April 01, 2014
Enemies
When I ask fellow
believers about their enemies the normal reaction is to recoil – Christians
don’t have enemies; Christians love one another. Eighty year-old Edward
struggled with the thought of having enemies, “I guess my daughter made me mad. She needed money to buy a house so my
wife and I gave her a loan from my retirement.” It wasn’t long before his
daughter missed installment payments and declared bankruptcy. The
relationship was severed for years, but when Edward’s wife passed away their
daughter asked another family member to find out if she could come to her
mother’s funeral. “My daughter did
nothing but bring heartache and cause grief in the family. I didn’t see her at
the funeral – I don’t know whether or not she came.” Had Edward’s daughter
been a stranger he would have taken legal action, but instead he avoided
having anything to do with her or ever seeing her again. “… a man’s enemies
will be the members of his own household.” (Matthew 10:36 NIV)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Gail;
-----This is sad. Retirement funds are important. But her dad lived long enough to bury his wife anyway. And his wife lived her entire life in spite of their funds having been lost. So they were making it through life regardless. Most likely, they were not as comfortably provisioned with life’s material supplies because of what their daughter lost. Yet, they were alive.
-----There’s something special about being alive. When we get home we will realize how despicable our life circumstances really were. Right now we are desensitized to it. It’s just normal, until something like this occurs. Then we have something to look at daily as a reminder. It’s like a scapegoat representing all of life’s travesties, which through it have become a bit less desensitized. We need to feel some of the travesty that makes part of our lives. As the Lord’s people, we are people of intimacy. Everything is important in the Lord. Everything has meaning. The Lord knows everything’s meaning to its last level of detail. And He approves it, or it would not happen. Yet, that does not mean He desires despair for us. He desires our lives to be real. And these despicable circumstances of our lives are real. So, our lives are what they need to be no matter what the circumstance, because the circumstance itself is a call for us to more deeply define ourselves through a response. That’s what is special about this life.
-----But the circumstance is not what’s important. The response is. Jesus could have cried up a storm and thrown a giant hissy-fit and descended from the cross and fried a whole bunch of Jewish and Roman backsides. But that was not in the definition His Father scripted for Him. His definition was to make use of the circumstance in the way it benefited everyone involved the best it could. Using our sins to “earn” His way off the cross through being “paid” death fit the bill quite well.
-----Now, Jesus was able to do everything He did perfectly because He was without error. We’re not. In fact, we’re pretty far up the klutz scale. But God gave us a few things to counter its effect. Desire for what’s right sets our eyes in the right place. Hope aims our hearts at the source of our strength and support. And His promises stir within our thoughts possibilities, from which we can choose a line of effort. Whether or not that effort succeeds is not the greater meaning. The greater meaning is that a bad circumstance did not change the inclination of our hearts from the right to the left. Our hearts maintained rightward inclination where the actions of our effort stamped our choice of that definition onto the clay tablet of all history. For the inclination is meaningful in the effort more than success.
-----Then regardless of circumstances, joy fills our hearts through their aim at hope. Hope can only aim at reality. And reality requires us to acknowledge the forgiveness of our sins, for they stand rock-wall strong between us and anything good. There is no hope unless we have forgiveness. But forgiveness is not an attitude unidirectional from God towards us. It is a state of being. To have it we must participate in it, we must be it. So Jesus said that we must forgive to be forgiven. For hope to be real, we must be forgiving. And if hope is not real, it is not well aimed. If it is not well aimed, joy does not enter the heart through it.
-----It is sad that the leveling effect of the grave was not able to spark an inclination to forgive the daughter. Only a few short decades were required before it would erase the difficult circumstance from both their lives. Yet they could not define themselves well enough to have the joy of hope through forgiveness within the discomfort of their brief “now”.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
Post a Comment