Read: Hebrews 4:14-16
Waking up for school, doing chores, completing homework, and getting off the screen are common points of contention in many households, including mine. Pastors’ families are truly just like any other family.
And pastor parents are just like any other parent. We also get upset and frustrated when our kids act up or misbehave. But we must understand that those moments are just consistent with normal and healthy human development. We were young once, too, and we did not always do our chores. The truth is, maturity comes with age.
In other words, we loving and responsible adults should be able to relate with the younger ones. Our love and care for them and their predicament’s relatability should enable us to be patient, forgiving, and empathizing adults toward them.
Christ is like that loving and empathizing adult to us. He is patiently loving and caring for us in spite of our many failures and shortcomings. This is because He has been in our human shoes.
Who, being in very nature God,did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made Himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness, and being found in appearance as a man… (Philippians 2:6-8, NIV).
Christ, because of His self-emptying, is familiar with the entire range of human experiences and realities. He got upset and really mad (turning over tables in the temple), he mourned over the death of His friend Lazarus, he got exhausted and hungry, and He was tempted, too like us. The only difference is that Christ did not sin in all of this. … But we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet He did not sin (Hebrews 4:15.) Indeed, He had been there, but did not do that.
Through His incarnation, therefore, Christ is able to identify with everything we go through in this life. Literally everything. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses… Hebrews 4:15 (NIV).
We all know why we trust those that we trust, why they are our confidantes and sounding boards, why they know our secrets. It is because they are able to sympathize with and empathize with us. To sympathize is to understand someone else’s suffering, and to empathize is to experience someone else’s feelings.
Christ is able to sympathize and empathize with us. Therefore, He is our perfect mediator before God the Father (1 Timothy 2:5). He knows our needs and desires, our emotional and physical pains, and our struggles with weaknesses and temptations. He may not always agree with us, that is, in our sinful tendencies, but He understands. And because He understands, He is patient and longsuffering with us.
We should then trust, love, and appreciate Christ. We should make us run to Him when we feel lost and discouraged. We should come to Him in prayer and let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence. The song, What A Friend We Have In Jesus, captures perfectly who He is to us.
You have a friend in the Lord Jesus Christ, in fact, a best friend. You can always come to Him. So don’t despair in this life. You have a sure, unfailing lifeline in our Savior.
Reflect:
Think about your service to God. In what way or ways have you experienced God’s patience and long suffering?
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