Empathy

At the Women's Weekend that we had here last month, I gave the sermon, and I went through a story. And it was an important part of what I was covering in that sermon. And it's about the story of Lazarus. And of course, we know the story. He was sick. They said for Jesus, Jesus didn't come. When he finally came, he was already dead. And the whole point of the story was to show how God interacted with Martha and Mary differently. He interacted with both of them differently in another instance. And then in this instance, he's interacted with them differently. He interacted with them in the way their personalities are. But let's look at this because I'm going to talk about Mary for a minute here, but I want to use this as a launching point into... Actually, it's an important subject. It's something we need to think about in the world that we live in. Let's go to John 11.

Verse 28. So Jesus shows up. The whole village is there. They are weeping. They're mourning the loss of Lazarus. And he meets and talks with Martha. It's an interesting... We won't go through that, but it's very interesting with Martha, who tends to be, from what the stories that we have about her, a much more serious person. I always say, I think she was the firstborn. Okay. Much more serious. She does all this work. She's always involved in things. And they have a remarkably detailed discussion about the doctrine of the resurrection. So he's dealing with her in a way that's dealing with the resurrection, the truth. She knows who he is as the Messiah. It's just one of the greatest, actually, professions of faith in the entire New Testament. So then he goes on to find Mary. Mary seems to be the more fragile one. And he says, at 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. So she goes and says, look, I've talked to Jesus. He's here. He wants to see you. And 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. That the Jews who were with her in the house and comforting her, when they saw that Mary rose and quickly went, they went out and followed her, saying she was going to the tomb to weep. So they think, okay, she's going to go back to the tomb. They're there, all these people helping her through her grief. This is very common in the ancient Jewish world. People would grieve for a long period of time. Friends and relatives would be involved in that grief with them. And then when Mary came, where Jesus was, she saw him. She felt down at his feet saying to him, Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. So she comes sort of with a similar approach as Martha, but Martha and Jesus had a whole different conversation because Jesus goes through, yes, I would have been here, but he is going to be resurrected. She responds, I know he is.

At the time of the great resurrection, he's going to be resurrected. They have a very deep conversation, but here she says that. So remember, she's weeping. She's overwhelmed with grief. All the people that came out with her are overwhelmed with grief. So there's a small crowd here. Therefore, verse 33, when Jesus saw her weeping and the Jews who came with her weeping, he groaned in the spirit and was troubled. And he said, where have you laid him? And they said, Lord, come and see. It's very interesting. He doesn't launch into a deep discussion of the plan of God with Mary, with Martha. He did. He just sees all this overwhelming grief. There's 35, the shortest verse in the Bible, Jesus wept. My wife said when she was young, her dad said, you have to memorize the verse in the Bible. And that's what she picked, which lasted for one week. She had to do something the next week.

But isn't it interesting? His response to Mary and this other group of people isn't an explanation. He actually has an empathetic response.

He knows what he's going to do, by the way. He set this all up. He's going to go resurrect Lazarus. That's all planned. He's going to do it. But his response to these people in this moment is empathetic. They're crying. He understands. He feels. He shares their grief, and he cries with them. It is remarkable, that story, how he interacts with those two women to show us that God, through Christ, interacts with us as individuals. So if you're a Martha type, he's going to interact with you one way. If you're a Mary type, he's going to interact with you in a different way. In this case, it was a total empathetic response. And then he went, of course, and resurrected Lazarus. Empathy is a quality of God's character. Now we're going to have to define this. What is empathy? But it is a character trait of God. In fact, it's one of the reasons Jesus came. He came to be our sacrifice. We just went through that whole celebration of that in the days of 11. But let's go to Hebrews 2 and look at this passage we've all read many, many, many times. In this context of what we're talking about, his empathetic response. It was an emotional response. Empathy is the expression of an emotion. So he has an emotional response to these people. It's real. He feels their grief. He shares in their grief. Even though he's going to resurrect Lazarus, he understands and he responds.

