Matthew-040

Today, we continue in our study in the teaching of our Lord Jesus in Matthew 14:13-21. Although what we will be looking at is not strictly a teaching section, yet in the midst of this wonderful miracle, the feeding of the 5,000, there is an important element of teaching that we must look at. It is here that we are going to find the key to whether or not we will become what we ought to be in the world namely, channels of blessing for others.

Those of you who have been Christians for some time have heard preaching on this passage, and it is one of the favorite passages for many preachers, especially Chinese preachers to preach on. I have heard quite a few messages from Chinese preachers on this section so much so that it is a kind of metonymy for example, when we say, “God blesses my ‘five loaves and two fish’”, it means my little gift that God has given me to bless others with. So the idea that is constantly preached on is that if you will commit to God your small gifts or abilities, the little that you have, “the five loaves and two fish,” God will bless it to such an extent as to feed the multitudes. I am sure that you have heard this message many times over, and there is no doubt that it is an important and valuable message.

Yet, it doesn’t quite answer certain questions. And this question is: if most of us have at least some small gifts that God could bless and multiply, if most of us have “five loaves and two fish,” then why doesn’t God bless the “five loaves and two fish” that you have to give to the multitudes that are round about you? Is it because you don’t even have “five loaves and two fish”? Or if you do have that, then why is it not being used to the blessing of the multitudes – the 5,000 men plus women and children? Why is God not using you? That is the question, and that question doesn’t seem to get answered. Is it that you haven’t offered your “five loaves and two fish”? What is the answer to this question?

There is an important element in this miracle which is didactic. The Lord Jesus wanted to use this miracle to teach the disciples something. And that is the whole point of verse 16: “You give them something to eat.” The crowds had been following the Lord Jesus around, listening to his preaching, and it was late; they were tired and hungry. The disciples did the common sense thing. They suggested to the Lord Jesus, “Send the people home so that they can get their rest, go to the villages to buy something to eat, and they can come again tomorrow.” The Lord Jesus said, “No, they need not go away. You give them something to eat.”

If Jesus had said, “I will give them something to eat,” there is no problem. “Okay, Lord, you give them something to eat.” But the Lord Jesus did not say, “I’ll give them something to eat,” he said, “You give them something to eat.” I’m sure that by this time, if they had big handkerchiefs, the disciples would be pulling them out to mop their brow as they look at this crowd: 5,000 men, plus women, plus children! They must have thought, “How many thousands of people are out there? We give them something to eat? Lord, you’re not kidding us, are you? You’re putting us on the spot. Unless we brought in a few lorry loads of food, how are we going to feed this mob? But we haven’t got a few lorry loads of food here.”

That is what I mean by didactic. The Lord wanted to teach them something. The question is: What did he want to teach them? Surely, he knew that they could not feed 5,000 men plus women and children. Neither the children nor the women are too small eaters. With this multitude, exactly how are you going to go about feeding them? Surely, the Lord Jesus knows that they cannot do it, so what is the point of putting them on the spot like this?

That is the question. What does the Lord Jesus want to teach? That is what we want to get at. It isn’t the question that the Lord Jesus can bless five loaves and two fish. On that we can preach endlessly. Of course, God can multiply five loaves and two fish through Jesus. For that matter, he could feed the crowds with one loaf and one fish; he did not need five loaves and two fish. But that is not the point. The point simply is: exactly how does the Lord Jesus want his disciples to feed the multitudes? That is what he wanted to do. He said, “You feed them,” notice carefully the words, “You feed them.” Was he trying to make life difficult for them? Or else what did he want to teach them? I am sure these disciples, having been put on the spot as they were, never forgot the lesson when the Lord Jesus asked them to feed so many people, and they looked out at that multitude and scratched their heads thinking, “With what are we going to do this?”

