We are about to turn to a new chapter of our lives, and it seems as time flows faster every year! I can see that many of you are nodding your heads. This time of the year is always a full of disappointment and excitement for me.
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“Then the Lord said to me, ‘Do not pray for the well-being of this people. Although they fast, I will not listen to their cry; though they offer burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them. Instead, I will destroy them with the sword, famine and plague” (Jer. 14:10-11).
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“But this is what I commanded them, saying, ‘Obey My voice, and I will be your God, and you will be My people; and you will walk in all the way which I command you, that it may be well with you.’ 24 Yet they did not obey or incline their ear, but walked in their own counsels and in the stubbornness of their evil heart, and went backward and not forward…But they did not listen to me or pay attention. They were stiff-necked and did more evil than their ancestors” (Jeremiah 7:23-24, 26).
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Even though Peter was the leader of the disciples of Jesus and the first pope of the Catholic Church, and wrote two letters of the NT, he still did not receive the same respect as Paul did. This may be because he was an uneducated fisherman, had hot temper, cutting an ear of a man who tried to arrest Jesus, and denied Jesus three times. Maybe, it was because Jesus once rebuked the devil out of Peter. Nevertheless, Peter had intimate relationship with Jesus, spending three years with him, eating with him, seeing the actual miracles with his own eyes, and being taught and loved by his Master.
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The world is filled with too many ideas and too much information, too many and too much to crowd and confuse our Christian values. Sometimes, what the Bible teaches us about Christian principles are so intricately related to the ideas of the world that it requires our careful attention and examination to untangle them.
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The world praises the value of compassion, but not enough. Christian communities do believe in the value and encourage practicing compassion in our lives, but not often as God taught us through the Scriptures and not as He demonstrated it in action. Believers hear about those great achievements of pastors building mega-churches, of missionaries traveling around the world, of Christian writers publishing best-selling books, and of business leaders obtaining financial success, but the significance of compassion and the examples of individuals who practice compassion everyday became too shabby to be decorated on the first page of Christian magazines and even cliché to be preached and celebrated on Sunday church pulpits.
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