Hebrews 2.14, it is much then, as the children have partaken of flesh and blood, he himself, this is speaking of Jesus Christ, 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 lifetimes subject to bondage. For indeed, he does not give aid to angels. It's very interesting. There's an aid that comes to us from God. It's a power. But there's also, what's being brought out here, Jesus Christ has an empathetic response to us. It's the emotional response. For indeed, he does not give aid to angels, but he does give aid to the seed of Abraham. And of course, we do know that in the New Testament, all those who come to God through Christ are the seed of Abraham. Not just the physical descendants, but all. Therefore, in all things, because he gives aid, not just because he's the sacrifice, but because he gives aid, in all things he had to be made like his brother, that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest and things pertaining to God to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For in that, he himself has suffered being tempted or tested as he's able to aid those who are tempted. He said, so understand, when you're going through, this is the point here that's making, when you go to Jesus Christ, it's like, wow, he's this, you know, the word who became flesh, you returned to the Father, all powerful, you know, how do I go before him? And we're supposed to understand he came as a human being so that he can show us, I understand. And he has an empathetic response to us. You know, sometimes we think of God, and of course, God has the Father as the same response to us as Jesus. Jesus, we understand a little better because he became like us. The Father is just so great. So, okay, he became like us. So we can, okay, he knows who the Father knows too. So there's this empathetic response, I can help you. I can comfort you. I can give you strength. I can give you what you don't have. And I understand because I know what it's like to be a human being. Now he didn't sin, so he doesn't have that experience. But the weakness of being a human being or the trials or the grief, he understands. He understood the grief everybody was experiencing with Lazarus and felt grief because they were feeling grief.

Now, there are two emotional responses we have to people. One is sympathy. Sympathy is when we feel bad for somebody and we know that they're suffering. So it involves caring. It involves acknowledging the hurt. It's not always understanding because we have a limited understanding. What we have with empathy is that there's a sharing of the emotions. Just to give an example, if you have suffered the death of a child, I can come up to you and say with all honesty, oh, that has to be overwhelming, right? That's a sympathetic response. I can't even imagine going through that. Now, if you've lost a child, you go up and say, I understand, right?

They're both legitimate, but the empathy is the sharing of emotions a little bit more than sympathy, in which sometimes there's a limit to what you can share. So sympathy is important. Empathy is important. Now, I have a question that actually I mentioned in that sermon at the weekend for those of you that were there, that I've been working on a sermon. The ideas about empathy, about empathy, is it possible that one of the weaknesses we can have is when our empathy gets misguided? Our empathy gets misguided. My wife, we were talking about this. Next thing I do, she had a book called Toxic Empathy, and she's reading it.

And she said, you got to read this because there's some really good points in here, because it was dealing with the same thing I've been wrestling with, you know, that she and I have been talking about. Is it possible that God has empathy? We're supposed to have empathy. Sometimes some of us don't have much empathy. We're supposed to actually learn empathy. But can empathy become, in a way, actually harmful to us if it's misguided? Let's look at Romans 12. And I had a whole list of scriptures, and I just picked this one because I read a lot of scriptures and working through this and thinking about it.

Started with one sermon, ended up with another sermon. Same subject, but I had a lot of very specific instances originally now. I want to talk about the concept of empathy and how empathy could be very good. And strangely, because it sounds strange to even say this, empathy could end up bad. It could put us in a bad place. Here, Paul talks about, in the New Testament, to the Christian church about the kind of love we have to have. Now, he doesn't use the word empathy here, but he's describing aspects of empathy. Romans 12 verse 9, "'Let love be without hypocrisy.'" In other words, it has to be real.

We can't pretend. We can't pretend. "'A poor one is evil, clean to one is good. Be kindly affectionate to one another with brotherly love, and honor giving preference to one another.'" So he says, okay, we have to be kind. We have to be, and we have to always give another person the benefit of the doubt. We always have to put them first. And you know what, something else? For this to happen, by the way, you have to learn to let somebody else let you be first.

You know, if we all are just going to argue about who's going to serve the tables, nobody will ever get served. So if you all are going to argue about serving the tables, I'm going to go sit down. Then you all can come serve me. Okay, I'll have a great time. You see what I mean? We all have to understand this is a give and take because it's a relationship. It's not getting your brownie points with God. Oh, look, I did this, this, and this. No, this is a relationship.

It's supposed to become natural. Not lagging and diligence, fervent in spirit, serving the Lord. So this is all thrown into a whole lot of things that he's writing about. Rejoicing and hope, patient and tribulation, continuing steadfastly in prayer, distributing to the needs of the saints, given to hospitality. So this is all part of the relationships we're supposed to develop. It starts in our own congregations. These are things what we're supposed to be doing. Bless those who persecute you and bless and do not curse. Now notice verse 15. Rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep. That's empathy. See, empathy isn't just the negative. Sympathy is what you give somebody who's suffering.

Empathy is not just, oh, this person's suffering. It's, wow, this person got a blessing. That's wonderful. I'm going to go tell them that's wonderful. There's actually, we rejoice with each other. We're excited for each other.

So see, empathy is a little different because you're now sharing good emotions.

