Christian Empathy

You all know the story of Lazarus in the Bible. Jesus is with his disciples. He gets a message that Lazarus is dying. Actually, Lazarus is a close friend of his, and Lazarus is dying, and he gets this message that he's dying and they want him to come and they want him to heal him. And Jesus doesn't go. He holds off, and when he finally arrives, he's dead. In fact, he's been dead for four days.

And he wasn't that far away. When you read the story, he could have been there in half a day, you know, just walk there, and he did not go. Now we know that story, we know the great miracle, but there's something else in here that's important to understand in his relationship with Martha and Mary. And it's going to set up what we're going to talk about today. So let's go to John 11. John 11. And he shows up now.

Now, remember, Martha and Mary, we have another story where Martha is complaining because Mary's enlisting to Jesus' teach, and she's having to do all the work fixing dinner herself for everybody. I've come to the conclusion Martha had to be a firstborn, because you know, this is how us firstboards think.

You know, hey, the work needs to be done. Let's get together, let's do the work. She's not pulling her weight. I'm going to go complain to Jesus about it, right? She's not pulling her weight. But this also is very interesting because they're both grieving, deep in grief, and he deals with them differently.

And this is what we're going to talk about today, about a quality we're supposed to learn, and yet a quality that we have to be, or understand as we learn it, that there are guardrails to that quality. So if we pick up verse 17, John 11, so Jesus comes, finds out he's been there in the tomb for four days. And many of the Jews have joined the women around Martha and Mary to comfort them concerning their brother. Then Martha, as soon as she heard that Jesus was coming, went to meet him, but Mary was still sitting in the house, just overcome with grief. Now, Martha says to Jesus, Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.

But even now I know whatever you ask of God will give you. She comes and she expresses her grief in very deep theological terms. This is Martha. This is the way she thinks. He responds to her in the same way. He's dealing with her grief the way she's dealing with it. You could have fixed this. I know God can heal him. I know God can raise him from the dead. And his answer is, your brother will rise again. She responds once again with a deep understanding of the Scripture.

She says, I know that he will rise again in the resurrection of the last day. She says, yes, I understand. We're going to have to wait until the resurrection, but at the last day, he will rise. He will live again. And Jesus said to her, I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me, though he may die, shall live. And whoever lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this? Now it's interesting as she's going through her grief, she's centering on he will live again. And Jesus said, yeah, that's because of me.

And he will never suffer eternal death. He's going to live again. And he looks at her and he says, do you believe this? Her grief, his dealing with her grief is centered in this deep understanding of God that she had. And that's a, you think, if you were dealing with someone grieving, this would be a strange conversation, but it's not.

He understands who she is and he's dealing with her the way she is. And she said to him, yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who has come into the world. Now, one of the greatest professions of faith in Jesus Christ is by this woman, Etta, who is suffering from the loss of a brother.

And it's recorded here for a reason. She understood what God was doing, she accepted it, and that's how she dealt with her grief. Now, Mary is a totally different person in the way she deals with things. Verse 28, when she had said these things, she went her way and secretly called Mary, her sister, saying, the teacher has come and is calling for you. As soon as she heard that, she arose quickly and came to him. Now, Jesus had not yet come into the town, but was in the place where Martha had met him.

She had actually met him outside of town. And, interesting enough, Mary and Martha had heard he was coming, but Martha gets up and goes. I've got to go talk to him. So then the Jews are in the house and comforting her. When they saw that Mary rose up quickly and went out, they followed her, saying she's going to the tomb, the weep there.

And when Mary came where Jesus was, she said to him, she fell down at his feet and said, Lord, if you had been here, my brother would have not died. Now, she starts with the same words as Martha, but not the same understanding. Therefore, when Jesus saw her weeping and the Jews that came with her weeping, he groaned in the spirit and was troubled.

Jesus responded to Martha with empathy in the way her personality is. Do you know God knows what he's doing? And do you know I am the Christ? And do you know he will live again? And she said, yes, I know that. And that's what helped her in her grieving. Mary isn't processing any of that. She's just weeping, and he looks all the people around her. They've been grieving for days, just overcome with grief. And his response is, he felt their grief.

He felt Martha's grief and dealt with her as Martha. He feels Mary's grief and deals with her as Mary. And he said, Where have you laid him? And they said to him, Lord, come and see. Now what's interesting, it says Jesus wept. I remember my wife saying, I'm going to just tell on her, her dad said she had to memorize a verse from the Bible once a week or whatever it was.

