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I think the best-known verse in the Bible may be, “For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). This truly is amazing love!
But on several occasions, the Gospel writers talk about the compassion of Jesus. This is a different word altogether. The root Greek word is “bowels.” To feel this kind of compassion means to feel it in your gut—to ache with the same pain that is afflicting someone else.
But compassion means more than feeling the pain, it also means going into action to alleviate the pain. True compassion aches and then acts.
Look at the compassion of Jesus—
- He sees crowds of people “harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” His compassionate response is to pray for His Father to send more shepherds to these sheep (Matthew 9:36-38).
- He sees people plagued by diseases—paralysis, deafness, blindness, even death—and He places His hands on them and brings complete healing (Matthew 14:14, 20:34; Mark 1:41, 9:22; Luke 7:11-15).
- He notices hungry people and He feeds them (Matthew 15:32; Mark 8:2).
- He encounters confused people and He teaches them the illuminating truth (Mark 6:34).
(Check out the above Bible verses by clicking here.)
This word isn’t just used for Jesus, but we see His compassionate heart behind the gut-level response of others. See the Christ-like compassion in…
- …a crushing, insurmountable debt completely forgiven (Matthew 18:21-27).
- …a Samaritan caring for an injured Jew (Luke 10:30-35).
- …a prodigal father fully forgiving and restoring his wayward son to himself (Luke 15:11-24).
(Check out the above Bible verses by clicking here.)
This kind of compassion is costly. It cost Jesus time to be alone, it cost the king, the prodigal father, and the Samaritan money to forgive a debt, lose an inheritance, and pay medical bills. But Christ-like compassion knows there is no greater reward than aching and acting like Jesus.
Christ-like compassion must be extended in faith. Like touching someone with unclean disease, or fasting to receive power to release a loved one shackled to a heavy burden, or embracing someone who hurt me, or canceling a debt owed to me, or helping someone who despises me. When we ache and act like this, we show the love of God in irrefutable ways. Our selfless, Christ-like compassion paints a vivid picture for a skeptical world to see and embrace the love of God that sent His Son to ransom us.
Let’s make it our prayer that we would ache with the needs of the people around us, and then to move in faith-filled, Christ-honoring, selfless action to alleviate that need. Then let us believe that our compassion will show others the love of a Savior.
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Craig T. Owens 
8 Quotes From “Light & Truth—Acts and the Larger Epistles”
February 10, 2016 — Craig T. Owens“Our Bible is of God; yet it is also of man. It is both divine and human. It comes to us from God’s Spirit; it comes also from man’s spirit. It is written in the language of the earth, yet its words are the words of him ‘Who speaketh it from heaven.’ Natural, yet supernatural; simple, yet profound; undogmatical, yet authoritative; very like a common book, yet very unlike also; dealing often with seeming incredibilities and contradictions, yet never assuming any need for apology, or explanation, or retraction; a book for humanity at large, yet minutely special in its fitnesses for every case of every soul; throughout its pages, from first to last, one unchanging estimate of sin as an infinite evil, get always bringing out God’s gracious mind toward the sinner, even in his condemnation of the guilt; such is the great Book with which man has to do, which man has to study, out of which man has to gather wisdom for eternity.” [Acts 1:1]
“One of the great characteristics of the whole interval between Christ’s first and second coming is the world’s rage, secret and open, against the Father and the Son. … It is very useless anger. It accomplishes nothing. It is like an angry child striking a huge rock with its fist. It is the mere display of impotent hatred, or the temporary gratification of their dislike of God, and their rejection of His purpose regarding His Son. … It calls light darkness, and darkness light; good evil, and evil good; but the light and the darkness, the good and evil, still remain as they were. All the enlightenment of the age, all the appliances of modern progress, are impotent against God and His Christ, against His truth, and His church, and His Word.” [Acts 4:25]
“This is one of the many repetitions of the Pentecostal scene which occurred in early days. Most unscriptural is the statement of some that the giving of the Spirit at Pentecost was a thing done once for all, not to be repeated, and that we are not to pray for or expect such things again. The whole of the ‘Acts of the Apostles’ is a direct refutation of this piece of human fancy. Wherever the apostles went there was a repetition of Pentecost, whether at Jerusalem, or Samaria, or Antioch, or Corinth. Every conversion is the repetition of Pentecost; it is doing the same thing for an individual soul as was done for three thousand then, by a similar process, and by the same power—the power of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Ghost is the heritage of the church. The Old Testament saints possessed Him; and still more the New. This is our heritage, the heritage of every believing man.” [Acts 11:15]
“Beware of seeking anything less than the baptism of the Holy Ghost. Our whole life is to be a reception of the Spirit. He is to be continually coming down on us, and filling us. Let us open our mouth wide that He may fill it. Let us beware of anything that would present itself as a substitute for the living Spirit. Many such things may we expect in these last days from satan as an angel of light.” [Acts 11:15]
“We are tempted in our day to be ashamed of the gospel. It is thought to be bare, unintellectual, almost childish by many. Hence, they would overlay it with argument and eloquence, to make it more respectable and more attractive. Every such attempt to add to it is being ashamed of it.” [Romans 1:16]
“We must have a righteousness, else we cannot stand before God; we cannot have merely a religion.” [Romans 4:6-8]
“The prodigal did not work for the ‘best robe,’ but got it all ready-made from his father’s hands; Joseph did not work for his coat of many colors, but received it as the gift of his father’s love; Adam did not work for the skins with which the Lord God clothed him: so it is with the sinner in his approach to God, and in God’s approaches to him. ‘Righteousness without works’ is given him; nay, put upon him as a raiment, a divine raiment, to fit him for drawing near to God.” [Romans 4:6-8]
“When the night is darkest, and the stars are hidden, and the clouds are black, then we think most of the clear fair day, and long for its dawn. When the storm is roughest, with the waves and wind roaring around the laboring vessel, then we are troubled, and look eagerly out for the glad and sunny calm. When winter binds the earth in its chain of frost, and wraps it in snow and ice, then we begin to ask for spring, with its flowers, and songs, and verdure. So with the saint, as represented by the apostle here. This is night, and storm, and winter to him; he is ever thinking of the day, and the calm, and the spring.” [Romans 8:19-23]
More quotes are here.
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