You're sharing good emotions. That's why we all come back from the feast and say, how was your feast? And if someone says, it was great. And you say, well, mine was great too, right? And you're sharing these stories. Why are we sharing the stories? Because we're sharing, that's an empathetic response to each other. He gives, oh, 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. So in the midst of all this, we have some descriptions that fit sympathy and empathy as part of what we're to be learning. And these are the traits of God. I'm not sure he has sympathy. I can't say that because he will even be sympathetic to the wicked sometimes.

He'll give some leeway or a blessing. So yeah, he can be sympathetic too.

So what happens when empathy goes wrong? And how can it go wrong? How can it be misguided? The fact that empathy involves shared emotions is the problem.

In other words, you could be sitting and talking to somebody and you're talking, two different experiences and you're, you could be sympathetic. But if it's empathy, then you're actually sharing your emotions.

And when we all experience that, we have this connection to this person, right? We just shared emotions. When we shared something similar, we were on the same wavelength in some experience. Of course, the problem is we struggle all the time to have objectivity and perspective hit our emotions. You're now sharing your emotions with somebody else, and it's hard for both of you to keep your objectivity.

And I've done this. You've probably done it. I've been sharing some emotion with somebody, and Kim and I don't do this. She's angry with something. She talks it over with me. Pretty soon I'm angry too. I'm a good defender. I'll get my sword out. It's like, wait a minute, why am I mad? Because it's an empathetic response. Is it a good response? Probably not. And this is where empathy gets us in trouble. Sympathy does not so much, because you're understanding, but you're not sharing. Let me give you an example.

You have a job—I had to make up something, so I just made up something here—you have a job where your boss is sort of demanding at times and it bugs you. I mean, he's a nice guy. It's not a terrible place to work, but he just is demanding sometimes and it really bothers you. And you have a close friend at work, and your close friend is really upset one day and says to you, he just yelled at me. He threatened to fire me. He was so demanding, and you're going, yeah, I've been through that too. What's his problem? And you're just now sitting around tearing down the boss. Okay? And you're sharing something. You've had a similar experience.

I don't know if anybody's ever done this. I had to make this up.

But I'm sure this happens all the time. And then you find out someone else comes up and says, oh, did you see someone's almost got fired today? I heard about that. Yeah, they've been late for work for the last two weeks, every single morning for an hour. And they've been written up. They've been told they can't do that. And she came in for the 10th straight day late, and he really chewed her out. And all of a sudden you're saying, oh, well, yeah, maybe, maybe, see, I didn't know that. Right? I didn't understand that. So you don't understand what the boss did.

I had all kinds of examples, you know, marriage examples. And then I thought, man, every example I use is going to step on somebody's foot. So I'll just use work. Okay.

You see how empathy can cause you to make a conclusion because it's shared emotions without full information. And this is the great danger in it. You and I live in a society where misguided empathy is often considered the highest virtue. It's the highest virtue. You just feel empathy. The feeling of empathy equals love, and they don't. Empathy is an aspect of love, but empathy and love are not synonymous. They're not the same thing. Understand that. Those feelings, because we can have lots of emotions, lots of feelings, love, and that can be part of love, but it doesn't just equal love, because you can have empathy that can become very, very destructive in your life. And so we live in a society where it's becoming more and more taught that basically truth is what you feel, so it becomes totally subjective. What I feel is truth, and what you feel is your truth, and I have my truth. Of course, that's just...

I guess we just only associate with people who believe that, you know, have their feelings. But how do you process that? How do you process the feelings? If I have a disagreement with someone on some doctrine, and they know something about the Bible, and I know something about the Bible, we may be able to sit down, have a discussion, and at the end say, okay, we just disagree, and walk away, right? Because we're not sharing emotions, we're sharing thoughts.

Once we share emotions, and we have some similar connections, it gets really messy. So what happens is that the greatest virtue is to understand somebody else's emotions and validate it. You understand somebody else's emotions, and you validate it. The problem is, what if they're wrong? Well, if you determine truth by feelings, they can't be wrong. Unless it's anger, hatred, those kind of things, yes. But how do you say, no, you're wrong, because the moment you do, the person says you're not validating my feelings, therefore you're evil, you're bad. That used to not be a center of, I'm a whole shelf of Christian psychology books in Hope.

Of course, none of them, they all look at the Bible and say, that's not what the Bible says. But that's not even in the secular psychology books 30 years ago. It has me going on. And I'm not even in the secular psychology books 30 years ago. And I'm not even in the secular psychology books 30 years ago. But that's not even in the secular psychology books 30 years ago. It has become common now.

The purpose is to validate the other person's feelings.

But in doing so, how do you determine what is truth?

