Here at the Unreached Network, we are a deeply compassionate people. We love fiercely, fight for justice, and long for people to know God. This compassion drives us—to pray, to care, to step into hard places, and to do hard things. But God recently showed me something that I found quite profound: Compassion with naivety leads to disaster, but compassion with wisdom allows God’s life to flow.
Compassion with Naivety
If we love and care deeply but are naive, we can miss what is really going on. We can miss what God is doing. We can miss the motives in people’s hearts. We can carry things God never asked us to carry.
The weight of compassion without wisdom and insight can become incredibly heavy, like carrying a burden that isn’t ours to carry. Or we can become reactive, overwhelmed and feel out of control, feeling like we are a small lifeboat being thrown around in a huge storm.
I don’t know about you, but I often find myself starting to feel easily overwhelmed by the big problems of our world: war, human trafficking, injustice, exploitation, poverty, oppression, hunger — there are so many things I cannot control.
Here are a few things that deeply stir my compassion:
Everyone should have the right to know God.
I get deeply angry when people are prevented from experiencing the basic birthright of every human being: to personally know their Father.
The world should be free from pain and suffering.
I feel overwhelmed in the face of human need. There is so much suffering, and I can’t help everyone.
People should be free.
So many people are not free. Seeing people exert dominance and power over others makes my blood boil.
Can you relate?
What compassion-based needs motivate you?
For me, this combination of overwhelming scale of need and my total sense of helplessness leads me to wrestle with our Father who has made His position on justice very clear:
“Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to lose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter— when you see the naked, to clothe them, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?” Isaiah 58
I see the need.
God expects action.
I can’t do anything to fix it.
Do I need to harden my heart?
Do I need to care less?
What should I do?
Why We Must Never Stop Caring
I don’t believe the answer is to harden our hearts.
We should always be a people who seek justice and compassion. We should care deeply. We should grieve what grieves God.
But we are also people with limits. We are limited by time, capacity, resources, power, knowledge and skill.
And just because we can’t respond to every single need in the world doesn’t mean we should stop caring.
Look at Ezekiel 9. God commands an angel to go throughout Jerusalem and put a mark on the foreheads of those who “grieve and lament over all the detestable things that are done there.”
Judgment falls on those who have turned away and simply don’t care.
The people who received God’s mark weren’t necessarily able single-handedly to stop the evil around them. They may have been completely powerless to change what was happening.
But they cared. They grieved. They lamented.
And somehow, their willingness to care touched the heart of God.
God doesn’t ask us to solve every problem. He doesn’t ask us to respond to every need.
He asks us to care — and then to let Him direct our response.
That’s wisdom.
Compassion with Wisdom
So, as we learn to respond with compassion to the needs God places before us each day, perhaps the invitation is not to care less, but to learn to care more, and to care with wisdom.
Sometimes our role is simply to cry with those who weep. Sometimes it is to pray, listen, give or act. And sometimes the most faithful thing we can do is to entrust something, or someone, back to God.
He will show us what to do.
Let’s learn from God, the Compassionate One.
In Isaiah 54:10, God promises:
“Though the mountains be shaken and the hills be removed, yet my unfailing love for you and my covenant of peace will not be removed, says the Lord, who has compassion on you.”
Let’s first go to God and receive His peace, His wisdom and His compassion — for ourselves and for the world around us. He cares for us deeply, comforts us, tends to our wounds, and meets us in our places of deepest need.
One of the most compassionate things we can do for someone is to first show that we care, and then encourage them to run to the One who will meet and satisfy all of their needs.
Compassion with wisdom allows God’s life to flow
So, how do we keep the outworking of our compassion in step with the heart and will of God? We can keep coming back to Him with these simple questions:
- What is God’s heart here? What does he want?
- What do I need to see?
- What is He asking me to do?
- Who can I talk to about this? Who else can partner with me?
These questions are not about making our hearts harder or putting limits around love. They help us to love freely, faithfully and wisely — without taking on what God has not asked us to carry.
Reach further
“Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.”
— Hebrews 4:7
And:
“Let all that you do be done in love.”
— Romans 16:14
My encouragement to us all is that we learn to love more deeply, not less. And that we learn to love with wisdom, exchanging our small lifeboats for large ships that are able to carry God’s compassion more assuredly through choppy seas.
May our compassion stretch further, spur us on and ignite our passions and desires to see God’s kingdom come and his will be done in the whole earth.
Nova (name changed for security) has spent her whole life in diverse cultural contexts and now lives and works in the Middle East. She enjoys coffee, reading, and learning about languages and cultures, especially appreciating the unique beauty each culture contributes to the body of Christ. Nova is grateful to serve as a founding member of the Executive Team at the Unreached Network.
