Compassion for Sinners, part 2

Pastor, author, and Bible teacher, Alan Wright. Quit expecting the world to act the way that you think that any good Christian should act when they don't know a different way. Quit expecting depressed people who are cast down to get themselves back up because they can't.

Start seeing with the eyes of Jesus and you'll be moved with compassion, which will lead you to prayer. That's Pastor Alan Wright. Welcome to another message of good news that will help you see your life in a whole new light. I'm Daniel Britt, excited for you to hear the teaching today in the series, You'll See, as presented at Reynolda Church in North Carolina. If you're not able to stay with us throughout the entire program, I want to make sure you know how to get our special resource right now. It can be yours for your donation this month to Alan Wright Ministries.

As you listen to today's message, go deeper as we send you today's special offer. Contact us at PastorAlan.org. That's PastorAlan.org or call 877-544-4860.

That's 877-544-4860. More on that later in the program. But right now, let's get started with today's teaching. Here is Alan Wright.

At our presbytery meeting years ago, the assembly of elders and pastors, that is the place where we approve examination of new ordination candidates and the ordination candidate has to preach a sermon that's approved by the presbytery. I love the opening line. This young man preached on Psalm 23 and he started his sermon by saying, Charles Darwin's survival of the fittest theory can't be right for one reason. Sheep still roam the earth. It was hilarious because sheep are one of the most defenseless creatures imaginable.

It's so interesting that we are compared to sheep, but we are. In fact, this image of sheep without a shepherd finds its root in antiquity numbers 27-15 when Moses spoke to the Lord. He said, let the Lord, the God of the spirits of all flesh appoint a man over the congregation. He's talking about a leader who shall go out before them and come in before them, who shall lead them and bring them in that the congregation of the Lord may not be sheep that have no shepherd.

He's saying they need leadership at the most natural level. But Jesus came and identified himself as a shepherd. In fact, in John 10, he said, I am the good shepherd and the good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. He was a hired hand and not a shepherd who does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees and the wolf snatches them and scatters them. In other words, Jesus is saying, I'm like a shepherd who cares for the sheep, but I do the unthinkable. I lay down my life for the sheep. In fact, Matthew 18, 12, he says, what do you think of a man has a hundred sheep and none of them gone astray and one of them has gone astray?

Does he not leave the 99 on the mountains and go in search of that one that went astray? He says, I'm a shepherd that would lay down my life for the sheep and I'm the good shepherd who would go seeking out the lost sheep. He would pursue the sheep because the sheep cannot find its way back to the flock.

They aren't bloodhounds. They don't, you never see a sheep putting his nose down and going, I'm gonna find my way back home. They cannot find their way home. Sheep without a shepherd will eat and drink the wrong things. Philip Keller and his book, a shepherd looks at Psalm 23, said that he had observed that sheep will just stay in the same little pasture, eat the grass until it's gone and then paw up the roots until there's no more grass that can even grow. They don't know how to go find a new green pasture and they'll just foul the water that they drink in until it's polluted and then keep drinking it. This is why they need a shepherd to make them lie down in green pastures and to lead them beside clean waters.

They can't find it on their own. Sheep will eat and drink the wrong things. Sheep will be so vulnerable to the coyote or the wolf or even the mountain lion because they cannot defend themselves.

Sheep, you know what the analogy that I think of? A guinea pig. We had guinea pigs when I was growing up. Fluff 1 and Fluff 2 met their demise in a most unfortunate way. You'd think you'd learn but Fluff 1 had them out in the front yard and a neighbor's dachshund came down. This was back in the day, there were no leashes, there were no fences and just had them out front for a small period of time and that dachshund came and just pounced on Fluff 1 and that's the end of Fluff 1. Can you believe that Fluff 2, you'd think we would learn? But Fluff 2 got eaten as well so I hate those dachshunds and I fell in love with Ann and I said, if y'all got a dog and she said, yeah, we had a dachshund named Mike. I said, grrr. She said his wonderful dog said the only bad thing is that one time he pounced on the neighbor's guinea pig in their front yard.

I said, you are kidding me. What is a guinea pig going to do to defend itself from a weenie dog? What are you going to do with a sheep?

Put it into a training, cross country training where you learn to outrun the wolf? No, they cannot run very fast. Are you going to try to sharpen their teeth so they could bite the mountain lion that comes after it?