And that was the first one she picked. Jesus wept. He had to accept it. That's what he said. Jesus wept. He goes and resurrects Lazarus. He knew he was going to resurrect Lazarus. He's not grieving the way Martha and Mary is. He's going to go perform a miracle that all those people are going to see. Why is he weeping? Because they are. That's empathy. He understood Martha and dealt with Martha in the way Martha processed things. He deals with Mary the same way he feels it, which actually should be something very comforting. That whenever you're going through something, God, and one of the reasons Christ came is to reveal that.

God knows and understands how you process things. And it may be different than your husband or your wife or your children or your best friend. He understands that. He has an empathetic response. This is an empathetic response. Let's go to Hebrews 2. I've always thought it was so fascinating how you see how he deals with both of those women differently. And it's because he understands them.

Hebrews 2. Verse 14, Inasmuch as the children are partaken of flesh and blood, he himself likewise shared in the same, that through death he might destroy him who had the power of death, that is the devil, and release those who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage. For indeed he does not give aid to angels, but he does give aid to the seed of Abraham. And of course, when he says seed of Abraham here, he says, I should not talk about physical seed of Abraham, because remember, Paul wrote, he promised that through his seed, the Abraham seed, all humanity would be blessed.

And he said that seed is Christ. So it's talking about here Christ in his sacrifice and in his work. What he did as a human being, what he's doing now, all those who follow him as the seed of Abraham will receive this blessing. Therefore, in all things, he had to be made like his brethren, that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For in that he himself has suffered, being tempted, is able to aid those who are tempted. In other words, I know how you're experiencing this. I know what you're going through. I came to experience it for you.

Now, if God told us, I know what you're going through, I don't think we'd believe him.

You've never been human. Christ is standing beside him and saying, hey, I have. This is an empathetic response from God through Christ. I know, he knows, and he's proved this empathetic response to us. Empathy is a God-like quality, but human beings have to be very careful.

We can, through empathy, through feeling what another person feels, we can become very confused and have some real spiritual issues because we don't have the same empathy God does. We're going to go through and show you what I mean. You know, sympathy means that you are sad because somebody else is sad. You have some common experience or just some understanding. Empathy, and these two words are sort of similar, but they are used differently. Empathy is you sort of feel what they're feeling. You know what that's like. You know what it's like when someone is suffering because a parent died. Maybe you've had a parent die. And when you go up to them, you start crying with them because you feel what they're feeling. I can understand this, and that's a good thing.

That's a good thing. But in sharing emotions with other people, we can make some very serious misunderstandings about God's way. God has perfect empathy. We don't. So we have to be careful. It sounds like a strange subject, but I'm going to show you that this is a subject that is affecting our society in an immense way and driving our society away from God. Let's go to Romans 12.

So here we have a command that we are to be sympathetic and empathetic. Romans 12.9.

So I still want to set up where we're going here, showing that, yes, we're not just to be sympathetic.

We are to have, we're to share things with each other. When we have some shared experience and we can share an emotion, there's times to do that. But that's a powerful thing that happens.

You ever been around somebody that's angry? I mean, just really angry. And after a while, you don't know why, but you're angry, too. We can absorb other people's emotions. And as you parents know, your children absorb your emotions. Where you are, they'll absorb that so quickly, at least a lot of children won't. They'll just absorb it. Pretty soon, if you're happy, they're happy. If you're mad, they're mad. You know, they'll just absorb what's going on around them.

So empathy isn't always good. Romans 12.9. Here, Paul is talking about the type of love that's supposed to be within the church. This is what we strive for as a congregation. You know, God gives us congregations not because we're all easy to get along with. As I've said before, we have the worst—I've read books on how to create congregations in the Protestant world. This is the worst model imaginable.

Take people that don't even live in the same community, who live far from each other, have totally different backgrounds, put them together, and say, get along.

That's not a good model. Churches that do that don't last. We last only because of God's Spirit.

God says, no, I'm bringing you all together because you are different. I'm bringing you all together because you are going to have conflict. I'm bringing you all together because you are going to have to learn certain things you wouldn't learn if you were in a room where you're all exactly the same.

So he says, that's why there's so many commands in the New Testament. Come on, folks. Let's work together. Let's build bonds. Let's be brothers and sisters. Let's not let conflict separate us.