Jesus teaches his disciples compassion – a lesson we must also learn

Here is a precious and important lesson. What do you think the Lord Jesus wanted to teach his disciples? If you were the disciples, and the Lord Jesus looks out upon the world today and says to you and to me, “You feed them,” as indeed he is saying to us today, what do you say? This is the whole point. You would probably say, “Lord, I haven’t got anything to give them. You know that I haven’t got gifts, I have no talents, I can’t preach, I can’t do this, I can’t do that, I can’t do anything for that matter. How can you ask me to feed them?”

Think carefully on this: Do you think that the Lord Jesus only had compassion on that particular crowd of people? Was that crowd of people somehow better than any other crowd of people? Was that crowd of people more pitiful than any other crowd of people? Surely not. They were a crowd like any other crowd. Then if he had compassion on that crowd, would he not have compassion upon any crowd today? Or did he have compassion only on people in the First Century but not people in the Twentieth Century? And if he has compassion on these multitudes out there, don’t you think that he would also say to you and me, “I have compassion. You feed them.” And don’t you see that the lesson that the Lord Jesus is teaching those disciples speaks directly to us? It’s the same Lord Jesus, with the same compassion that God works in him upon the same needy crowds, speaking to his same disciples, I don’t mean we are exactly the same Twelve, but we are also disciples, and in that sense we are the same. He is going to say the same thing to us, as indeed he says to me, “You feed them.” And I’m going to say, “Lord, how am I going to feed them?”

We must learn the lesson. The Lord Jesus wanted to teach the twelve disciples the same lesson he wants to teach us today. What is the key to understanding this whole thing? Look at verse 14 again:

Let us look at this word “compassion.” He had compassion. He fed the 5,000 not because he wanted to show his tremendous power. The Bible tells us that he fed them for only one reason: he had compassion. He did not want to see the children crying for hunger, and have the stomachs of the grown-ups groaning. He had compas­sion; he was touched by their need. Jesus lives out the compassion of his God and Father, so he feels and sympathizes with our needs. If God’s Holy Spirit lives in us, we will also show forth God’s heart of compassion to others.

“Bowels of compassion”

This word, “compassion” translates a Greek word which is used mainly about the Lord Jesus in the New Testament. I touched on this point when I was preaching about the Prodigal Son where the word “compassion” also occurs. We are going to study how this word is used in the Greek. The word translated “compassion” comes from the word which means the innards, the inside of you, which does not sound very nice. And in fact, the Authorized Version sometimes translates it as “bowels”, “bowels of compassion” (1Jo. 3:17), which turns the one word into a whole phrase. The word in its literal sense means bowels. Bowels does not just refer to your digestive tract or intestines, but to all your inside, the innards. That may not sound nice but that’s not the point. It means all the insides of us have become the seat of some kind of emotion.

Even in English and also in Chinese we say, “Our heart is touched.” Physically, the heart is that muscle which is pumping blood inside of you. But when we use the word “heart,” it is now given a figurative meaning referring to the seat of your feelings or emotions. So when you speak of “heart,” you are not referring to the muscle pumping inside you, although that word certainly means that, but you mean your feelings. That is exactly what the Greek means. Instead of saying “heart,” it refers to all your insides, your bowels, and this means your compassion because it wants to emphasize that compas­sion is a feeling which is not superficial. It’s not associated with your skin or your hair which is on the surface but with deep feelings inside. In English, you even have a term like “gut feeling.” “Gut” means bowels and “gut feeling” means your deepest, innermost feeling about a matter or a person. So the Greek word for “bowels” is used to emphasize that deepest innermost feeling of love, concern and sympathy: compassion. Compassion comes from the inside of your being.

In fact, in one of the Apocryphal books called Baruch, for example, it is used of the seat of our life. Baruch 2:17 speaks of the bowels as the seat of your pneuma (spirit). In other words, the seat of life is in your innards.

In the book of 4 Maccabees, also an Apocryphal book, this word “compassion” or bowels speaks of a mother’s compassion for her seven sons, her indescribable sympathy as she saw them suffering while being tortured to death one by one, for refusal to deny their faith in God. Can you understand the feeling of a mother for her child being put to death? If you can, then you can understand this word, “compassion.” It’s hard for us to understand, isn’t it?

