10 When you make a loan of any kind to your neighbor, do not go into their house to get what is offered to you as a pledge. 11 Stay outside and let the neighbor to whom you are making the loan bring the pledge out to you. 12 If the neighbor is poor, do not go to sleep with their pledge in your possession. 13 Return their cloak by sunset so that your neighbor may sleep in it. Then they will thank you, and it will be regarded as a righteous act in the sight of the Lord your God.
14 Do not take advantage of a hired worker who is poor and needy, whether that worker is a fellow Israelite or a foreigner residing in one of your towns. 15 Pay them their wages each day before sunset, because they are poor and are counting on it. Otherwise they may cry to the Lord against you, and you will be guilty of sin.
16 Parents are not to be put to death for their children, nor children put to death for their parents; each will die for their own sin.
17 Do not deprive the foreigner or the fatherless of justice, or take the cloak of the widow as a pledge. 18 Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you from there. That is why I command you to do this.
19 When you are harvesting in your field and you overlook a sheaf, do not go back to get it. Leave it for the foreigner, the fatherless and the widow, so that the Lord your God may bless you in all the work of your hands.
20 When you beat the olives from your trees, do not go over the branches a second time. Leave what remains for the foreigner, the fatherless and the widow.
21 When you harvest the grapes in your vineyard, do not go over the vines again. Leave what remains for the foreigner, the fatherless and the widow.
When our daughter was just a baby we had a pretty small house where you could look in all the rooms from the kitchen. During the summer we had this big old exhaust fan on the floor in the kitchen, which was really the only way to suck some air through the house.
Well, our daughter thought this fan was kind of intriguing, she thought it would be neat to explore. I had no idea how attracted she was going to be to it. I walked into the kitchen one day and here she is toddling toward that fan with her hand fully extended.
She wanted to put her fingers in the fan! Guess what I didn’t say – “oh go ahead honey, I love you. No I said, “No!” She tried again a few minutes later. She really wanted to do this. So I kind of spanked her on the bottom and said, “No, no! Don’t do that.”
Now if I tried to explain it to this little toddler, she wouldn’t have understood it at all. But I had to stop her. I knew what would happen if she went ahead with it.
Can’t you imagine what she would’ve said, if she could’ve said, “Haven’t you heard of love? If you love me, you’ll let me do what I really want to do.” No, not in this case.
Today I think she’s very glad I didn’t think that was love. I’m Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about “Cruel Compassion.”
Our word for today from the Word of God, we’re in the book of Lamentations. And what’s being lamented is the fall of God’s people and the fall of God’s city, Jerusalem.
Here’s a couple things that Jeremiah says. He’s talking about Jerusalem, “She was once queen among the provinces and is now become a slave, all because of their sin and God’s resulting judgment.”
He goes on to say that, “She herself groans and turns away.” It’s just a time of sadness and shame for God’s people. It’s a broken time. Well, as this book identifies where the blame ultimately lay, it gets to our word for today from the Word of God.
And in many ways it identifies some of the mess that we’re in in our world today as well. It says in Lamentations 2:14, “The visions of your prophets were false and worthless. They did not expose your sin to ward off your captivity. The oracles they gave you were false and misleading.”
There’s a lot of power in those words because it’s saying that the people who knew you were sinning didn’t do anything to expose the wrongness, the sinfulness of it.
And as a result, they didn’t tell you the consequences of staying on that road. So they didn’t ward off their captivity. Those people back then didn’t do any favor to those people by not telling them where God says those actions would take them.
In other words, you wanted to stick your fingers in the fan and they didn’t stop you. Now, they maybe didn’t want to judge anybody. They wanted to be tolerant and loving, and not condemning.
That’s nice. But then they let them walk right into the blades of God’s judgment. See, it’s not loving to not let people see where their sin will take them.
To be non-condemning and loving doesn’t mean that we don’t tell them what God says the consequences will be. To live and let live when it comes to sin is not really compassion.
I was told by a couple of men who used to live in a homosexual lifestyle and felt that Christ had given them the power to change and move on from that, they were commenting on people who say, “you know, I think we should just accept them and let them be themselves.”
And they said “Ron, that’s not compassion.” They said “We call that cruel compassion.” It’s letting them march right into captivity.
Well listen, whether it’s sexual sin, or divorce, or dishonesty, or anger, or “justifiable bitterness,” if we leave it unconfronted, unchallenged, without telling them the consequences and what God says he must judge, it’s not compassion.
It’s letting a person take a drink you know is laced with poison. Sin makes people slaves. It destroys families, it destroys friendships. It promises to make you feel better about yourself and leaves you feeling worthless, sometimes even suicidal.
Sin cuts people off from each other, cuts them off from God. Compassion is doing everything you can to warn them of the wages of sin. We’ve got to love people enough to kindly, gently, lovingly tell them the truth.
Love will always stand in the way of someone who is about to stick their fingers in the fan. By Ron Hutchcraft