And this is a major impact in our society today. I mean, I discuss this with people, not from this area all the time. Young people call me or have interaction with people that are in the church, and they're asking these kinds of questions. Struggling with, but if I love somebody, I have to accept their feelings and validate it. No, you accept their feelings as how they feel. Oh yeah, that's how you feel. I get it. But is it true? Because all of us, in pursuit of truth, have to look at not only intellectually what we consider, but what we feel. Now boy, that's hard.

That is so hard. I still remember the feeling of keeping Christmas.

And the last time I kept Christmas, I was six years old. And I like the feeling.

It's valid only then I experienced. Is it valid as a Christian? No.

It is not. So I could validate, yes, I experienced that. I can tell you I experienced that.

Today, do I wake up and say, oh, this year I'm going to keep Christmas because I want to have that feeling again. No. The feeling is wrong. It's all I do. Now I realize it's wrong.

So all of us struggle with what we read there in Romans, right? Growing in empathy, growing in sympathy. But we have to understand how empathy can become very, very misguided.

Very misguided. Think of the slogan, love is love. Very common slogan in society, even in many Christian groups, which means that as long as, and we talked about this in a sermon I gave in a book, a while back, but if two men love each other and they want to get married or live together or just have sexual relationships, it's okay as long as they love each other, because love is love. That statement, love is love, is an absolutely, it's either a nonsensical a sensible statement, I mean it makes no sense, or it's a piece of propaganda, I'm not sure which it is, because it's illogical. Love is love.

Wood is wood. Cloth is cloth. I mean, what's that mean? There's no definition to the words, but it sounds so good. Love is love. No, I mean, if you really take what they mean, I don't mean to be crass here, but if you're going to actually take what they mean to the true meaning, it's sex is sex, and it's all okay. That's what it means. That's what it means. That's what it means. It's not love is love, because it's not talking about love, it's talking about sexual relationships.

That's where empathy gets totally out of control. Well, but if they love each other.

That's why love is love is one of the most spiritually, emotionally, mentally, and physically destructive phrases in the history of humanity. It just twists reality with words.

That the phrase means nothing. Because I guess you'd have to give everybody a test. Oh, I'm sorry, you're married. Take this love test. If you don't love each other, you can't have physical relationships. But if you're not married over here, you can because you love each other. How do you test whether they love each other?

So this is the problem with a disciplined empathy. Because you feel for people. I mean, I've been in prisons dealing with some of the most vile conduct that anybody's ever committed. And I have felt empathy for some of the men in there. I had an emotional reaction was, this is terrible for you. But I didn't say, I'm going to go home and pray that God get you out of jail. We prayed that God would take care of them. However, God decides to take care of them. He said to me, empathy did not erase the fact that their 40-year sentence had a reason. It didn't erase that. It didn't erase that what they did was horrible according to the law of the end of the law of God. But I had a little bit of an emotional reaction, especially to a guy that was 18 years old. And the rest of his life's in jail.

And I just tried to help him understand he can repent and have God give him salvation, even in jail. That was my job. It wasn't to tell him how to get out.

Turn to God and he'll get you out. No. Turn to God and you can receive salvation. He's a kid.

But he was in there and admitted entirely to what he had done.

And knew it was wrong, sort of late to figure that out, but that's where he was.

But I didn't feel hatred towards him. I felt a bit of empathy for him.

This is why we have in our society, people who think that no matter what crime you commit, you know, six months in jail is enough. And you read over and over and over again, people that have been arrested a dozen times, two dozen times for crimes, they just let them out because it's empathy. I came from a bad home. I was beat as a child. I would, you know, they did. They lived horrible lives and terrible things happened to them. So empathy now says, oh, your crime is acceptable because of what happened to you. The scripture doesn't allow that.

But if we take empathy beyond a certain point and we equate empathy equals love, we have a problem. And we have a deep spiritual problem in that too. So let's go to Ephesians 4.

I have dealt with people in prison where I went home and just wanted to cry. It doesn't change the fact they are where they're supposed to be. It doesn't change it.

My empathetic response was what their day was like every day. And I won't even explain what some of them explain to me what they go through every day.

You think, wow.

You know, that's not living every day. That's being tortured every day.

We have to understand it is enormous as God's empathetic response is to us.

He still requires the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, doesn't he? In fact, the sacrifice of Jesus Christ is an empathetic response. It's not just a legal response. It's an emotional response. It was just a legal response. Oh, okay, I will forgive you now and you have to obey me. No, I will forgive you now and you can be my children. You see it in the difference?

It's more than just a legal response. There's an empathetic, there's an emotional response.

But God never says, you know, you don't even have to repent. You don't even have to change. Just say the name of Jesus, I forgive you, and just go out and keep robbing and stealing and I don't care. That's not how this works, right? He has an empathetic response, but he doesn't say, what you do doesn't matter.