It is so important to understand compassion, because only so will we understand how God can make us to be a source of showers of blessing to others. It’s all tied up with our understanding this word “compassion.”

This is the feeling that God, who lives in the Lord Jesus, has for the crowds. Can you understand it? This is compassion of a father or a mother for the child. The compassion that God has for us is shown through the Lord Jesus, as he looked upon the crowds and saw them hungry. It’s a very strong word. It is very hard to describe compas­sion unless you have experienced this feeling.

Jesus desires his disciples to have his compassion

Now what is the Lord Jesus trying to teach his disciples in the words in verse 16? He had compassion upon the crowds, and said to his disciples, “You feed them.” Strange, if he has compassion on them, he should feed them, and yet he tells his disciples to feed them. That is the whole point of what he is trying to teach them. Can you see what he is saying? He is saying to them, “I want you to share my compassion upon this multitude, just as I share my Father and God’s compassion for them (Jo. 5:19). I want you to care for this crowd, but can you feel my compassion for them? If you can, I want you to share my burden to feed them.”

Here we touch at the very foundation of our Christian life. When have you ever felt compassion for a crowd? Have you ever felt compassion for a crowd? I doubt it, if you are like me. I confess to you that as a young Christian, I did not feel compassion for any person never mind a crowd. Compassion is not native to our soul because love is not native to our soul. We only care for ourselves because we are brought up to care for ourselves. When did you see the suffering of another person and were touched by that suffering? When did you ever weep for someone you didn’t know? I said someone you didn’t know because it is similar to a crowd. You must have the mind of Christ to be touched by the needs of a crowd. Without the mind of Christ, without the Holy Spirit of God, you would never be touched by compassion for any crowd, perhaps not even for an individual.

Are we bothered if we don’t have compassion?

In China, we have seen a lot of suffering, and we have been hardened by a lot of suffering. We don’t feel. If you have never been used to seeing beggars on the street, you might be touched by the sight of one, but not us. We are used to seeing beggars. In Shanghai, there were beggars here, there and everywhere on the streets. You are not touched by their need anymore. You don’t feel anything. Your heart has become hardened. I could walk through crowds of beggars, emaciated, dirty, their hair crawling with lice and fleas and so on, and I don’t feel anything! We have no compassion anymore. Our hearts have been hardened by the suffering and the need, and that is where the problem is. We are not touched by the feelings of Christ.

In those days in Palestine, it was rampant with beggars. People went to worship at the temple in Jerusalem every day, and if you went, you could not get in without going through a crowd of beggars at the front gate. All the beggars were waiting there for people who go into the temple to give them some charity. So if you lived in Palestine in those days, you would have been very used to seeing beggars, like us who lived in China in the old days. We didn’t get touched by them anymore. For some Europeans who had never seen beggars until they came to China, they were struck by the poverty and wretched­ness of these beggars at first. They were almost made to feel sick, not by compassion, but by a sense of revulsion and disgust to see people suffering like this. Compassion might be mixed a little in it, but I’m not sure how much compassion there was. But after a while, they also got used to it, they felt neither sickened nor a little compassion­ate anymore. This is the whole problem with us.

I spoke to a friend of mine who became a Christian, and he said to me, “I don’t seem to have any sense of compassion for those who are perishing out there, and that bothers me. I know I should be compassionate. I know I should be concerned that they are going into eternal damnation, but I don’t feel compassion.” Do you feel compassion? Does it grieve you that people perish? And that as the time ticks away every moment, people are dying and perishing? You will say, “We have heard missionaries getting us worked up about that.” The fact is the fact. They do perish. Does it affect us? Do you suddenly find to your astonishment that you don’t really have any compassion? Does it bother you? Let’s be honest. It doesn’t bother you.

