Editorial – Being Considerate

The Facility To Empathize with the feelings of another is an ability God has given to mankind. This quality is the basis for considerate behavior.

The human and the divine

In order to exercise the quality, we usually need to have shared the circumstances of another person. It is regularly in traffic, when someone makes room for a driver who has been blocked off by a stalled car. We see it in the supermarket check-out line when a person with many items lets somebody with one item go ahead of him. At some time, most people have been blocked off in traffic or shopped for one item. People can understand the situation of the other when they have been there themselves.

What is rarely seen, however, is for someone to wholly understand the needs of another when he has never experienced a similar situation. It is not easy for the rich to truly empathize with the poor; those who have always lived at peace have trouble understanding the turmoil and ravages of war.

What is even more unusual is when one person eases the burdens of another at great cost to himself. It is one thing to help when we have plenty; it is quite another when helping will mean personal hardship.

When we understand feelings we have not experienced and help even when it hurts, we show a divine level of consideration which is exemplified by God.

The divine quality

God has never struggled with human weakness yet “He knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust.” Parents can enter into the feelings of their chil­dren because they have experienced them; they were once children themselves. God has not lived through our humanity, yet “Like as a father pitieth his children, so the LORD pitieth them that fear him” (Psa. 103:14,13).

The Almighty has never hungered or thirsted; He has never worried about providing for His family. Yet, in dealing with His people, “In all their affliction he was afflicted, and the angel of his presence saved them: in his love and in his pity he redeemed them; and he bare them, and carried them all the days of old” (Isa. 63:9).

God went through their afflictions with them. To wholly empathize with feelings one has never experienced is remarkable. Moreover, the Lord not only empathized, He acted. God rose early, sending His prophets to appeal to a wayward nation. The phrase, “rising up betimes and sending” conveys expending great time and energy to help. The margin notes that “betimes” means “continually and carefully.” God did so “because he had compassion on his people” (II Chron. 36:15).

More was needed, so God moved to the pinnacle of grace; the Father sent His Son to be the savior of any who would respond. As we know, the method of salvation would include the rejection, the physical abuse and the slaying of His only begotten Son.

God entered into problems He had never experienced; He helped at great personal cost. Here is a fullness of compassion. No wonder the Son would say, “Why callest thou me good, there is none good but one, that is, God” (Matt. 19:17).

Developing the Savior

This level of consideration is divine. To bring the Son up to such a level, the Father diligently instructed him and educated him through his experiences. “Though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered” (Heb. 5:8).

The Lord Jesus can enter into our feelings because he has experienced so much of what we go through. He knew hunger, thirst and discomfort. Obstacles were put in his way; his words were distorted; his family misunderstood him; his acquaintances betrayed him; his friends failed him. He can “be touched with the feelings of our infirmities” being “in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin” (Heb. 4:15).

Yet he learned even more from his Father; his ability to consider our needs goes beyond the circumstances he personally experienced. He was never a sheep .without a shepherd, but he has compassion on those who are. He was never a prodigal son, but he is able to reach out to those who have gone astray. He was never unfaithful to those who loved him, but he can have mercy on a woman who betrayed her husband. In seeing such conduct, we see the glory of the Father in the attributes of the Son.

Confident that he will consider our difficulties and dilemmas, we come boldly to the throne of grace. We are further reassured because the Lord has proven his willingness to act, as well as understand, even at great cost to himself. What more could he do than lay down his own life for the sake of his friends?

By providing such a high priest, the Father has further underscored His own consideration of our needs. We feel reassurance in our relationship with the Father and the Son knowing that the Son, through whom we are sanctified, was also a partaker of flesh and blood.

Reflecting the divine

Now what of ourselves? Consideration is a fairly common quality when we sense needs that we have personally experienced. That is being a decent human being.

Servants of God, however, are called upon to be considerate in the manner of their Heavenly Father. Such behavior does not come naturally. Deliberate effort is needed to sympathize with problems we have never experienced.

If we are busy almost beyond our limit, it will not be easy to empathize with the person who is lonely with too much time on his hands. If we are financially secure, it is hard to relate to those who struggle for a living. If all of our family is in the same fellowship, we will have trouble understanding the burden of families split by lines of fellowship.

The difficulty of understanding what we have not experienced is magnified by distance. This is notable on an ecclesial level. When word is passed about ecclesial decisions that are apart from our own experience, there is none of the experiential empathy on which to draw. We don’t know the people; we don’t know the cases; our natural reaction, therefore, is to be critical and judgmental. This is especially true if we feel principles have been compromised.

We must beware of judgmental reactions. Our own eternal life depends on the Father being wonderfully considerate of us. To receive such sympathetic understanding, we must demonstrate it to others. By deliberate effort, we need to put ourselves in their place, viewing circumstances from their standpoint This is consideration as God practices it.

Many people are considerate. The servant of God, however, must elevate the quality to emulate the divine, empathizing with situations he has not experienced and helping even at personal cost to himself.