking
about the feeding of the 5,000, a story that we all know, where
there was a little boy that took his lunch of five loaves and
two fishes, and it was given to this multitude. But look at
verse 14, it says, and Jesus went forth and saw great multitude
and was moved with, what's that word? compassion toward them,
and he healed their sick. If you turn over just one page,
you go to chapter 15, and you go down to 32, there was another
instance where there was another multitude that was fed, and in
verse 32, the Bible says this, then Jesus called his disciples
unto him and said, I have, what's the word? Compassion on the multitude,
because they continue with me now three days and have nothing
to eat. If you turn over just a couple
more pages to verse 20, or chapter 20, excuse me, chapter 20, verse
34, the last verse of that chapter, and this story here talks about
a blind man that Jesus healed. Verse 34 says this, so Jesus
had, what's the word? Compassion on them, and touched
their eyes, and immediately their eyes received sight, and they
followed him. I'm not gonna have you turn there,
but if you look throughout the rest of the Gospels, in the book
of Mark and in the book of Luke, you find this word once again. The Bible says in Mark 141, and
Jesus moved with compassion, put forth his hand, and touched
him, and saith unto him, I will be thou clean. Mark 634 says,
and Jesus, when he came out, saw much people and was moved
with compassion toward them, because they were a sheep not
having a shepherd. Mark 8.2 says, I have compassion
on the multitude because they have now been with me three days
and have nothing to eat. If you continue to go in Mark
9.22, this word appears again in Luke 7.13, then a familiar
story that we know, a parable on the Good Samaritan, Luke 10.33
says, But a certain Samaritan, as he
journeyed, came where he was, where the man that was beaten
and laid for dead, came where he was, and when he saw him,
he had compassion on him. And then another verse in Luke,
another familiar story of the prodigal son, Luke 15, 20 says,
and he arose and came to his father, but when he was yet a
great way off, his father saw him and had compassion and ran
and fell on his neck and kissed him. There's a couple interesting
things about this word. It's only found in the gospels. In these passages, from what
I can tell, it's used for a character, either a character in a parable,
so it's not necessarily a real person. The only real person,
from what I see in these passages, that has compassion in this way
is attributed to Jesus Christ. So what does this word mean?
This word is broken down, and the first part of that word,
again, that I can't pronounce, gives the idea, is the word for
your innards, your abdominal area. And the ancients in this
time, they believed that the deep feelings that a person felt,
those emotions came from your lower abdomen. That would be
love, pity, sympathy. And this may be the idea or where
we get the idea of having a gut feeling. That's the thought that
is conveyed. Today, if we were to consider
this today or use the vernacular of today, we would use the terminology
of the heart. We would consider it and say,
oh, it's the heart. It's something that's a deep-seated
emotion. And that's what this word gives
us the idea of, this word compassion. So now that we understand this
word, let me give you this piece of advice. We have compassion
that's been defined, but compassion makes a difference. My exhortation to you is don't
lose your compassion. Compassion is a duty. Compassion
is demanded of you. But I must also say that compassion
is demanding. It's difficult. Compassion does
not necessarily mean that you give someone a pass, that you
let them go. It does not mean you don't uphold
the law. It means that you remember that
these people that keep you busy, that keep you in business, are
people as well. I have to confess that this is
true in ministry as well. I remember talking to a man very
often. He's since gone home to be with
the Lord. I remember talking to a man very often who was an
alcoholic and sometimes he would call me sober. And I would talk
to him and he'd say, man, Gus, I gotta beat this, you know,
and I wanna beat this, I wanna do right, I wanna get rid of
this, this is plaguing me, I wanna get rid of it. And so we would
talk, we would pray together, and we would, you know, I would
encourage him and try to help him out and say, hey, you gotta
avoid these areas, you gotta take these steps, you gotta keep
yourself busy. And then there would be some
times when he would call me and he would call me drunk. And it
was this cycle over and over and over again. And I loved him. I loved the guy. But it was difficult
to have compassion because it was like you knew what you were
supposed to do and you didn't do it. And it's frustrating and
it's difficult. And it's easy to become calloused. It would be understandable for
someone to be cynical. but compassion is what's going
to make the difference. When you look at this passage,
what stands out the most to me in Matthew chapter nine, if you
turn back there, is how Christ approached this problem. He looked
at this village, and the Bible says that he was moved with compassion
on them. Why? Verse 36 says, because they
fainted. and were scattered abroad as