It didn’t bother me either. Then I realized that I simply don’t have compassion. It doesn’t bother me. We have not become like God and like his Christ. It bothered them. If it did not bother God, would he have sent Christ to become the Lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world? If it did not bother Christ, would he have gone to Calvary to be nailed upon the tree for us? If it did not bother God and Christ, where would we be? But if it doesn’t bother us, where will the people in the world be? Will God send his angels to bring them to salvation since we don’t seem to be touched by their needs?

Let’s not go so far afield. Let us think about brothers and sisters in need in the church. Does it bother you that they might be having a hard time financially? So long as you don’t see, it’s out of your mind. Who worries? Does it bother you? Does somebody’s suffering bother you? If you are a nurse or a doctor, you have probably got so accustomed to seeing people suffer all day long, but you cannot get emotionally involved with people. Nurses are usually warned when they first go into training, not to get involved. The new nurses who come in really suffer! I know because we have a lot of new nurses almost in every church, and they share with me how much they suffered to see patients in their agony when they began training. However, as time went on, they got used to seeing so many people suffer. Do they still feel it? Not so much, maybe not at all.

Perhaps the first time you saw an operation and saw blood, you collapsed! You can just see it flow now. You might as well be looking at tomato juice for that matter. You are used to it. In other words, we learn to adjust and to harden our feelings. But why doesn’t it bother us that people perish? Is it because you don’t really believe they perish? Or if you do believe that they perish, why doesn’t it disturb you? Why doesn’t it disturb me?

I lack compassion, so God must deal with me

I am not going to preach at you, I preach at myself. I want to condemn myself first and foremost. I am disgusted with myself for my lack of compassion, I share with you honestly. Just last night, I was examining myself before the Lord God, and letting the Spirit of God examine me. I could only feel a sense of disgust with myself because of my utter lack of compassion. If we compare ourselves with the most hardened people, we may say that we are more compassionate than they. But I am not comparing myself with the hardened people, I have to compare myself with Jesus because my purpose is to become like him. That is God’s purpose for me, to be conformed to the image of his Son. And when I compare myself with him, I am almost in despair!

I have so little compassion! Perhaps it’s because in the past, my ambition was to be a military man, as some of you know. A military man must not have feelings. He must not allow his feelings to get the better of him. You don’t squirm when you pull the trigger and shoot down a man. That is part of your job. But the point simply is this: when you have built in this hardness—you know you have to be hard in a hard society, to fight for survival—you become “feelingless.” And I thought about myself. I thought for example, of my impatience. This point particularly bothers me. It shows me the symptom of my self. I don’t know about you, but I’m a very impatient person. I have had to fight with this all the time.

Let me illustrate what I mean. When I pray with someone, and that person prays too slowly, I tell you, I get very impatient, almost annoyed. There are some people who have a habit to pray very, very slowly. It takes them some two minutes to bring out the second word, and another two minutes the third word, and by that time, I am getting really impatient. I am saying to myself, “In the time this fellow takes to pray one prayer, I can pray three, four, five prayers! You are just wasting my time. Get on with your prayer. How long does it take you to think up the next sentence?” Now you can see what I’m like. It’s disgraceful! My impatience is disgusting! I share with you about it in my shame. After all, the Scripture says confess your sins to one another that you may be healed. (Jas. 5:16) I confess my sins. I don’t pretend to be better than anyone else.

Or take another example, some people speak very slowly by nature, and it gets me very impatient. I’m just thinking, “Get on with it! Do you want me to wait here all day for you to say what you want to say?” I am by nature impatient. I tend to speak fast, I tend to work fast, and it really gets my temperature up to see people doing things slowly, whether it’s doing things with their hands, speaking or whatever they do. I am exceedingly impatient. I have to say that sometimes it really irritates me. Then it came to me, “Why are you like this?” If someone is by nature slow, shouldn’t you be under­standing? You are made differently, so you tend to function differently. It doesn’t mean that because I function faster that I am better than anyone else. It is just my nature. Even today, I have to learn to slow down my pace when I speak.

