Yesterday’s encouragement to strive to be as compassionate as Christ may have been hard to take. Some days, we feel like we are as far away from the perfection of Jesus as we have ever been. How can we become more Christ-like when we get so annoyed with everybody all the time?
I’ve always wondered why Jesus called Himself the Son of Man so often, instead of the Son of God. All of us humans, of course, just want confirmation that He is God. But for Jesus, who was in heaven all up to this point, being the Son of God was assumed. The thing that was different about Him - the process He was about to go through - was all about Him being the Son of Man - a human. The demons and angels knew all along He was the Son of God. The new, amazing thing God was surprising them with, was Jesus becoming a Son of Man! Of course, then, that was what He called Himself at this time in history. Being a Son of Man was what His whole time on earth, as a man, was all about!
He came to earth to experience life as we do, so that He could demonstrate His great compassion towards us. He knows what it’s like being a human. He knows how difficult some people can be to love. He knows how difficult we can be to love. But He gives us His compassion anyway, and gently, lovingly, shows us the way to be compassionate ourselves.
For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin.
Hebrews 4:15
Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others. In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross!
Philippians 2:3-8