The Painted Door Church - Chicago
The Painted Door Church is church family that gathers in Chicago, IL. We are a people who share the same story; we are sinner, saved by grace. We draw our name from the Exodus account in the Hebrew Scriptures, when God spared his people from judgement, passing over all homes that had the blood of a spotless lamb painted across their doorways. Jesus is the new spotless lamb, his death on a Roman cross sparing the people of God from judgment once for all. He reconnects us to our Maker and to each other and invites us to participate in his grand work of restoring all things.
The Painted Door Church - Chicago
The Suffering of Compassion / Colossians 1:24-29
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Pastor Mark Bergin
Our God is a compassionate God. We know this only because he has entered our suffering with us. That is the very definition of compassion -- "to suffer with." How then can we consider ourselves the body of Christ if we fail to enter the suffering of our neighbors? Many among us relish the thought of being compassionate people, but whose suffering are we sharing in? We live in a cultural moment when the dogmatic teachings of the church largely fall on deaf ears. Our pronouncements of judgment against sin are like clanging gongs in an echo chamber, ever ricocheting off hardened surfaces, finding no soft places to land. Yet mercy and compassion are the instruments of God's Spirit to turn stone into clay. Our church has a mission: to participate in the life and death of Jesus, to suffer with sinners as he did, to offer this Christ within us.