This selfish, arrogant, impatient attitude really bothers me. I don’t have compassion. Maybe I’m a little bit better now in God’s grace, a little bit better, but I am still impatient. I simply have no patience. For example, I had no patience with people who are sick, no feeling for people in hospital. I had even less patience with people who kept telling me they were not well here and there. I just say, “You’re probably just silly. Pull yourself together.” I felt that what these people really need is to take hold of themselves and pull themselves together. What’s with all this feeling sick or pain here and there? Who worries about this? So God had to deal with me, and he is still dealing with me now so that I might learn to be a little more compassionate, feel a little for others.

I often say that studying medicine was of no interest to me whatsoever. I would never have considered it. When you study medicine, you spend all your life getting involved with the sick. I had no compassion on them. So God had to deal with me physically, and in every way, to break me down. And still, I confess to you, I have a long way to go. May the Lord God have mercy upon me!

Why I am so concerned about this, brothers and sisters, is because if God is ever going to use us, he has to make us compassionate first: “You feed them.” That is the point. As I look at this, I understand what the Lord Jesus is teaching his disciples. His disciples didn’t have compassion any more than you and I do. Jesus had to teach them compassion.

“Compassion” is used of the Lord Jesus five times

This word “compassion”—the Greek word for bowels—is used five times of the Lord Jesus:

First, Matthew 9:36 says, “when he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” Have you been in a football crowd? Or have you been in any crowd? I have been in many crowds, and those of you who are from Hong Kong will be very familiar with crowds. But have you ever felt, as you looked upon a crowd, that they were sheep without a shepherd? Has it ever touched you? It never touched me. I confess it has not touched me, at least not until recently.

What do you feel when you see a crowd? My reaction is a sense of almost wanting to get away from the madding crowd. All that a crowd brings is noise and dust, all negative things. You want to get away from a crowd. Why do you want to go on holiday? You want to go to a quiet place to get away from the crowd. But Jesus looked upon the crowd and his heart went out to them. May the Lord transform us so that when we look at a crowd, we don’t think, “Oh, this nuisance!” Rather, we look at them and say, “Where are they going? They are sheep without a shepherd! They are all going to perish! They are all dying!” Can we feel it? We can’t, can we? It’s so hard. It’s not native to our feeling.

The second time this word “compassion” is used is in the feeding of the 5,000 in Matthew 14:14, and the 4,000 in Matthew 15:32. Again, not only is he touched by the fact that the crowds of people are in the midst of going down the road to destruction, but he is also touched by their physical need – they have nothing to eat. It touched him. Perhaps we are touched by their spiritual needs, but are we touched by their physical need? I doubt it.

The third time is in Mark 1:41, where he has compassion upon a leper, of all people. Have you seen a leper? He looks disgusting. Some of us have been to the Leper Colony in Hong Kong. I went there too, and saw all these lepers. If you have been to a leper colony, do you remember your first reaction? My first reaction was almost wanting to throw up when I saw people without noses, having stumped hands, and sores and boils. You feel a sense of being sick to see a person’s face with no nose and rotting flesh. Did you feel compas­sion? Not me. If you did, you are much better than I am. But Jesus looked upon this leper with his decaying flesh, and had compassion. He even touched the leper. He said, “Be clean. Be healed.”

The fourth instance in which he had compassion is for two blind men. Matthew 20:34. Have you seen blind people? We have seen lots of blind people in the East. Again, it is a sense of revulsion when you see their white eye.

The fifth instance is in Luke 7:11, where he had compassion on the widow of Nain who lost her son. When you talk to someone who has lost a son, a daughter, a husband, or a wife, have you ever felt embar­rassed because you don’t really know what to say to them? You are struck by awkwardness rather than compassion. You are thinking of yourself, you are not thinking about them. You don’t know how to behave in relation to that person. You don’t know what to say to that person. That is the whole point.

Why don’t we have compassion? It’s because we think of ourselves – our feelings, our reactions. We don’t think about that person, that person’s need and suffering. If only we could forget ourselves and feel for that other person. The reason we dislike crowds—with some exceptions—is because we don’t enjoy noise or being jostled. We’re thinking of our own comfort. Naturally, we don’t like crowds when we think about ourselves. If we could only forget about ourselves, our being jostled, the heat, the noise. If we could only be saved from ourselves, and think of them.

