Compassion
Put On… – Part I
Scripture Reading: Colossians 3:8-17
Key Verse: Colossians3:10
Put on your new nature, and be renewed as you learn to know your Creator and become like Him.
If you go to Planet Fitness or any other gym, you are doing a good thing trying to stay physically fit.
However, if you achieve physical fitness and are not “Kingdom Fit”, what good will it do for you at the end of all things? Since your life is both physical and spiritual, focus on fitness in both areas!
Obviously, I devote my devotionals to spiritual fitness. Let me remind you where we have been so far in this devotional. I focused the first week on our mental attitudes, and the second week on forgiveness.
Today, we start a third essential ingredient to being Kingdom Fit: our capacity for compassion.
One cannot read the New Testament without coming across dozens of scriptures about the importance of compassion.
Believers as well as unbelievers can have a compassionate heart. In fact, some unbelievers put believers to shame with their level of compassion. However, for unbelievers, compassion is either there by their nature or it’s not, and they live with whatever comes naturally.
Believers can also be compassionate naturally and some not. But all believers must decide to show compassion no matter how they feel naturally.
Today’s Key Verse reminds believers that we must “put on” the new nature and be “renewed” as we learn to know God, through Christ.
If you are a Christ-follower that does not come by compassion naturally, then you want to do the work of compassion by choice not by feelings. That is what it means to “put on…”. In one sense, this phrase means we are acting out, putting on as if we feel something. That sounds hypocritical, but when done with a spirit of obedience to Christ, it is not! One of Jesus’s teachings might explain this better, Luke 17:7-10:
“When a servant comes in from plowing or taking care of sheep, does his master say, ‘Come in and eat with me’? No, he says, ‘Prepare my meal, put on your apron, and serve me while I eat. Then you can eat later.’ And does the master thank the servant for doing what he was told to do? Of course not. In the same way, when you obey Me you should say, ‘We are unworthy servants who have simply done our duty.’”
Jesus is saying, as Christ-followers, we have a duty to do, no matter how we feel, and that takes discipline; it is not hypocrisy!
(continued)
Father, I will do my duty and act in compassionate ways today, as You give me wisdom and strength! In Jesus’s Name, amen.