Here we have it in Ephesians 4, a section where Paul is talking about the church and he's getting the church to focus.

And in verse 11, he says, I'm just going to read through this quickly because I just want to make a point here, but this is all one sentence, so I'm going to go ahead and read it together.

Wow! That's huge! That's huge! So Paul says, this is the reason we're here.

So he says, biblical knowledge, and none of us have all biblical knowledge, we know that, the biblical knowledge, core doctrine, he says, we're here to protect that, to learn it and protect it. Now, verse 15, so this is what we're leading up to. But speaking the truth in love, might grow up in all things into him who is the head, Christ. We become like Christ because we speak truth in love. To come to the love of God and have the love of God developed in us, we have to have the truth of God in our limited way. I mean, if you ever really start thinking about the greatness of God, it's a little overwhelming because we don't even understand a tiny bit of it. But we can have a relationship because he makes that possible.

He makes it possible by having us come to him, opening our minds, having us repent, and putting his spirit in us. And now we can have this relationship. And so we have to speak truth in love. Love without truth is not godly love. I suppose we have truth without love, too. You can have somebody that just memorizes the teachings of the Bible and doesn't have any love. That doesn't work either. It's truth and love and how they combine together. That's what this is all about.

Pure love is developed in us with a pure relationship with Christ and God the Father, and adherence to the truth. The more we move away from the truth, the more we will lose our love. And we will redefine love. That's all the idea that this unbridled sort of strange sort of empathy and love being the same thing. That's just a redefinition of love. Because if you define love as, I have to love God also, well you've rejected there's a God, so you have to redefine love. You don't have a biblical viewpoint. What bothers me is how the idea of the Woke Christian Movement is that they have actually thrown out about nine-tenths of the Bible, redefined it, and say that they're the only ones following Jesus.

Our problem is, by the way, we're Pauline. We're Pauline. We're not Christians. We believe in Paul. And no Christian would believe in Paul. He's just a mean old Jewish guy. There was a product of his age. I'm serious. That's what is taught. So, as I said, I've covered that before, but as I was going through this, I thought, oh, this is sort of a part two of that.

Because that idea is being driven into our society and is being driven into our kids. And we have to be aware of it.

So, the great danger to this misguided empathy is that it blinds us to the truth of God.

And it produces an acceptance that truth is based on your subjective feelings. Feelings determine truth.

Now, I don't want your experience, but when I read the Bible, a lot of times, it's directly against my feelings.

No. God does not run the universe based on my feelings.

It's hard to imagine. I know. Sometimes he doesn't care about your feelings. Well, I mean, he cares, but what do you mean? It's not a determinant in reality. We live inside ourselves in this confusion of emotions, which many times has very little to do with reality. We shape our little world around us based on how we feel. And you're not going to get away from that entirely as long as you're a human being. But in its fullness, it's literally we get out of, out of, we don't even know what reality is. We redefine reality, which we used to call mental illness.

I mean, you go back 40 years ago, that was considered mental illness.

Now there's whole belief systems that define, redefine reality into something that is not a reality. I mean, have you seen these people that literally go through transformations, spend a huge amount of money, so that they look like a cat or a dog?

Because they feel that way.

Now, that's an extreme, you know, that's not very many. But when you see people do that, the fact that they're allowed to do that, when in the past they would be sent to a mental institution to receive some kind of help, hopefully, to realize they're not a cat.

What love is defined as accepting and validating others' feelings. And that's the only, now once again, you can't look at somebody that's struggling with something and say, you can't feel that way, you shouldn't feel that way, that doesn't help. You have to accept our feelings. You have to do that in conversation. You have to do that when we're helping each other. It's no good to say, you shouldn't feel that way. You accept it. You try to discuss it. You try to work through it.

But at the same time, there's times when we have to realize that we have to help people understand your feelings do not determine truth in this instance. I had a mentor early in my ministry who really drove that home to me all the time. Gary, sometimes you lead with your heart, and that's great, except sometimes it makes you absolutely wrong.

Okay. So go ahead. He said, lead with your heart. I realize two things are going to happen. Sometimes you're going to be wrong and you're going to get beat up all the time. But that's just the way it is. You're going to get beat up, so go do it, because that's how you're going to do things.

I miss that man. He died a few years ago, because I just call him sometimes.

I hate it when he'd say, so how do you feel about that? I don't want to talk about my feelings. Yes, you should, because you're wrong. He's a very wise man, very gentle man.

Okay. How do we then learn to speak the truth and love, that we combine these two together? Now that's a huge subject, so I'm just going to go through one passage of Scripture to look at and to analyze here. So let's get Ephesians 5.

