Caring for Hurting People: What a Real Heart Looks Like

From the sermon preached on June 28, 2026

Caring for hurting people is not a program or a personality type — it is what a life shaped by the gospel actually produces. Zechariah 7 draws a sharp line between going through the motions of faith and having a heart that genuinely sees the person right next to you. If you have ever wondered whether your faith has become routine, or whether you have what it takes to actually help someone who is quietly falling apart, this passage has something honest to say to you.

There is a particular kind of tired that doesn't make the news. It is not dramatic. It looks like showing up on time, doing what is expected, carrying what needs carrying, and never quite saying how heavy it has gotten. And if you are honest, there are days when showing kindness to others is the last thing you have left to give. You are already running on fumes. The idea of noticing someone else's pain when you are white-knuckling your own feels like asking for something you simply do not have.

That tension is exactly where Zechariah 7 begins. The people of God had just returned from nearly 70 years of exile in Babylon. Their city was destroyed. Their temple was gone. They were rebuilding from rubble. They came to the Lord with what sounded like a reasonable question: should we keep fasting in the fifth month the way we have for years? It seemed like faithfulness. It looked like discipline. But the Lord's response cut straight to the motive underneath: "Was it for me that you fasted?" (Zechariah 7:5, ESV). The Lord was not impressed by the ritual. He was asking about the heart driving it.

The indictment is uncomfortable because it lands close to home. It is possible to attend every service, go through every motion of faith, and still be entirely oriented toward your own comfort and satisfaction. Showing kindness to others becomes impossible when we are only ever looking inward. The Lord wanted something more than religious performance; he wanted hearts that were actually engaged with the people around them.

The practice here is simple and hard: before this week is out, slow down long enough to ask whether there is someone right next to you who is carrying something you have not noticed.

Real versus ritualistic Christianity is not primarily a theological distinction. It shows up in whether or not you see the person beside you. Goodland Campus Pastor James McGovern walked through Zechariah 7:9, where the Lord commands his people: "Thus says the Lord of hosts, render true judgments, show kindness and mercy to one another. Do not oppress the widow, the fatherless, the sojourner, or the poor." That list is not random. Every person named in it is someone whose suffering is easy to overlook, easy to explain away, or easy to walk past with a polite greeting.

Real versus ritualistic Christianity means opening your eyes to the people on that list in your own life. The widow in your neighborhood whose house has been quiet since her husband died. The single parent at the end of your road who hasn't asked anyone for help but is a paycheck away from something breaking. The person in the next pew whose smile has been showing up every Sunday for months while their pillow is soaked from crying at night. Real versus ritualistic Christianity looks like the difference between a faith that exists mostly to make you feel good and a faith that costs you something for the sake of someone else.

Pastor McGovern pointed to the fruit of the Spirit, not as a list of virtues to achieve, but as the natural output of a life saturated in Christ: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Bathe yourself in how Jesus treated people, he said. Swim in Matthew and Mark and Luke and John. See how he moved toward the ones everyone else stepped around. Real versus ritualistic Christianity starts with that kind of immersion, not with trying harder, but with looking more carefully at the one in front of you.

There is a pull in every mercy and kindness sermon to nod along and then walk out the same way you walked in. The message was good. You meant it when you felt it. But by Thursday, the farmer in you has seventeen other things demanding your attention, and the person who needed someone to notice has faded into the background again.

Zechariah 7 will not let that off easily. Pastor McGovern brought the text to a point that carries real weight: what happened to Israel when they repeatedly rejected the call to mercy and kindness was severe. The Lord said plainly, "As I called and they would not hear, so they called and I would not hear" (Zechariah 7:13, ESV). This is not a soft warning. A city once full of life was left empty, its streets abandoned, not because of an outside enemy but because the people had made their hearts, in the prophet's words, "diamond hard." They had stopped being moved by the suffering around them.

But that is not where the sermon ends, and it is not where the text ends either. Because the same God who brought that rebuke is also described as Zachar-Yah — the one who remembers. He remembers his people. He remembers his promises. And his answer to hard hearts is not condemnation alone; it is the gospel of Jesus, who brought good news to the poor, valued the widow, made strangers into friends. This mercy and kindness sermon is a call to let that same gospel operate on your heart from the inside out.

The action point Pastor McGovern gave was concrete: seek the Lord to see who needs to be refreshed. Then go be that for them. One person. This week.

Zechariah 7:9 is the hinge verse of this passage and of this message: "Show kindness and mercy to one another." The word translated "kindness" here carries the weight of steadfast, loyal, covenant love — the kind that does not quit when it gets inconvenient. The word for "mercy" points toward a tenderness that sees suffering and is genuinely moved by it. Together they describe a posture that has to be practiced, that has to be chosen, and that only becomes possible when you have first received it from Christ.

There are a lot of people in this part of Illinois and Indiana who know what it is to carry something private and heavy. The grief that doesn't fit in a conversation at the grain co-op. The marriage that has gone cold. The anxiety that wakes you up at 3am and has no name. Those things do not announce themselves, and the people carrying them rarely ask for help. Across Iroquois County and into Newton County, from Watseka and Milford to Goodland and the small communities in between, there are people in that exact place right now. Trinity Church has campuses in Ashkum, Goodland, and Watseka, and a genuine, low-pressure door is open. You do not have to have anything figured out to walk through it.

The people of Israel in Zechariah 7 had a choice. The same one is in front of anyone reading this. The heart can stay hard, turned inward, going through the motions until there is nothing left to feel. Or it can be operated on by the God who remembers, the one who sent Jesus not to condemn but to restore. That is the whole point of the passage. That is what a mercy and kindness sermon is actually for.

If you are one of the ones silently struggling, the Lord sees it. If you are one of the ones who needs to start seeing others, the same Lord is ready to open your eyes.

Trinity Church gathers at campuses in Ashkum, Goodland, and Watseka, plan your visit below and take one low-pressure step toward a community that is living this out.