Posted: June 18th, 2010 |
Author: Serena Woods |
Filed under: life |
6 Comments »
It can be infuriating to stand back and watch people get away with vindictive behavior. It’s even worse to hear them do it in the name of God.
Speaking up doesn’t always work. Most end up with their name added to the hit list.
It’s hard to spend years watching manipulation and cruelty being called ‘God’s will’.
It’s one thing to be reviled because you’re a Christian. Has that even happened to you? Not me. I’ve never been made fun of for my faith. Non-believers have repeatedly shown themselves to be more accepting and supportive of faith ventures than Christians.
More often are the instances where a professed Christian will criticize you in the name of God. That’s the worst. When one of your own uses the Utmost Authority to crush you into something he can control.
Why don’t you do something? How long are you going to sit there with your hands folded in your lap? -David to God in Psalm 74:11
David wasn’t around to experience life after Jesus, but we are. Jesus took the stick of justice on Himself and every time I want someone to pay for what they do to me, I’m asking Jesus to take a little extra… for me. My sense of stability and well-being need to be balanced and I’m demanding the scales be calibrated in my favor. With that attitude, I’ll be sitting in the wrong spot when Jesus comes in to the temple to over turn the tables.
You might not know what you’re doing, but when you want someone to pay for their sins, you’re assuming that they haven’t been paid already. If you decide that the pain they caused you is worth more than what Jesus already did, then you might consider the staggering profundity of your pride. My heart aches for the person who is so far removed from their own darkness that they cannot connect with the magnitude of what Jesus did. It has to eat them alive to see wrongs never made right and to feel God sitting complacently in His rocking chair chewing a piece of mint He dug out of His empty tea glass. To hear the irritating slurrrps of the last drops of tea trapped in between the ice cubes and the way they ting against the glass when He rights it or snap between His teeth when He crunches it.
‘How long are you going to sit there…?’
Every single thing a person does is forgivable. The price has already been paid. Justice has already been served. Would you want to dismiss Jesus as you escort the target of your irritation to the cross and watch the pain on his face while you rip into him? Would you want to dismiss Jesus? Because that means you can’t have Him either.
Every single thing is forgivable. The price is paid. Justice served. Would you want to ask Jesus to crawl back up there and take a few more hits? Do you want to hold the whip?
When a person doesn’t like you, doesn’t include you, when they criticize you and treat your name with disdain ‘on behalf of Jesus’, don’t worry. Don’t fight back and don’t return the favor. Count yourself ‘blessed’.
Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you and revile you and spurn your name as evil, on account of the Son of Man! -Luke 6:22 ESV
It’s not because ‘they’ll get what’s coming to them’. That’s pride. It’s because the aptitude of grace and selflessness is a reflection of who Jesus is and the truth of that is disconcerting to those who have forgotten. There will come a day when the cruelty of the one who hurts you in the name of Jesus will be seen for what it is. In that day, they will need you to give all of the grace you have received for your own failures and give it to them. It’s your long awaited chance to make the biggest statement of faith you’ve ever made in your life: to act like your Father. Stoop low, take the hit and forgive them. That’s how you glorify God, that’s how you get to be just like Him.
Pride lands you flat on your face; humility prepares you for honors. -Proverbs 29:23
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Tags: forgiveness
Posted: November 20th, 2009 |
Author: Serena Woods |
Filed under: God |
Comments Off
You decide according to what you can see and touch. -Jesus, John 8:15
Humans are naturally egocentric. We base our response to life on our experience. When opposing ideas are introduced, our first inclination is to reject them. The only time we entertain the notion that we have something yet to learn is when what we know collides with what we know and we have to reexamine what we know. This doesn’t happen unless you’re in a state of brokenness. If a firm internal belief is shattered by an external fact, then we are no longer solid and have to find a new position of solidarity before we experience what it is to be whole again.
The first response to hearing the Truth is fear. As you watch the fabric of life as you know it…faith as you know it…become loose and transparent, it makes you feel small and powerless.
We can hear that we are in an ‘alien’ state of existence. We’re travelers, lost children on foreign soil who wait for a horn, a light in the East, a Savior on a cloud. How is it that we can believe the most amazing stories not witnessed, but not the Truth right in front of us? You believe that Jesus was conceived in a virgin, but not that God’s plan shatters through the fabric of yours. You know that Paul was accosted on a road to Damascus, yet you still spend yourself on your bedroom floor begging God to let His will prevail. You believe that the Son of God offered Himself as a sacrifice for sin, died, rose and lifted off the earth to disappear into clouds on His way to Heaven, but you cannot believe that the person who hurt you can be transformed by that miracle.
Jesus said, “You’re tied down to the mundane; I’m in touch with what is beyond your horizons. You live in terms of what you see and touch. I’m living on other terms. I told you that you were missing God in all this. You’re at a dead end. -John 8:23
Jesus, the human, kept His eye on the Truth as He travelled through the facade. Life is an obstacle course. A process, not a purpose. A journey, not a destination. You cannot look at a member of your own traveling tribe and bind them to the lies of the land on which they walk. Failure is inevitable, if there is breath, there is hope. Don’t determine the prognosis of the fallen based on your understanding and personal confines of acceptability. Unless they’re dead, they’re still in the game. If for no other reason than to epitomize your unbelief in the finality of Grace. The pebble in your shoe.
You are brought through experiences and are formed as a result of the squeezing and stretching. If you look at the here and now, what you can see and touch, you completely miss God in the process. You see yourself as a victim. You scramble to keep your grasp on what you deem yours, you wait on others to do the right thing because you see their faults clearer than you see your own. We should be scrambling in a race to be the first to reconcile. Loose ends are cancer to your freedom and if you do your part to prepare them for reattachment, you can be free while you wait for the healing.
You can focus on the sin that divided, but why would you ‘think on those things?’ If you use sin as the glasses, then you will never be free. You have many reasons to maintain the separation, but how many times do you have to revisit the overgrown battlefield of mistakes and selfishness to give you the power to maintain your defiant stance of righteous indignation? Contempt is not in your nature, you want to show kindness and have to suppress the love that wants to seep from the depths of you. Yet, you have to honor the scarred with the resolve to ‘never forget’.
Forgiveness is freedom, whether your target deserves it or not. The freedom is for you, not them. The forgiveness is reciprocal, not from them, but from God. He wants you to forgive the unworthy so you can identify with Him as He forgives you….also unworthy. This isn’t about them…this is about you. You have been brought to this place because there is a part of you that needs to be placed on an altar and burned. You are not a victim of your circumstances. An accident has not overtaken you. Nothing in your existence gets altered without instigation from the ‘Sovereign Strong’.
All we’re saying is that God has the first word, initiating the action in which we play our part for good or ill. -Romans 9:18
Did someone ‘play a part for ill‘ and you are stuck with the bruises? Are you grooming your concept of God while you punish the bad teammate? What if God instigated the action for a purpose you’re not privy to? What if it’s obedience to self-abandonment that gives purpose to your plight and it’s not about ‘here and now’ at all? Are you missing God because of your short sightedness, narrow mindedness, experiential determination? When you question your circumstances, you question God.
Look up to keep yourself from looking down. Look around only with the vision of what is up. Spin in the twist. Dance in the Truth.
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Tags: forgiveness