Let love be without hypocrisy. Abhor what is evil. Clean to what is good.

Now, love without hypocrisy—and then he adds something here. As we go through this, this is going to be important. Abhor what is evil. We're talking about love here, and he connects them together in the same thought. Be kindly affectionate to one another, with brotherly love, in honor giving preference to one another, not lagging in diligence, fervent in spirit, serving the Lord, rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation, continuing steadfast in prayer, distributing to the needs of the saints given to hospitality. Okay, verse 15. I'm going to—because we can spend the whole sermon. This is a sermon, this passage, but I'm just going to pick a few highlights. Rejoice with those—verse 15—rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep. That's empathetic response. Be of the same mind toward one another. Do not set your mind on high things, but associate with the humble. Do not be wise in your own opinion. He goes on and gives more instructions how this is to work. How can empathy become misguided?

We're supposed to weep with those who weep, rejoice with those who rejoice, right?

We see Jesus having an empathetic response, which is encouraging us because that means God and Christ have empathy towards us. We can suffer, and they feel it. They understand it.

I mean, they don't feel the way we do. They're not chemical, right? But what I mean, in the depth of who they are, they understand suffering. And they can connect with us. The problem happens when we become so immersed in our empathetic response to another person that we lose a sense of proportion and objectivity and, in a way, a sense of self. We absorb what's happening.

I'll give you an example. A very good friend of yours comes to you and says, you know, my husband, my wife, or this other person in the church, they really mistreated me. You know what they said to me? You know what they did to me? And they tell you.

And they cry, and you console them, and you cry. Pretty soon you're weeping with them. You feel what they're feeling. They're angry. You're angry. The next time you see that person, you won't even talk to them. You won't even talk to them. That person mistreated this person, and that's it. I'm just not even going to talk to that person.

Till one day you go up and you just unload on them, right? And then the person says, that's not exactly what happened. And you hear the other side of the story, and you say, oh, okay, my friend wasn't 100% right either. But you might have spent weeks sort of feeding off the emotion of your friend. You lost proportion. You lost objectivity. You made a judgment on another person, and you find out it's not entirely true.

See, most of us have done that. You make this judgment because you're feeling what the other person's feeling. This is the problem with human empathy. God never loses himself. He never loses his objectivity. He never loses the difference between right and wrong. He never loses that, and yet he can have an empathetic response to us.

I find it interesting he didn't tell Mary how to resurrect him in the last day. It wouldn't have meant anything to her at that moment. He understood that. But with Martha, that gave her the strength to go on. That shows you what the empathy of God can do. You and I have a hard time doing that.

We get lost in it, and we get lost in another person's feelings, and it can distort the truth. It can destroy what we think. And that's not because they're a bad person. It's because every single one of us, when we're lost in our own feelings, can affect others to come join us. And I know there's lots of you here that have heard me say this, so it's one of my cliches.

When a person needs help, they're in a pit. They need you to reach down and pull them out of the pit.

But what happens with empathy, they want you to get in the pit with them. And if you jump in the pit with them, you're just two people in a pit. That's all you are. Now you're in the pit with them, and you're two people in the pit needing somebody else to come pull you out. It is so hard when you're really close to somebody, and they're hurting not to get in the pit, but be empathetic enough to say, let me give you a hand. In our society, empathy has become the highest virtue.

It's the highest virtue, and it is a virtue. But as the highest virtue of a human value system without other values, where does that stop? I was watching something the other day where a young boy had killed another young boy, and they were going to sentence him, I don't know, you know, pretty heavy sentence for it. And the parents of the boy who committed the murder said, why don't they care about how my son felt? And I understood what they were saying. I have children, but they can't justify murder. See the empathy that's there? I understand their empathy, but you can't justify murder.

Learning how to have empathetic responses without getting in the pit is a very different... First of all, learning how to be empathetic for us guys can be really difficult. I get over it, kid.

Right? You shouldn't feel that way. You tell somebody you shouldn't feel that way. You haven't helped them one bit. It's how they feel. You have to work them through it, right?

So it tells you, you shouldn't feel that way. Well, that's how I feel. I guess you don't love me. Now you're supposed to have an empathetic response to me. You don't, so you don't love me. You see, where this empathy has become a virtue that supersedes all other virtues.

And it's causing a huge societal issue. Because truth doesn't matter. The purpose of love is to validate somebody else's feelings.