That is the key factor that the Lord Jesus wanted to teach his disciples. He knew that they did not have compassion. He knew that they were used to seeing blind people, beggars and hungry people. Like us, they were used to all this. But he changed them until that hardness could be taken away, so they could feel the needs of the people and identify with them.

Being compassionate is not being sentimental

Mind you, the Lord Jesus was not being sentimental. Being compassionate is not being sentimental. That is very different. You can get sentimental about something for a while, but sentimentality has the remarkable feature of evanescence, that is, the feeling fades away. Compassion on the other hand, grows deeper and deeper as time goes on. You have watched a movie, and what happened when you saw some suffering in the movie? Your tears came down. Why did you weep? When you asked yourself, was it compassion? It’s not likely. You were really thinking of what if that happened to you. You were not thinking about that person. Sentimentality is really putting that person’s feeling into your own life situation: what would happen if that happened to me? You didn’t weep for that person but for yourself, if that happened to you. Isn’t that so? It’s certainly so with me. Sometimes, I see something on the screen and I weep, and I realize it was pure sentimentality because it was born of selfishness in the first place. I was thinking, if that were me losing my daughter, and my tears came down. I wasn’t worried about him losing his daughter. I was concerned about me losing my daughter.

Or if you see someone suffering and you weep, it’s because you think: “If I were there, what a terrible situation that would be!” and your tears come down. You are thinking about your suffering. That is sentimentality. That is not compassion. Compassion is when you forget yourself, your feelings, and you go out to them thinking about them, when you don’t weep for yourself but for them. When did you ever weep for other people?

Jesus wants his disciples, and us to give the bread and water of life

That is the reason why you will understand the answer to the question I asked at the beginning. When God doesn’t bless your five loaves and two fish and use it to feed the multitudes, is it because you don’t have five loaves and two fish? Or is it because you are unwilling to offer those five loaves and two fish? You will say, “No, I am honestly willing to offer them.” Then why doesn’t he bless? The answer is simply this: before he can use us, He must make us think like himself. The prophet said,

How can God let his power work through us when we don’t even have the feeling that Jesus feels for God’s people?

God’s power would stop at us. We would be the obstacle to the outflowing of that power. We would be the closed taps. The reservoir is there but the tap is turned off. What turns on the tap, or what allows us to connect with those people is the compassion within our hearts. Once we connect, the power will flow through. Don’t you think the Lord Jesus knew very well that his disciples had no way of feeding the 5,000? Of course, he knew. The point was he wanted to feed the 5,000 through them, so they needed to unlock their hearts so that God’s compassion could flow through them to the people.

Consider this analogy: the waters of life are within reach; the vast reservoir of God’s salvation is accessible. Yet, why are people not getting it? Isn’t it because you and I are turned off? If we were turned on, that water would flow out to them. But it’s not flowing to them. Is it because the reservoir is not there? You know it’s there. Then why isn’t it reaching them? Because you and I are turned off. All the taps are turned off, so where would the people get the water from?

We only have to be a tap; we don’t have to be a reservoir. God is that reservoir. God in his amazing grace is available to the crowds, but we are turned off. So the people have no water. That is what Jesus wanted to teach his disciples. He is saying to them, “Do you under­stand that I will not always be here to attend to the needs of these crowds? But you will be here. You must carry on the work. You must feed the crowds. I’m going to the cross. I’m going to open the gates of heaven for these crowds. I’m going to let the water of life flow out from the temple of heaven. I won’t be here anymore, but you will. You must give them the water of life, and the bread of life. Who is going to give to them if you don’t?”