How silly is that? They're not going to rear up on their back hooves and fight off anything. In fact, they don't even make noise. They can't even call out and say, come help me, rescue me. They can be led to the slaughter and not make a sound. Sheep are one of the most defenseless creatures on the face of the earth. If they don't have a shepherd, they will be eaten alive. Sheep will follow other sheep into dumb places, dangerous places.

Phil Keller said that even some have been known to follow one another right off the cliff. Imagine that. I remember one time when I was a teenager, I was at a party at somebody's house.

I never liked going to parties. I thought they were so dumb. People standing around, what are we supposed to do? But we were standing around, had about three or four of us, nothing to do, talking to each other. And it must have been some black electrical tape on a shelf in this house. I don't remember why it was there, but one guy was fiddling with it. And next thing you know, a piece of it got stuck on his nose. We said, you got a piece of black tape on your nose. And he said, I think I might leave it there.

And so we said, yeah, let's do the same thing. So about three or four of us put a piece of black electrical tape on our nose. I'm not making this up. Within 30 minutes, the majority of the 50 or so people at this party had a piece of black electrical tape on their nose. Sheep can be cast down in this sense that when they get on their side, if they shift their weight and their wool's a little heavy, they can get right on their back and their feet straight up in the air. And when this happens, a cast sheep cannot right itself.

They're stuck. And if a shepherd doesn't come and get them back up eventually, especially under the hot sun, a sheep will die in a cast position. So the shepherd has to come, get the sheep, sometimes use the staff to leverage it, get the sheep back upright, rub the legs and get the life going again. When the Psalmist said he restores my soul, the word for soul is my life, restores us.

Because if you cast down, you can't get yourself up. That's Alan Wright. And we'll have more teaching in a moment from today's important series. Want to give someone a present this Christmas that they'll never forget? Let us help you give a gift that money can't buy. This Christmas, give someone your blessing, a positive biblically based faith-filled vision for their life.

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Today's teaching now continues. Here once again is Alan Wright. When Jesus said that I see them and they look like they are harassed and helpless like sheep without a shepherd, the word for harass means torn or flayed, like they have been attacked. He saw the spiritual battle. He saw the spiritual battle and He said they're helpless and the word for helpless actually comes from the word in Greek meaning to throw down. It's the word used of Judas when he threw down the pieces of silver at the temple. It's a picture of a sheep that's been thrown down. I think it's the picture of a cast sheep who is helplessly on its back.

And Jesus was saying, when I see the crowds, here's what's going on in my guts. I see that they've been ravished by the enemy and that they are cast. They've been thrown down and they're stuck and they're not going to be righted unless they have a shepherd. They're like sheep without a shepherd and I feel for them. When you see as Jesus sees, the Splungna, your insides start being moved in a visceral way with love and mercy and compassion because sheep are just sheep and they cannot get themselves going in the right way until they have a good shepherd. In other words, quit expecting sinners to act like they're not sinners. What they need is a savior. Quit expecting the world to act the way that you think that any good Christian should act when they don't know a different way. Quit expecting depressed people who are cast down to get themselves back up because they can't.

Start seeing with the eyes of Jesus and you'll be moved with compassion which will lead you to prayer. People, let me put it even more pointedly, people, this is completely counter-cultural and maybe offensive to the spirit of this age, but what the Bible teaches is that we do not find our identity in ourselves. The message of the age is look inside of yourself and find out who you are.

That is exactly opposite of the scripture. David said the Lord is my shepherd. I am identified by whose I am.

I never could find myself by looking inside of myself. I needed a voice beyond me to call me and tell me who I am and call me His own. I'm identified by the fact that I'm in the family of God.

A sheep is identified by the shepherd. We're expecting people to find their way when they don't know the way. They'll never have an authentic identity unless someone tells them that they were made in the image of God, a little lower than the angels. Never have an authentic identity until they understand that God gave His all out of compassion and inexhaustible love to die in their place on a cross so that they could be His child and that their destiny is to be an heir alongside of Christ Himself. Here's our identity. We are baptized into Christ. We are immersed into Christ.

My identity is not found by looking inside. My identity is found by being immersed into the love of Christ, my shepherd. It means we won't have victory by looking inside ourselves either. It's impossible for sheep not to act foolishly when they don't have a shepherd.

It's just not in their nature. The power of compassion in Christ is the power that moved Him even when He was physically exhausted. It moved Him to heal and it is that compassion that moved Him to die for you.