You realize what I just said? Love is validating another person's feelings because it validates their worth. They don't... If their feelings are wrong, and everyone... I tell you what, there's nothing more... I'm only speaking from experience. Maybe the rest of you are different. But just speaking from experience, my emotions can be absolutely chaotic in leading to decisions. Now they're part of decision making.

But we don't always trust our emotions. We're going to look at that in a minute.

So if the purpose of love is to validate the other person's feelings, then you can never say somebody's wrong. And that's why there is a lot of... In this country, when surveys are done, one of the biggest problems with Christianity is they tell us we're wrong. We had a company bring in a focus group, beyond today's ones, just to watch us and in the world tell us what they thought. They were all religious people. We picked all religious people, mainly mainstream Protestants. And the one thing they said was, oh man, they used the word sin. We just turn off anybody. Now these are mainstream Protestants. Soon as they were born, they were mainstream Protestants. Soon as the word sin, we turn them off. We don't want anybody telling us we're wrong. I don't know, the world year, reach an audience that that's the ones who are Bible-based more than anybody else, the ones we brought in. Because that hurts my feelings, you see. And what happens is truth becomes defined by feelings. If I feel it, it's true. I remember years and years, this was 25, 30 years ago, counseling with someone, and I said, how do you make your decisions? How do you know what true is? Truth is. And the person said, I feel it. Now I accept that there's, I mean, there's a certain emotional level which we respond to truth. But you can't determine all truth by how you feel. It's just part of a process.

And the person eventually rejected everything we teach. Because she came to the conclusion, she just didn't feel it was right. But give me some proof she didn't have any.

There has to be something more than our feelings involve.

Empathy is an emotional component of love. Empathy and love are not synonymous. That's the difference. We have to see empathy as an emotional component of love. Yes, but it's not synonymous.

Just because someone has empathy doesn't mean they're loving you.

I just bring up, I mean, if all interactions are you have to validate my feelings, all friendships will break up. All marriages will break up.

Right? If every human interaction is you must validate... Now, there's a time to validate somebody. I'm not saying that's not part of the process. That is not the core part of the process.

We just read Paul gave all these things in Romans that have to do with love, and it is how you treat other people is all that goes in there. How you treat them.

Validating their feelings wasn't part of it. There is a time to validate the way somebody feels. Yes, the problem with sort of this toxic empathy is we lock into feeling what they're feeling so much we validate it even though it's a wrong way of looking at something.

Men don't... We don't do this as much as women. I'm being very general here. And the reason why is many times we're not very empathetic. So we have another problem, but we can do that too. Get caught up. Women can... I've seen a group of women sit down, start talking, and watch them relate to each other at a level that would take us men six months to reach. And they don't even know each other. And there's this empathetic response going on. And I'm amazed by it, because it's... there's something real special in that. But I also know how far... that can get out and go spin out real quick, because pretty soon everybody's in the pit, right? Because one person drags them in.

This is the problem with the love is love slogan that you'll find all over the place in today's world.

Two people love each other. Doesn't matter if they're, you know, and should get married. Doesn't matter if they're both men, both women, because they love each other. And those... if you have an empathetic response, oh, they love each other, that's a wonderful thing, God would not be against that. And anyone that says God is against that doesn't love. God is love, therefore they're not Christians. I've listened to that argument and read that argument over and over and over again.

If you're against certain things, that means you don't love. You have to have empathy. If you could understand how they feel. So there has to be something attached to love.

So that love is focused on the way God wants us, because God is love. Okay, if that's the definition of His character, of who He is, we have to understand that definition of love.

And that defines love for us. Because of our constant emotional states as human beings and our flawed thinking processes, you and I can't figure out what love is entirely. We get bits and pieces of it. I mean, I've met very loving people. They're agnostics in a certain level.

At another level, they're not. Let's go to Ephesians 4.

I'm trying to walk a tight line here between, yes, we must develop empathy.

The older I get, the more empathetic I find myself.

If you cry, pretty soon I'm weeping with you. I can't help it. The older I get, that happens. But then I also have to wrestle with all the time the extreme of being cold-hearted or being too empathetic. We have to walk those two. We're not cold-hearted, but we're not in the pit.

You can't help somebody if you're in the pit with them. Ephesians 4, 11, talking about the church.

