God empathises with us so we can have empathy for others

In willingly serving others for their sake and not our own, we must necessarily have partaken in a process of having received God’s empathy.

We have called this salvation, but not all who have received Christ have journeyed this far in having received God’s empathy. How gracious is God that salvation is offered to all, and by our mere acceptance God bequeaths it?

God’s love is so immeasurable, salvation itself is a depth of grace unfathomable.

God’s empathy is a special portion of grace the Spirit has for each of us, but the gift cannot be received without having gone deep in terms of how deeply we are loved and how deeply God wants to speak into our experience and our perceptions of our experience.

In a word, it’s healing. And by healing, I mean to truly understand—and live into—the fullness of grace whereby we experience without any doubt just how much God understands and accepts us unconditionally.

This healing manifests itself in us not being able not to love others.

But God will only take us as deep as we are prepared to let our Lord take us.

The good news is that the more we trust, the deeper into empathy we will be taken, and the reward seems equal with the level we have plumbed our grief. True, we need to go into the vestiges of our pain to receive this healing of God’s almighty empathy for each one of us.

What God wants to give us is unimaginably wonderful. We could hardly conceive it. It’s what we’ve always wanted. It’s all we’ve ever needed. It’s his empathy for us. It’s his understanding. In all its radiant perfection.

Until we live in this shimmering reality, that we have God’s unconditional acceptance (which is the expression of his unconditional love) we miss what our Lord has to give us.

Once we truly understand how much empathy God has for us, we begin to have empathy for ourselves, and then we’re compelled to pay it forward into others’ lives.

I could never love those I love well until I understood how well God loves me.

We can’t love those we love well,
until we understand how well God loves us.

I could never love someone who was unlovable, until I realised how lovable God finds me.

These are primal understandings. We’re incapable of being empathetic until we recognise our own need of empathy. And once that empathy fully absorbs into us, once we begin living out of that reality, we then truly do have the keys to the Kingdom. We then see others through our own eyes, and it hurts us when others hurt. When others hurt, we hurt. Then we fulfil the Golden Rule: without effort, we treat others as we would be treated.