Pastor Steve continues his sermon series on "The Good Life" with this message on empathy. But why empathy? In recent years, it feels like our culture's use of this word has become somewhat careless, and our engagement with it as an idea or position has suffered and weakened. But empathy has a strong, divine lineage—God directly engaged with our human experience through the person of Jesus Christ, and so much of Christ's own ministry was grounded in empathy, in his ability to enter the perspectives and deeply subjective emotional experiences of "the other." When we enter into that same space with those around us who suffer, struggle, grieve, and fear, when we engage with them as bearers of the divine image, even the most mundane of exchanges can make all the difference for them.