Now, once again, I've given a whole sermon on this section because there's so much here, but I just want to bring out one idea here. Verse 11, to give the context, he himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors, and some teachers. Okay, so Christ is working in the church. All of us, by the way, everybody here has a gift. I don't know what it is, but you're given something to contribute to the church. I don't care what your age is, your education is, everybody has something they're supposed to give.

And he says, for the equipping of the saints, for the work of ministry, see, the reason there's different jobs within the church is to help the church do what it's supposed to do. For the equipping of the saints to the work of ministry, that word there just literally means service.

We all have a ministry. We all have service we're supposed to do. It doesn't mean an ordained minister, but it's talking about service. For the edifying of the body of Christ, till we come into the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature and the fullness of Christ, that we should no longer be children tossed to and fro, carried about with every wind of doctrine by the trickery of men and the cunning craftiness of deceit. Okay, so here's all these things that we're supposed to do.

And a big part of it is not be deceived. Then verse 15, and this is the part I want to pull out.

But speaking the truth in love may grow up in all things into him who is the head Christ.

Pure love is expressed in pure truth.

Pure love is expressed in pure truth. None of us have pure love yet, and none of us have pure truth yet. That's what we're working towards. If we don't have pure truth, we will twist what love really is.

So the two have to work together. You know, the argument that God can't, the God of the Bible, can't be real God because he punished people. And love means you don't punish anybody. I mean, there's a movement in the United States today with millions of people involved that want to do away with prisons. If someone commits a crime, you just, I don't know what you do with them, but there's no prisons.

That is, well, there's a couple reasons it could drive people that way, but part of it is there's a certain group that follows that because of misguided empathy. They commit crimes because they had poor parents. They make, okay, that may be a factor. They commit crimes because they're mentally ill. They commit crimes because this, that, the other. Therefore, we should not punish them.

Truth would not lead you to that. And they'll use the teachings of Jesus about love to say he would support it. And then you look at teachings of Jesus that says, you know, all about judgment. There's a whole lot of things he taught about judgment of God.

So they're ignoring those and doing the one. Now, if all we do is talk about the judgment of God, we have a problem too. It's how this fits together that is so important and understanding what God is doing. So the great danger of misguided empathy is that our subjective feelings determine truth. I've had people, I know truth because I feel it. You see it all the time.

I know truth. Okay, there can be a bit of truth to that. Sometimes you see something, you read it in the scripture and you say, I know that's true. I can't explain it, but I know it's true. But to say all truth is subjective, that's what this means. If all truth is based on feelings, it's subjective. That means there's no subjective truth. There's only individual truth.

And if there's only individual truth and I decide that robbing you is a good thing for me, I will rob you. Because that's my truth.

Love and truth on a godly level. The love comes from God and the truth comes from God. And we live both of those things and they have to work together. It's the concept, sermon. We have to really work through the scripture to say, how do those things work together?

We're not cold-hearted and also we're not to the point where we're just emotional wrecks all the time being manipulated by other people's emotions. Because that's what happens, we're manipulated by other people's emotions all the time. How they feel. There's three ways that Paul talks about, we can initiate and work within truth and love, fit them together. So that's where I want to sort of zero the last few minutes of this into this one verse or one passage in Ephesians 5. Ephesians 5. And this is something that you could spend a lot of Bible study on this, tearing this passage apart, connecting other scriptures to it, thinking about it, praying about it. Because it's interesting how he organizes this. So verse, let's see, verse 1, Ephesians 5. Therefore, be imitators of God as dear children and walk in love.

It's interesting, he uses a verb. He just doesn't say, and love others.

You walk in this. This is a way of life. We walk in it. We live in it. We're surrounded in it. It's in our minds and in our hearts. We walk in love. And we're gonna, there's three things he says, walk in. So there's three things here in this passage. He says, this is your life. This is why you get out of bed in the morning. This is how you move through life. This is what frames your thought processes. It's what frames how we try to process our emotions.

Walk in love as Christ also has loved us and given himself for us as an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling aroma. Where does he go? You want to understand this? Look at the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. That's love. Because he didn't have to do it, and he never sinned. That's love right there. And then he ties it. We're walking in love here, right?

So you think he'd now say, this is how you love, this is how you love. That's not what he does.

But fornication and all uncleanness or covetousness, let it not even be named among you as fitting for saints. In other words, if we understand love, there's certain conducts. We don't do. This is what sin is, and we avoid it. Love doesn't mean sin doesn't exist. Love and truth fit together to say if you truly love, you stop these things. You work this through in your life.