So we're back in Ephesians. We just read about ... He's telling the church here what they should be and that they should speak the truth and love. So he connects the two together. A little later now, he begins to break that down, actually.

There's certain themes that run through Ephesians. The mystery of the gospel, that he just ... Themes. You can tell Paul's in them. He's being inspired, and he's putting things together, and it's coming out. And he'll go away from one theme, and then over here, he's back on it. So all the themes fit together by the end. So verse 1, chapter 5.

Therefore be imitators of God as dear children. So this is how he starts this passage here. And walk in love. So he wants the congregation in Ephesus to understand, which may have been, I don't know what this is, the biggest congregation in the church. Jerusalem hadn't fallen yet. Jerusalem would have been bigger, but maybe some other places around Judea. But this was one of the biggest congregations throughout the Roman Empire. And 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. He starts with walk in love. Now, if you're going to understand what I mean, okay, see what Paul's saying here is all one sentence. If you're going to understand what I mean is look at Christ.

Look at the sacrifice He did for you. That means that's how much God wants you. That's why He's so empathetic towards us. Even when we do something terribly wrong, there's an empathetic response from God. There's an emotional response from God, even when we're wrong.

We always think only, oh, His response is only anger. No. Sometimes it's disappointment.

Sometimes it's hurt. Sometimes He can't stand to watch us suffer anymore. Why are you doing this? See, sometimes He's angry, but He's not angry like, oh, I'm just going to kill you. That's not how God deals with these children.

It may be how He deals with the world because they get so evil.

Every generation destroys itself in certain environments. When you're sacrificing your own children to pagan gods, to demons, and it goes on and on and on, God finally says, I can't. I just can't take this anymore.

And so He's wiped out. There were tribes in the time of ancient Israel that were wiped out because they sacrificed their children, their babies, to these gods. The statue burned them.

And He finally said, that's it.

I just can't allow this anymore.

So He says, remember Christ. Walk in love, always first remembering Christ. So He gives us a starting point. Remember, there's another place that we'll go there in Romans where Paul literally says, God demonstrates His love towards us through Christ. You want to know what God, His response to you? Look at Jesus Christ. That's His response to you.

I said Him, He sacrificed, He is perfect, He is resurrected. He's there to intercede for you. I'm showing you who I am through Him because you get to see Him. See, we can visualize Him. How do you visualize God? I don't know. But we can sort of visualize Jesus Christ because He became like us. Now, you think He'd say, okay, so now let me explain to you how to really develop really, really, really close empathy. Now we know He writes about empathy, but I want you to notice because we're going to... He has three steps here in this understanding how we speak truth and love. Okay. It all goes back to this concept. But fornication and all uncleanness nor covetousness, let it not even be named among you as this fitting for saints. Wait a minute. We're talking about walking in love. And you're telling us that, wait a minute, you know, covetousness.

Well, what's that have to do with love? Everything. Because it's our relationship with God.

It's everything. You mean sexual sins have to do with our relationship with God? Yeah. Uncleanous. Verse 4, neither filthiness and uncleanous and filthiness have real moral issues here that there is describing. He's not about just being dirty. Okay. You know, you're a person that takes a bath once a week and works in the...

with the honey dippers. Who knows what a honey dipper is? Well, that is an old, old, old term for the guys that clean out septic tanks.

You gotta be from Appalachia to know that. I grew up in the mountains, so, you know, honey dippers.

Sorry I got sidetracked there.

It sounds like something Fred would have done, Mr. Keller's.

They're foolish talking, they're coarse jesting, which are not fitting, but rather give a thanks. For this you know that no fornicator, unclean person, or covetous man, who is an idolater, has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God. How could he be talking about walking in love and then come out with like a big club and beat everybody up? Because the point he's making is it's truth and love. To walk in love, you have to know the truth, and God tells us what is acceptable and not acceptable. Now, fortunately, because of His love, we have the ability to repent. Fortunately, because of His love, we have the power to overcome. And repentance and overcoming isn't an event, it's a lifetime. We're repenting and overcoming to the day we die. The day you die, God says, yep, I'm finished, until then, until then, we're constantly striving to grow in truth and love.

So He tells us to walk in love and then gives us all this truth. In fact, verse 6 says, let Noah deceive you with empty words, for because of these things, the wrath of God comes up all the sons of disobedience. He says, God, someday, steps in and stops the world.

Someday, Christ is coming back. His empathetic response is, I just want you to come to me.