The same is true today. God’s salvation is available. It is here to feed the starving multitudes out there. But what is happening? Salvation stops with you, and me. God forbid! What do the starving multitudes get? They have nothing because we gave them nothing. What do we say to them? We say, “Lord, it’s late now. Let them go home. They can go and buy their own food. Let them find some way to satisfy their needs.” Isn’t that what you and I are saying now? We say, “Let them go. They can find somewhere to satisfy their need. There are a lot of churches out there peddling all sorts of religion. If they need religion, they can go to the churches and get what they need. If they don’t go, that’s their fault.” Isn’t that the way we think? Therefore, we don’t have compassion. We couldn’t care less. The water stops here.

Surely, God can multiply your “five loaves and two fish,” your little gifts, but nothing happens. At the end of your life, your “five loaves and two fish” will still be with you. You will return to the Lord Jesus that one pound he gave you and say, “Lord, you gave me one pound, here it is. You can have it again. I’ve kept it safe in this napkin.” (Lk. 19:20)

I plead that we may understand what the Lord Jesus wanted to teach his disciples, and he also wants to teach us that. When I think that behind me are the waters of eternal life, God forbid that I should be the tap that is turned off, so that this water doesn’t reach others. I have the water in me, but it doesn’t reach others. I see Christians boasting to themselves saying, “I’m saved. I’ve got God’s Holy Spirit in me. I’ve got the water of eternal life in me.” The tap certainly has the water in it, but is it in the tap just so that the tap can boast about the water it has? Or is the tap there to be a channel of that water to others?

We have been brought up on a doctrine of salvation which basically teaches us to enjoy our own salvation, to just be saved. Then apparently, you have to have “a special call” as far as preaching the gospel to save others is concerned. What call do you need? The one call is the call of compassion. If you had any compassion at all, you wouldn’t be saying, “I’m waiting for some call.” What call do you need? The call has already been given that we have compassion on the perishing multitudes.

Living water flows out of our innermost being if you believe in Jesus

I want to turn to John 7:37-38:

The Lord Jesus said, “If you believe in me, out of your heart shall flow rivers of living water.” Now the word translated as “heart” in the English Standard Version [ESV] is a word which means innards, just like the word “compassion.” And this is the reason why I want to bring in this verse. It is a different but synonymous Greek word, and so the Authorized Version [AV] has translated the word, “out of your belly will come rivers of living water.” The word is “belly,” or “innermost being” in the New American Standard Version [NAS] is correct. It is synonymous with the word translated “compassion.”

I link these two words for this reason. When the Lord Jesus says, “Whoever believes in me, out of his innermost being, the seat of com­passion, will flow rivers of living water,” not just a few streams or drops. Now “whoever believes in me” applies to every Christian, not only to preachers. I would like you to understand this: We are not saved just so that we can get to heaven. We are saved to do a job in this world here and now. What job? To be rivers of living water! This is the reason why I am dealing with this passage here today.

If you are a Christian, why is living water not flowing out of you?

Why are Christians not rivers of living water? Are you functioning as a fountain of living water? If not, we can ask one of two questions. The first is: Are you a Christian or not? It says, “Whoever believes in me,” and that simply means a Christian. So are you a Christian or not? If you are a Christian, the second question is: Why is the water not flowing out of you? So either you are not a Christian—and that is a very serious matter—or you are a Christian, and the water that must be in you must flow from you now, and not some time in the future when there are no more deserts in the new heaven and the new earth. It is the desert that needs the water. It is the people who thirst here and now. May God grant that every Christian is a fountain of living water!

In these days of heat, how much we need water both to wash with and to drink! Life is sustained by this water, and I am simply distressed that the water doesn’t flow from me as it ought to; it doesn’t flow from Christians as it ought to. And the reason is this: the gospel may have reached our head but it hasn’t reached our heart, our innards – our bowels, kidneys, lungs, liver. No matter how convinced we may feel we believe, our faith has not permeated into the depth of our being! I suspect that is the problem of our Christianity today. Christianity has convinced us intellectually. We are “intellec­tual Christians” today. Christianity has got to our brain, not to the depth of our being, because if it had, then rivers would flow from the innermost being. It has not conquered us. Has it conquered you in the depth of your being? Has it really? Let God search your heart today!