Neither filthiness nor foolish talking nor coarse jesting, which are not fitting but rather giving giving to thanks. For this you know that no fornicator, unclean person, their covetous man who is an idolatry, idolatry has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God. Whoa! Let me talk about walking in love and Paul is saying, but if you do this, you don't have love and you can't be in the kingdom. Now, once again, he's not talking about an event.

We all sin. He's talking about this is your lifestyle. This is the way you walk.

This is the way you walk. He says it doesn't work because you're not walking in love.

So love here, this is why so many of the what used to be mainstream Protestant groups now don't read Paul. I'm a Christian, I'm not a Pauline. That's the typical statement. I'm a Christian, I follow Christ. I'm not a Pauline. Pauline was a prejudiced man, homophobic, a misogynist, and just a product of his age. But Jesus, he understood love.

Paul here is saying love means certain loving God and loving our neighbor and loving what God is doing in us. I mean, for our own selves, we're doing some of this, right? You want to obey God because he forgives you and he changes you. We get benefits inside our heads, not always physical benefits, but inside our heads, inside our hearts. We're getting benefits from God. We want those benefits. That's not selfish. That's one in relationship with God. So verse 6, he says, let no one deceive you with empty words. Love is love. Those are empty words. Because of these things, the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience. Therefore do not be partakers with them. Whoa! You read this, he said, well, that's not love.

He's not saying you don't, you know, treat your neighbors right. You do. He talks about that, too. What he's talking about is you don't act like them. You don't think like them. We're coming out of that. We're moving away from that. So he gives a whole different approach to love here, doesn't he?

We walk in this way of life, which we're rejecting what God says. That's not love. That's not love.

And someone has to do with the things we think and feel ourselves. He says, that's not love, because if it's in your mind and if in your heart, guess what? You'll treat another person wrong at some point. And besides, you're not loving God. We're not loving Him. Okay, verse 8.

For you were once darkness. You know, Paul talks a lot about being in darkness. So does Peter.

He says you were darkness. That's a powerful statement. Before God called us, we were darkness.

That's all we knew. But now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light. So he says, walk in love and walk as children in light. That we are the children of God.

For the fruit of the Spirit is in all goodness, righteousness, and truth.

Well, I don't have the half hour I would take to explain that verse.

So I'm saying, this is something I want you to really think about and think about your own emotions and think about the emotions of the world around us and why everything seems so chaotic. And so much of it is either selfishness or a broken empathy. One or the other. That's what so much of the world is driven by. Finding out what is acceptable to the Lord and have no fellowship with the unproofed works of darkness, but rather expose them. What is he going here?

We're walking in light. Surely, that means just spread light every place we go. He says, no, recognize what darkness is. Here's the thing. You recognize darkness and you live in light, you will eventually face some kind of persecution because people in darkness don't like the light.

That's just reality. I want to say, well, if you love me, you won't care that I do this or do this or do that. And you're not preaching to them, you're not condemning them, but they know after a while. Right? One of the halls we're looking at in Nashville, the person we were working with, seemed a little uncomfortable for a second, and she said, do you do weddings in your halls? I said, not usual, usually. We do them. People rent their own halls. She said, okay, well, if you want to use this hall for a wedding, if you rent from us, she said, we don't accept homosexual weddings. And I said, that's okay, I don't do homosexual weddings. She said, good, because that's not allowed in our church. She was making a stand, and knowing I might say, well, we're out of here, these, you know, I mean, these are good, but she was making her stand. I admired her for it. She didn't, she wasn't filled with hatred. She wasn't condemning.

I would, you know, if a homosexual walked into that congregation, they probably wouldn't throw them out right away. They would talk to them, you know, they'd, the pastor talked to them later or something.

But they're not going to participate in that.

That's what this is talking about. For it's shameful even to speak of those things which are done by them in secret. But all things that are exposed are made manifest by the light. The light is God and Christ. For whatever makes manifest is light. Therefore, he says, awake you who sleep, arise from the dead, and Christ will give you light.

The third point here is, and I'm not going to go through this, I want you to study this yourself, because I really am encouraging all of you to take, you know, I, in the past, I used to give passages to study for a year, six months to a year, you know, and I'd post it and say, study this. Maybe I should do this, that you need to, we all need to take Ephesians 5, 1 through 21, and study it together. That's some of your personal Bible study. You may do some, you know, joint Bible study with each other, but this is something you're going through. This is what you walk, and you realize truth and love are connected together. Truth and love is the very core of who God is, and we can't separate them. We can't separate the truth that we have. We can't compromise with the truth that we have, because someone will be offended. That doesn't mean you go out offending people.