sheep having no shepherd. He looked out and said, there's
a lot of work to do in this area. And the follow on in that passage,
he says, we need to pray for more people to help. He looked
out and the people, it says they fainted, the people were wore
out. They were a sheep having no shepherd, the people had no
direction. The people had no purpose. And how similar is that
today if you're serving as a police officer to look out and you see
people that are struggling, that they have no direction, they
have no purpose, they're wearing their bodies out with different
drugs and alcohol, tearing themselves, killing themselves slowly. And
it's easy to become calloused. I want you to consider that,
that as you look at this passage and Jesus looks out into these
villages, he saw multitudes of people and he had compassion
on them. Understand for a minute that
God, Jesus was God in the flesh. And as he was standing there
looking at these multitudes, he knew what sins that they had
committed. He knew what sins they were going
to commit. He knew how bad they were. He
knew how bad they were going to be. He knew there was gonna
be a time where they were gonna reject him, that they were gonna
crucify him. He knew all the sins that they
were gonna be involved in, and he still had compassion. He knew the struggles that they
went back to, but he had compassion. And so we look at this passage
and we see Jesus that has this compassion, that he's defined
by this compassion. We see that. We see this compassion
that Jesus showed. We see it over and over again
throughout the scriptures, this yearning, this feeling from deep
within him that he looked out at people that had no purpose,
that had no direction, and he had compassion on them. Lastly,
what I want you to see this morning is that compassion paid a debt. When we stop and consider what
compassion, the compassion of Christ, what led him to do this
is quite amazing to think about. Jesus did not get hardened at
the world around him. He didn't disregard and give
up on humanity. That's what a lot of times, if
you look at people, people are in a mess. And you look at things
and you can look at people and their lifestyles and different
situations, and you know what? Within church, we can do that
for lost people as well. We can see that they're running
to and fro and not having necessarily the right directions, the right
things that they need to focus on. And we can become calloused. And we can give up and say, you
know what? They're hopeless. And so many
times we can look at people that way, but understand that Jesus
took his compassion and he acted on it in a different way. He
made a way to reconcile people, those people, to him. He took
action based on his compassion. He did not get frustrated at
our offenses. I want you to think for a moment
that Jesus was face-to-face with the person that betrayed him.
He looked him right in the eye, and he knew what he was going
to do, and he had compassion on him. I have no doubt in my
mind that between the time that Judas betrayed Jesus to the time
that he took his own life, I have no doubt in my mind that if he
would have repented and trusted in Jesus as Lord and Savior,
that he would have been forgiven. I have no doubt in my mind that
that would be the case. But Judas rejected that compassion
that was shown to him. Jesus faced his accusers knowing
that they were lying about him. But out of Jesus's compassion,
he chose to die on the cross. There's one passage in Matthew
that we did not stop at when we talk about this compassion.
I wanna go there at this point. If you can, if you have your
Bible open, go to Matthew chapter 18. This is a familiar parable,
a parable that we understand of forgiving one another. want
you to see some of the truths that are in this passage in Matthew
18. There's a parable of an unforgiving
servant if you go down to verse 23. Jesus was telling this parable,
therefore is the kingdom of heaven likened unto a certain king which
would take account of his servants. And when he had begun to reckon,
one was brought unto him which owed him 10,000 talents. But for as much as he had not
to pay, his Lord commanded him to be sold and his wife and children
and all that he had in payment to be made. The servant therefore
fell down and worshiped him saying, Lord, have patience with me and
I will pay thee all. When the Lord of that servant
was moved with compassion and loosed him and forgave him, the
debt. Now this parable goes on to talk
about how that same servant had a debt from another servant and
he was giving him a hard time and he said, hey, pay me what
you owe, what you owe me, even though he had been forgiven of
this giant debt. Now we look at this passage and
we see, oh, 10,000 talents, that doesn't sound so bad, but I want
to put these things into perspective for you. 10,000 talents, the
idea of this passage, this parable, is that that value was more than
he could pay in his lifetime. So I want you to think about
this for a moment. If you take the average American,
according to some statistics that I looked up, the lifetime
annual earnings of an American person today As of last year,
2022 was somewhere between 1.1 and 1.7 million. And that was
given a $50,000 salary over a certain period of time. That would be
considered the lifetime earnings of a average American today.