If you are simply an “intellectual Christian,” you are not going to survive that long, or you are just going to be an intellectual Christian all your life. You can talk “intellectual Christianity,” you say and do all the right things, but it hasn’t got you in the depth of your being. However, when the Spirit of God makes you a true Christian, Christianity will get right into the depth of your being, right through your heart, into your belly, your innards. When it gets you there, and when it gets me evermore deeply there, the rivers will begin to flow.

Compassion brings having wisdom in human relationships

As we close, we need to remember one thing: When your compassion begins to flow at first, it may be a very small trickle. All rivers start in a very small way, not as mighty torrents. You will be surprised when you go up to the source of a great river, how small a little stream it is. But thank God for that little stream!

One day, you are going to be able to feel a little compassion for someone in your family. It is surprising, but I have discovered that sometimes, compassion is very lacking between a husband and wife. Do you know that? Do you know why so many marriages break down? It’s because there is no compassion. The husband doesn’t feel for the wife, and the wife doesn’t feel for the husband. Their love was never so deep as to go into the innards, into the depth of their being. There is no compassion, so the marriage falls apart. Do you have compassion for your husband? Or if you are a husband, do you have compassion for your wife? Do you really? Every time you show irritation, impatience, doesn’t it show that your compassion is no longer there?

What about our compassion for our children? Both under-disciplining or over-disciplining is a lack of compassion. When you don’t discipline your child, you don’t have compassion upon him or her. Don’t you know that by disciplining your child, you will prevent him or her from making mistakes, and so suffering in the future? Under-disciplining is a lack of compassion. When you over-discipline and constantly tell your child, “Don’t do this; don’t do that; don’t do anything,” it’s as if you’re chaining them to the wall. Then your child cannot spill the milk, or spill your tea over your dress, or knock over the cheese. Your child would be very safe. Some people want their children never to do anything. Just sit still, keep their mouths, and you will have peace. The ideal child would have their hands handcuffed at the back, and a plaster on the mouth!

That is not compassion. You don’t feel for the needs of that child, and that child knows that you don’t have compassion on him or her. Do you know what happens as a result? They disobey you. A lot of disobedience on the part of the children is because they know that their parents don’t understand them. Their parents don’t have compassion on their needs.

Yet, don’t make the other mistake to think that compassion means you never discipline the child. That is not compassion either, because if you don’t discipline the child, the child will do all the wrong things and hurt himself or herself even more badly in the future. If everything you did were governed by compassion, then everything you did would be governed by wisdom.

In the church, you also have to exercise church discipline. As teachers, we have to exercise discipline out of compassion. It hurts us, but we understand that without discipline, we risk causing even greater harm to the individual. Therefore you act in wisdom and the right motive.

I am concerned about Christian families because I have seen many families where the husband and wife have no more compassion on one another, and the marriage is tottering and going to break up. However, when God speaks to us and touches us at the depth of our being, he transforms our marriage relationship, our relationship with our children, and our relationship with our friends. He transforms everything.

It is vital to remember: The obstacle preventing us from becoming a channel of blessing to those who are perishing is our lack of compassion.

Become the streams of living water, beginning with compassion

I hope you can see the importance of this message today. If we are ever going to become channels of blessing for God, what we need above all things is to become like Christ, who lets God’s compassion flow through him. Let God’s Holy Spirit so touch us, and transform us in our thinking that when we go out into the world, we begin to have compassion. I thank God that I do begin to have compassion, but it distresses me that I have such a long way to go. I am not even in the picture when compared with the Lord Jesus. But I thank God that there is some small stream of compassion flowing from my heart. It’s not enough, but it’s a beginning.

It’s like the streams of living water flowing out of the temple in Ezekiel chapter 47, which is the picture behind the words of John 7:38. At the beginning, it flows rather shallowly, maybe only ankle-deep or knee-deep, but as time goes on, it gets deeper and deeper. We thank God for that. I pray that God will somehow speak to each one of us and transform us; that he will save us from ourselves so that we might truly become the rivers of living water in this generation.