It means you don't, you don't do it as a club, right?

You don't have to knock on your neighbor's door and say, I hear you were drunk again. I heard you, you were drunk again last night, you heathen. Okay, there's no need to do that. He's probably just gonna punch you in the mouth, right? But when he says, when you come over and have a drink, we've just made it, we've had neighbors say, come on over. We like getting together, you know, every Monday night and having some drinks with the neighborhood friends, and we all say, we can't, sorry, because we're not, I don't know what that's going to turn into, right?

So we just don't go. And they, I'm not even accusing them of getting drunk.

I'm just saying, I don't think going to a drinking party once a week is a good idea.

And we had, those neighbors moved a while back, but we had great relationship with those neighbors.

Oh, their names were, what was their names, Kim? Their first names. Don and Donna, right? Was that it? He was Don, she was Donna. So we always thought that was funny. Don and Donna, I don't know why we thought it was funny. Kim and I are quite, well, no, I'm really quirky.

She's the most normal person I have ever met. I don't know why she married me, but anyways, I digress. Okay, so you understand this verses 1 through 21, I think I'm going to establish that, is what we need to all be studying in the next six months. And in doing so, we begin to see, okay, truth and love have to fit together.

And it gives us emotional stability when we do that.

Empathy is something we need to learn. Hard-heartedness is not good.

And guys, we can tend to be more on the hard-hearted way.

Some women do that too, but women tend to be more empathetic. It's easier for them to do that.

We all need to learn to be empathetic because we need to thank God that He and Christ are empathetic.

They understand. God can understand how you feel and still say no.

He said, I mean, He can have an empathy for us and still say no, or still say, that's gonna, you get punished for that. I've been in prisons with men who have committed terrible crimes, and they told me what it's like to be in prison, as they explained in detail.

And I have felt empathy for them that did not justify the fact that they shouldn't be there.

They should be there for the crimes that they committed.

Yet I felt empathy like, oh, what you live through every day is a horror. You're in a horror movie every day. But it was His decisions that put Him there.

And you know what? The men who are really changing say that. It's my fault I'm here.

I made these decisions. That's why I'm here. And I, will God forgive me? Can I be forgiven?

And I find, yes, God can forgive you. It's not going to change the penalty, though.

This temporary penalty in this life. I know I'm never getting out.

But, you know, I want to have eternal life.

But that, once again, empathy can never say, it's okay, man. You know, you just had a bad upbringing, that's all. No! That's not how it works.

I never thought I could have empathy for a person in prison until I was put in. I had to go to prisons all the time for a couple years, including a prison for the mentally insane. That was a strange thing.

And in those experiences, I learned I can have at least a sympathetic, not necessarily empathetic, but a sympathetic response that says, yes, you could be forgiven. Because, first of all, I want to say, act. You're gone, man. God's not going to forgive you. You know what I mean? There's this sort of, this is so terrible, it's unbelievable. And now then it's like, yes, he can.

There's an eraser, the temporary punishment for what you've done.

And the ones who always come along, they know that, and they accept it.

And I still felt sympathy for them. It took me a long time to build sympathy for somebody in prison.

It took me a long time. I have it now.

If they're repentant. If they're not repentant, okay, well, it's your problem, but if they are...

So it's an emotion that's a component of love. It is not synonymous with love.

And we have to understand that. Truth and love have to fit together. That's what speaking the truth in love, right? That is what Paul told us. We sometimes have to recognize, no, we all know, we need to recognize you and I live... We're all products of the sort of convoluted emotional chaos that we were born into. Every human being since Adam and Eve had been born into convoluted emotional chaos. We all have been. That's what this is. And we have to be able, with God's help, His truth sort through that. Remember, true love never wars against the truth of God, ever. And true love never accepts the way of darkness.

Even when they know it's going to hurt somebody else's feelings, you're not purposely hurting people's feelings, but you understand that you can't be dragged into them, the ditch with them, into the hole, into the pit. You can't go there with them.

But when we have a pure lifestyle of truth, that light shines in the darkness.

And it will shine in the darkness because people will see, because we have the truth, we actually really have love.