I love being right. 

As believers, I think most of us genuinely want to get things right.

We want to know what scripture says. We want to embrace truth rather than simply conform to what is easiest or most culturally acceptable. We want to name what is good as good, and what is contrary to God’s purposes as such.

That instinct is necessary for faithful discipleship.

However, in recent years I have wondered whether asking, “What do I believe about this?” is sufficient on its own.  

What if instead I were to ask, “What is this conviction doing to my heart toward the people on the other side of it?”

You see, I have found that the way we hold our beliefs shapes the way we see other people, particularly those whose lives seem to contradict our own.

I can be convinced someone is wrong and stop being curious about who they are.

I can defend something true and still become proud.

I can disagree deeply with someone’s choices while, almost imperceptibly, beginning to see the issue before I see the person.

Scripture never asks us to abandon discernment, but neither does it give us permission to let discernment become contempt. It is possible to be right about an issue and still be deeply wrong in what that issue has trained our hearts to feel about people.

Being right isn’t the same as being loving.

In 1 Corinthians 8, Paul addresses a disagreement over food sacrificed to idols. Some believers understood an idol had no real divine power, and that there was only one true God. Paul largely affirms what they know. What concerns him is what their knowledge is producing. He addresses this in 1 Corinthians 8:1, declaring, “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up…”

The word translated to “puffs up” is phusioō—to inflate or swell. Meaning, knowledge without love can enlarge our confidence in what we know while shrinking our attention to the person in front of us. Love, however, “builds up.” The Greek verb oikodomeō comes from the language of building or constructing. Knowledge can inflate the self; love builds something beyond it.

The Corinthians understood their freedom, but some exercised it without considering another believer’s conscience. Paul warns that insisting on what they had the right to do could wound someone for whom Christ died. By verse 12, he calls this sinning against Christ Himself.

Paul is not asking Christians to become less discerning. He is insisting that knowledge remain accountable to love.

In a culture where sarcasm is easy, mockery is shareable, and dismissiveness can masquerade as confidence, we can become so invested in exposing the weakness of another position that we stop noticing what our responses are doing to our own hearts.

No disagreement erases another person’s God-given dignity.

James approaches the issue from another direction:

“With the tongue we praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse human beings, who have been made in God’s likeness… My brothers and sisters, this should not be” (James 3:9–10).

James grounds the dignity of the person on the receiving end in something more fundamental than agreement: they bear the likeness of God. Before I know another person’s politics, theology, morality, or choices, Scripture tells me something more foundational: they are made in the likeness of their Creator.

Disagreement does not erase that.

Paul identifies a related danger in Romans 14, where believers disagreed over food and sacred days. He warns against two temptations: judging and despising. To despise is to treat someone as beneath consideration—to allow our assessment of a position to quietly become an assessment of a person’s worth.

Discernment says, “I believe this is wrong.” Then requires us to investigate and prove that it is wrong.

Contempt says, “Because you are wrong, I no longer need to take you seriously as a person.”

Our modern categories make that surprisingly easy: The left. The right. Evangelicals. Progressives. Pro-life. Pro-choice. Deconstructionists. Fundamentalists. People like that. 

Labels can describe real differences. They can also create enough distance that we respond to a category instead of encountering a person. Categories do not have histories, families, fears, or grief. People do.

Enemy-love requires us to hold our categories loosely enough that they never become larger in our vision than the image of God in the person behind them.

The heart of Jesus moves toward people with compassion.

Ultimately, I come back to Jesus.

In Matthew 9:35, we find Jesus moving through towns and villages, teaching, proclaiming the kingdom, and healing. He is among the people—seeing their needs, encountering their suffering, and meeting them with compassion.

Matthew writes in verse 36: “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” The word for compassion here is visceral, rooted in language for the inward parts of the body. Jesus does not merely recognize need. What He sees moves Him deeply.

Matthew describes the crowds as “harassed and helpless”—worn down, troubled, cast down. Jesus never lacks moral clarity, and yet their brokenness does not provoke contempt.

It evokes compassion.

Matthew adds that they are “like sheep without a shepherd,” echoing Ezekiel 34, where failed shepherds are condemned and God promises to seek and shepherd His scattered sheep.

Against that backdrop, Jesus’ response is more than sentimentality. The Shepherd has come. 

And this is not an isolated moment.

In Matthew 14, even in His own grief, Jesus sees the crowd and is moved with compassion.

In Mark 1, He reaches out and touches a man accustomed to being untouchable.

In Luke 7, He sees a widow burying her only son and responds to grief she never even voiced.

And in Matthew 20, two blind men cry out while the crowd tries to silence them. Jesus stops.

Again and again, Jesus notices the hungry, the untouchable, the grieving, the voices others would rather ignore—the people easiest to overlook, dismiss, or write off.

He sees them. He is moved by them. And He moves toward them.

Then the pattern turns toward us. 

This is not only how Jesus responded to those people in the Gospels. It is how He has responded to me and to you. “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). 

The compassion we are being asked to extend is compassion we have already received. That ought to change my posture entirely. I am not standing among the enlightened, looking across a moral divide at people who need Jesus. I am standing among people who have been met by Him.

Compassion does not require us to abandon conviction. Jesus holds moral clarity and extraordinary tenderness in the same heart. He names what is broken without reducing anyone to their brokenness.

And that is the invitation of discipleship: not simply to become better at identifying what is wrong, but to become more like the One we follow.

Christ did not love us from across a divide. He crossed it.

If our convictions are truly forming us into His likeness, they should deepen our compassion and move us toward the very people we might otherwise keep at a distance.