It's why He did it. He loved you and you were like a sheep that had no shepherd and would have remained such if not for the compassion of the Son of God. Henry Nouwen has said that competition and compassion are in conflict. I think this is a brilliant insight that in a culture that is bent on getting ahead of someone else, it is extremely difficult to have authentic compassion if you are worried about your position, whether you're in front of somebody else or not.

And so where there is competition, you don't have compassion. So I'm a competitive person and I love sports. So when my team is winning, then I am cheering. If my team is winning by a large margin and my wife is in the room, she starts feeling sorry for the other team and I have to kick her out of the room. I said, no, there's no feeling sorry for the other team. No, no.

These leads, you can't have too big of a lead. Maybe you can with just a minute or two laughed, but here's what Nouwen said and see if you can wrap your mind around this. Only God can be wholly compassionate, completely compassionate because only God is not in competition with us. The paradox of God's compassion is that God can be compassionate because God is completely other than we are and because God is holy other, God can become completely as we are. God can become so deeply human because God is so fully divine. In short, God can be fully compassionate because there can be no comparison with us and thus God is in no way in competition with us. This is one of the greatest assurances you could ever have is God's God all by Himself.

Maybe God, you're not His ways are not our ways. He is so transcendent and so beyond. He is God. He is perfect. He's holy. He is love. So in that sense, there's no comparison between you and God. God doesn't have any need to compete with you.

He's God. And so all that's left is His movement towards you in compassion. It's like a father who has a toddler. When I had a toddler that I'm trying to help learn how to walk, I'm not in competition with the toddler. I don't have to prove something to the toddler.

It's a toddler. I just have compassion. I just want to help.

I just want to help. So all of this is to say when you start feeling frustrated and I'm honest with you, I get frustrated with the crowds. What if you were just to stop and say, Jesus, could I have your eyes to see this properly? Maybe there's a person you're frustrated with. Could I just borrow your eyes, Jesus, to see her as you do, to see Him through your eyes? It is in a sense to stop and ask why. And you'll find that the answer to the why is often it's because they're sheep and they don't have a shepherd.

And once you see it from that perspective, you will be transformed. When our son, our first child, Bennett, was one, he'd been so healthy. I don't even know, other than the early checkups, we'd never even been to the doctor. And one night he was just fussing all through the night. And this was after a time in which he had learned to sleep through the night because he would get up in the night and cry and get frustrated. And this night we were actually visiting Anne's folks.

We were in Durham at the time. We came to visit in Winston and Bennett was fussy through the night. And I was frustrated with him.

I thought, well, he's just going back to his old ways of fussing through the night, wanting to get some attention. And I kind of said, Anne, I said, he's just being fussy. And we came over to cuddle him. And the next day he wasn't himself and he didn't feel like eating.

And that's when I said, oh, that's not good. So we took him into the doctor, same pediatrician Anne had when she was growing up, went to see Dr. Stamey. And the first time we'd had our child and the pediatrician and Dr. Stamey looked in his ear and said, oh, he's got a raging ear infection going on. I just about burst into tears there in the doctor's room because I've been kind of frustrated with the little guy the night before. And he said, he does not feel good. And I said, well, doctor, he hadn't been eaten. He said, oh, well, once we get some antibiotic going to get this here, he'll eat everything he can then. And I feel like that we spend way too much time thinking we know what's going on with people and just being frustrated with them.

And why don't they get their act together? And I think that underneath it, there is a different narrative and it doesn't excuse their sin and it doesn't excuse the problems of this world, but it changes the way that we feel that God has come to us and the person of Jesus as a shepherd. And he has such compassion on us that he will never let us go. When you feel frustrated, just pause and say, Jesus, how do you see this? And he'll show you. That's the gospel. When you feel frustrated, just pause and say, Jesus, how do you see this?

And he'll show you. And I think that underneath it, there is a different narrative and it doesn't excuse the problems of this world and it doesn't excuse the problems of this world and it doesn't excuse the problems of this world and it doesn't excuse the problems of this world and it doesn't excuse the problems of this world and it doesn't excuse the problems of this world and it doesn't excuse the problems of this world and it doesn't excuse the problems of this world and it doesn't excuse the problems of this world and it doesn't excuse the problems of this world and it doesn't excuse the problems of this world and it doesn't excuse the problems of this world and it doesn't excuse the problems of this world and it doesn't excuse the problems of this world.