His response of truth and goodness is, you're going to try to fight me. Okay, we'll just start over. Literally what He does is kill. Mankind's killed off most of itself. He kills off a big chunk of it, and He starts with a smaller number, says, now we'll start over, and those people will get resurrected in the future. Okay, we'll deal with them in the future. But we've got to create a new world before that happens. We've got to get rid of Satan, and we have to create a world fit for them to make a choice in. If he was totally driven by empathy, how could he do that? And yet he is empathetic. He's empathetic enough to say, you die now, and I'll resurrect you later and give you an opportunity. That's empathy. But it's empathy that is connected to truth, that's connected to not just accepting all human behavior as good. Verse 7, He says, therefore, do not be partakers with Him. He says, be careful with how much of the world you accept, because this whole world's going to disappear. This whole world's going to be destroyed. So He warns the church here in Ephesus, be real careful what you accept here. So we have walk in love. Next point, verse 8, for you were once darkness, but now you're light in the world. Walk as children of lights. We have a second walking they have to do. So you walk in love and you walk in light. So you see love and truth, relationship with God. You can't separate these things.

What I find interesting here is He doesn't say you were once in darkness. He says you were once darkness. You were darkness. But now it doesn't say you're in the light. You are light. That's an important point. You were darkness. You didn't know any better. And now you're light, because God gave you the light.

Sometimes we get discouraged with our Christianity and the world. And sometimes it's like, you know, what's my purpose? And we say, well, your purpose is to be in the kingdom of God. Yeah, but what am I going to do for the next 20 years or 30 years or 40 years? You know, what am I going to do? Understand the light came on for you. That has to be a core motivation of understanding God turned on the light for you. He did that.

And that's not only just to give you knowledge. It is an empathetic response from Him. I want you—so I'm going to turn the light on for you right now, because I want you to be my child. That's empathetic. That's an emotional response to you. We don't think of God as having emotional responses, but all through the Bible, He has lots of emotional responses. And Christ had lots of emotional responses. The group of people came up and they're crying, and pretty soon He's crying with them. It's real tears. He's not pretending. This is actual empathy with these people.

But God's empathy never leads to evil. So something that says it's love and is an empathy that is dangerous, that leads people away from God, that's not love and it's not empathy. It's just, well, it's an emotional response that we can say is empathy, but it's not love.

Love is you want to save people, to bring them to God. Love is you want you to be.

Responding to God. Love is what do I do today? It's as simple as this. Give me an opportunity today to love somebody in the church, outside the church, my own family. Just give me opportunities and show me what to do.

And show me what to say.

So He says, walk as children of light. Now verse 9 is interesting. For the fruit of the Spirit is in all goodness, righteousness and truth. That's a whole sermon right there.

He says, as you walk in light, there's three things that become very apparent to you. One is what is goodness. What is good, what God says is good. Okay. That is truth. So we're, He's breaking us down into truth. Righteousness, being right with God and truth.

You could break that down. You want to do a little study? Break down those words and study them throughout the New Testament. Oh, you'll find them used in Psalms. You'll find them used in the prophets. Different language, but same meaning. Finding out what is acceptable to the Lord. Truth is not finding out my own truth. It is finding out what is acceptable to God. Now, if a person is a Christian, that's going to make no sense to them. And you can't make that make sense to them. A light has to come on to get that. A light has to come on to get that.

I said, I was reading a book. My wife's been reading it. I read a little bit of it. And there were some interesting examples in there about, like one was someone who was a transgender. And I don't remember if it was a man to a woman, a woman to a man. But they were in the process and something happened to them. And they started to wonder if there was a God. And in the process of that, they stopped and then went back. And they had gone far enough they couldn't go back. They went back. And realized they were searching for a meeting. If I become a male or I become a female, I'll have meeting and purpose and life and it'll be good and I'll be loved by everybody. And that wasn't what could happen at all. They were just more confused, more messed up, and didn't have any more love than they had before. Well, what's love? They had to redefine what love is. It was an interesting part how the person had to go through this. Well, even how do I define love? And they reversed because they had found in a very limited way, but they had found God enough that it changed. God helped them to change. He says, finding out what is acceptable to the Lord, and have no fellowship with the unproofful works of darkness, but rather expose them. That's another interesting statement.

If you live in the light, it doesn't matter. You don't go around preaching to people. Sooner or later, you're going to expose some darkness. It's just going to happen. You could try to hide. I guess if you just hide in your house all the time, you'll never expose any darkness, but you interact with people. Sooner or later, someone's going to ask you, why do you do that? Why do you think that way? You know, they're going to ask you a question. Because what you're doing doesn't make any sense.