All right. And so the idea here is that
this person had a debt that he had incurred that was more than
he could pay in his lifetime. And we could consider that and
say, oh, let's say his lifetime earnings is $1.7 million. Maybe
he owed like $5 million. That would take two lifetimes
or three lifetimes. But it was a great debt, a huge
debt, a debt that when we think about this, when people, when
a bank gives you a loan or when you're given some debt to utilize,
there's a debt to income ratio that is considered. And this
man, his income was way lower than his debt could ever repay.
That was the problem with this servant. It was more debt than
he would pay in his lifetime. But the Bible says here in Matthew
chapter 18 that the king was moved with compassion. And if
you look at that passage, look at what he said in verse 26.
The servant fell down and worshiped him, saying, Lord, have patience
with me, and I will pay thee all. He was still delusional. He was still thinking that I
could, be patient with me, don't sell my family, don't take my
family from me, and I'll pay you back. And he couldn't, there
was no way. And this passage gives us this
illustration, it gives us this picture of this man who was indebted
with a debt that he could not pay because that was us. We have
accumulated a debt of sin. The Bible says that the wages
of sin is death. So what we earn for our life,
for our life of sin, those wages that we earn accumulate this
sin debt. And that sin debt is more larger
than we could pay in our lifetime. And we're just like this servant
because we say, Lord, we can pay you back. Just give us time,
give us patience. I will be a good person. I can
do good works. I'll go to church every Sunday.
Maybe not so much on Wednesday nights or anything, but I'll
go to church every Sunday. I'll give offerings. I'll do
this. I'll do that. Whatever I can do, I'll try to
pay you back. But the idea is, is that debt
is too big to pay. And what pays it off? Compassion. Because Jesus, the Lord in this
picture, the King in this parable, is evidenced by the compassion
to forgive that debt. So we can look at life and look
at people, and again, it's not a matter of letting them off.
It's a matter of taking action based on that compassion. And
so that's why my exhortation to you is don't lose compassion. When you go out and we visit
people and we talk to them and we share the gospel with them,
some of them, they don't want to hear anything. They don't
want to hear, and many times we can get calloused by that
and say, well, you know what, forget them. We don't want to
talk to them anyway. And over and over, a door is
closed in your face or when somebody comes in and says, hey, I need
help, I'm struggling with this, and I have this problem and you
try to help them and then eventually they say, they're back to it.
Happens over and over and over again. I encourage you, keep
that compassion. But this idea here is that the
action that was taken as a result of that compassion paid the debt
of sin that we owed. So I've talked to you about a
compassion that we should have, but I've also shared with you
compassion that has been extended to each one of us. Jesus Christ,
when we see these passages, when we see the compassion, we need
to put ourselves in that place, that He had compassion on me. Because the Bible says in 1 John
2, 2, that He is the propitiation. That means that He's the substitute.
He's the payment. He's the payment for our sins
and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.
When you look at any man, any person, any living being that
has walked the face of the earth, Jesus Christ had compassion and
paid their debt by dying on the cross. The sins of every person
that's ever lived. Here's the thing, when we come
and, you know, I have a debt. that I owe that
is unfathomable to pay. I cannot pay it. And I would
say, well, what if I got this rich guy on my side to pay my
sin debt, or to pay my debt? Well, the truth of the matter
is, he could pay my debt, but he still has to pay his. And
any person that we bring along, each person has a sin debt, except
that one who was sinless. And that was Jesus Christ who
walked the face of the earth. And we hear about Jesus and we
hear about what he did and his love. But most importantly, what
we need to understand is that that representation of him on
the cross was paying for our sin debt because of the compassion
that he had for us because he wanted to forgive our sin debt. If you haven't had your sin debt
forgiven, that compassion's been shown to you already. All you
have to do is accept it.
The Compassion of Christ
Faith and Blue 2023
| Sermon ID | 1111231553523485 |
| Duration | 23:42 |
| Date | |
| Category | Sunday Service |
| Bible Text | Matthew 9:35-38 |
| Language | English |
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