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The Emotional Life of Jesus | Compassion

March 9, 2025
Matthew 9:35-38

³⁵And Jesus went throughout all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction. ³⁶When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. ³⁷Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; ³⁸therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.”

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Purpose

To discover and experience Jesus Christ in our midst

To cultivate mutually encouraging relationships

To participate in God’s mission to the world 

Opening Prayer

Lord Jesus Christ, for our sake you fasted forty days and forty nights: Give us grace to use such abstinence that, our flesh being subdued by the spirit, we may always obey your will in righteousness and true holiness, to your honor and glory; for you live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, forevermore. Amen.

Responsive Prayer — Psalm 103

The Lord is merciful and gracious,

    Slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.

He will not always chide,

    Nor will he keep his anger forever.

He does not deal with us according to our sins,

    Nor repay us according to our iniquities.

For as high as the heavens are above the earth,

    So great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him;

As far as the east is from the west,

    So far does he remove our transgressions from us.

As a father shows compassion to his children,

   So the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him.

Summary and Connection

In his essay “The Emotional Life of Our Lord,” B. B. Warfield wrote, “It belongs to the truth of our Lord’s humanity that he was subject to all sinless human emotions.” The essay presents Jesus as a person who has feelings and who can empathize with us, but also as a complete and perfect man, different from all other human beings. Living during the time of modernism and theological liberalism, Warfield grounds his arguments on the authority of the Scriptures and also clearly affirms the deity of Jesus. Sinclair Ferguson calls this “the work that has left the deepest impression on me” and “the hidden jewel of his writings.” As we learn the different emotions of Christ, we will increase in our understanding and appreciation of his work — from the incarnation to the cross. It is in this Jesus, who experienced the complete range of human emotion, that we find the salvation and hope of our humanity. We’re in a new sermon series called The Emotional Life of Jesus, and today we’ll look at Jesus’ emotion of compassion.

Discussion Questions

1. Looking at the Bible

Observation: Read the passage privately. What does the text say? What is the theme of this passage? Do you notice any keywords?

• Draw your attention to the way Matthew describes Jesus. What are some things you notice?
  

2. Looking at Jesus

At Central we believe that all of Scripture points to Jesus. In other words, Jesus is the theological center of the Bible. Every passage not only points to Jesus, but the grand narrative of the Bible also finds its fulfillment in the person and work of Jesus.

• How do we envision Jesus' personality and countenance when we think of him?
• How do we picture Jesus' facial expression toward us? Is he frowning or smiling when he is looking at us?

3. Looking at Our Hearts

• What do our answers from the previous section reveal about our hearts? 

4. Looking at Our World

• How does Jesus’ compassion affect his actions? How do right emotions lead to right actions?

Sending

• View Study Guide Notes

  Question 1: Verse 35 is Matthew’s summary of Jesus’ ministry: He taught people, proclaimed the gospel, and healed the sick. It aligns almost word-for-word with his earlier summary in 4:23. Frederick Bruner, in his Matthew commentary, describes these verses as the parentheses embracing the material between chapters 5 and 9 — Jesus’ ministry of teaching, preaching, and healing. Jesus’ compassion in verse 36 will be dealt with below. In verses 37 and 38, it is encouraging to note that Jesus also sees the work of the ministry as overwhelming. There is much to be done, but the workers are few. The Son of God’s approach to solving this issue is noteworthy: prayer. He tells his disciples to pray to the “Lord of the Harvest,” reminding them that mission and ministry are primarily God’s work and belong under his sovereignty. We can often become “too busy” with ministry for prayer, but Jesus reminds us again that the most effective solution is prayer.

  Question 2: God described himself to Moses as the “compassionate and gracious God” (Exodus 34:6). The Hebrew word for compassionate is rakhum, which stems from the word for womb, rekhem. Emotion is centered on the human’s stomach, and it’s related to how a mother feels for her child. God says to Israel, “Can a woman forget her nursing child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you” (Isaiah 49:15).

  In the New Testament, Jesus the Son of God is also described most frequently as “moved with compassion.” The Greek word for compassion is splagchnizomai, which is derived from the word splagchnon, meaning “inward parts” or “entrails.” It is literally a gut-turning, strong emotional response. In today’s passage, Jesus’ compassion isn’t due to the people’s faithlessness or a physical sickness but rather because they are “harassed and helpless,” unable to rescue themselves from their spiritual oppression. Jesus is the good shepherd, “who lays down his life for the sheep” (John 10:11) and who leaves the ninety-nine to seek the one lost sheep (Luke 15:3-7).

  Question 3: How we picture Jesus or how we picture God is crucial to our Christian life. A. W. Tozer said in his book “The Knowledge of the Holy,” “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.” What were some of the thoughts shared in your discussions? Did you picture him disappointed or happy? Indifferent or maybe even angry? Does his face say, “Get your act together!” or “If only you could do a little more for me!” In their book “The Gospel-Centered Life,” Bob Thune and Will Walker write:

  If you imagined God as anything but satisfied because of what Jesus has done for you, you have fallen into a performance mindset. Because the gospel truth is that in Christ, God is deeply satisfied with you…But when we fail to root our identity in what Jesus has done for us, we slip into performance-driven Christianity. We imagine that if we were “better Christians,” God would approve of us more fully.

  They go on to write that such misunderstanding of God actually minimizes his love, his holiness, and the gospel. When we rightly understand how Jesus feels when he sees us, we can boldly “draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (Hebrews 4:16).

  Question 4: Numerous times throughout the Gospels, Jesus was “moved with compassion” and then acted accordingly (feeding the multitude, healing the sick, teaching the crowd, etc.). Warfield writes:

  The divine mercy has been defined as that essential perfection in God whereby he pities and relieves the miseries of his creatures: it includes, that is to say, the two parts of an internal movement of pity and an external act of beneficence.

  Jesus’ compassion fulfilled itself in the outward actions; his emotion led to his actions. The Bible repeatedly teaches that right faith and doctrine (orthodoxy) will produce right actions (orthopraxy). In James 2:14-26, it talks about how faith without good works is dead, and in Titus 3:8, Paul writes, “The saying is trustworthy, and I want you to insist on these things, so that those who have believed in God may be careful to devote themselves to good works.” Sinclair Ferguson said this is the dynamic of the gospel: Knowing leads to being, and being leads to doing. Through our text today, as Warfield points out, we also learn that right emotions (orthopathy) is important. Tish Harrison Warren, an Anglican priest, wrote:

  In the same way, you can’t have orthopraxy without orthopathy. If people seek biblically motivated action by, say, caring for the poor or advocating for justice, but they do so without the posture of Jesus, then orthopraxy is lost amid arrogance, legalism, or self-righteous political posturing…Taking on the disposition of Jesus isn’t something we can easily control, manage, or produce on our own. We need the transformation of God. We need the profound healing of Christ. And we need the mysterious leading of the Holy Spirit to help us embody Christian wholeness in its entirety: orthodoxy, orthopraxy, and orthopathy.