Verse 15 is the last of the three, and I'm not going to go through this one, because it's really a broader subject. You walk in love, you walk in light, which is goodness, righteousness, and truth. And you walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise. You walk in wisdom. That's the ability to make right decisions. That would take an hour to explain. The ability to learn how to make right decisions. Walk in love, walk in truth, walk in wisdom. I had a whole different sermon prepared. I was up at 5.45 this morning saying, no, I'm going to change this. I'm going to get into the concepts. I had lots of examples, but I was going to change the concepts. The concept of how would the New Testament Church have handled this?

They handled it very simply. God is empathetic. Christ is empathetic. We should be empathetic. But love and empathy aren't synonymous. One is just a component of the other. And without truth, without truth, love isn't love. I mean, it is in some little ways, but it's not the love of God. I mean, even evil people sometimes show love in one way or another, right?

Even really bad people can show love in some little way. But the love of God is what we are wanting to grow in us.

Empathy is an emotional response of love. It's not synonymous because empathy must always be tempered with truth. And so we can be empathetic, but still safe. But still say you're wrong. I understand how you feel. I feel bad for you. I wish your life was better. But you can't do this. You can't be this way. You know, one of the greatest travesties of this kind of thinking is you see some of these big cities where they have all these homeless people that were drug addicts.

There's an interesting problem. This has been known since World War II, where they tested people to go into the army. We had 16 million people in the army, so we had to test lots of people. 10% of all men that applied to go into the army did not have the mental capability to even be a cook.

So they know 10% of the population doesn't have the mental capability of actually holding down a job. What do we do with them? You can't just throw them out on the street. That's sort of what we do. So you see all these people out on the street, and what is the empathetic response sometimes of some of these big cities? Because I saw it in Austin, where we used to live down there.

Well, you just... they're all... somebody with drug addicts, just give them their drugs so they don't suffer. Now, I understand. Seeing somebody suffer from drug withdrawal, you'd have to be a hard person not to have an empathetic response. Giving them the drugs so they stay addicted instead of a program to help them is not empathy. It's not empathy.

It's not social justice either. We're going to keep you dumped up on all the streets. That's not social justice. It's not empathy.

And we just don't have a society that can deal with it. It will take Jesus Christ coming back to deal with it. Human beings haven't figured out a way to deal with it. I just said... one time I was in Austin... I don't know if I can't remember if I told you this or not, but we were in Austin, and there was a man who had come to church once in a while, and he would leave his house and go out and live on the streets every once in a while. He was mentally a little off, but he was harmless.

And we got it. Someone came to church, went to pick him up from church, and he left a note, and he went out to kill himself. So I go down south Austin at night, and I knew there was a homeless shelter. When I didn't know there was a whole block of homeless shelters. Thousands and thousands of people out on the streets. I'm just walking through a sea of people, whole families.

Somebody just wiped out on whatever drug, and the next to them, two people with little kids tried to cook a meal over a little burger. There were just thousands and thousands and thousands. And I thought, how do I find him? I went up and tried to go into a couple of the shelters. They said, we're sorry. No more can come in. I said, I'm in a suit, okay? I'm a pastor, which I've never been turned down from a shelter as a pastor before, but no one would let me in. It was late at night, and they would open the doors. And I spent hours walking down the streets, and I finally had to go home and said, I don't know, God. I can't save him.

Well, the next day he found out. He finally went home in the middle of the night, realized he didn't want to sit on the streets. So I went to him and said, do you have family any place? And he said, yes, in Arizona. I said, do you think your family would like you to come visit? He says, I'll call and find out. And he did. And I said, tell you what, I'll buy you the bus fare to go home. He said, well, I'll just sell everything I have and pack up and go. So the last time I saw the man, I gave him a ticket. I said, the bus station. I gave him $20 for food because it was going to be, we had one trip. The whole thing, he only got to stop for food one time. So I gave him $20 for food and a ticket. And he was so excited. And off he went. I found out later, I got a call from the minister in Arizona. I think it was Arizona. He said, do you know so and so? And I said, yep. He said, is he okay? I said, yeah, but he's, you know, he's not all there. And he could just leave for days at a time. And he said, okay, did you send him here? And I said, yeah. He said, what am I supposed to do with him? I'd find out if he has any more relatives, any place, buy him a ticket, give him $20. And we'll just keep sending him around the country, you know, and we'll take care of him. But fortunately, his people there took care of him and he was okay. He had to get someplace where there was people to take care of him.

So, you know, there's no solutions to some of this. There's no solutions. Not until Christ comes back. But we should have an empathetic response to it. We should feel bad. We should look at the way the world is. And we should hate the way the world is. Because those are people made of the image he caught. But we can't let that empathy create in us, sometimes, a sinful attitude. So, God has brought you out of the darkness. No. No. That's what Paul said. He's taken the darkness out of you. And he's put the light in you. Live by the light.