Weather Report From Heaven: Sunny and bright, with an abundance of light and lots of singing and rejoicing.
Bible Verse of the Day: Romans 2:1-4 ” You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgement on someone else, for at whatever point you judge the other, you are condemning yourself, because you who pass judgement do the same things. Now we know that God’s judgement against those who do such things is based on truth. So when you, a mere man, pass judgement on them and yet do the same things, do you think you will escape God’s judgement? Or do you show contempt for the riches of His kindness, tolerance, and patience, not realizing that God’s kindness leads you to repentance.”
I am a man in dire need of repentance based on the verse above because I am guilty in my sin of judgement. I live my life in a way that is at odds with this teaching, even if by my power I try my best not to. And you see, that is where the problem lies. I cannot live the life I am called to live as a Christian, as a follower of a Christ, on my own terms and in my own power. My self-righteousness quickly gets in the way and condemns me of being guilty of judgement of others. Who am I, a mere man, to judge others and where does that lack of tolerance come from? I believe it comes from allowing the world in which I live to corrupt my thinking and from not being grounded deep enough in the true teachings and understanding of who Christ is and how he taught. He taught nothing but compassion and tolerance. In every person he saw a child of God who was worthy of His calling and time, and never did he judge someone based on their past behavior without throwing them a life line to a new life of hope in him. He understood fully our human weakness and our moral frailty.
Brenning Manning, in the book Abbas’s Child, points out the paradoxical challenge of Christ’s life on earth to His followers by noting how He got involved with the ” moral failures, the irreligious and and immoral people; so many dubious, obscure, abandoned, hopeless types, existing as an eradicable evil, on the fringes of society.” My God, if Jesus Christ himself was so compassionate and patient towards those people in his time on this earth, turning towards them with gracious kindness so that they may still be “saved” up and until their last dying breath, who am I or is anyone else to cast our own judgement upon those same people when we don’t even have a court in which to judge? Lord have mercy on me and forgive me of my sin! In today’s world, the AIDS carriers, the drug addicts, the sexual predators, the dregs of society, would be the first ones that Jesus would probably reach out to because of their being ostracized in society. How hard of a message is that to hear with our human understandings and limitations? Impossible! According to Manning, “the Pharisee lurking within all of us shuns sinners, while Jesus turns toward them with gracious compassion.”
The only way we can ever get to the place where we can look at things through Jesus’ eyes is to totally surrender our way of thinking and to remove all pride from our lives that assumes that we have some moral authority over those whom have chosen to reject God. We are so quick as Christians to judge those that have chosen to live their life in a way that doesn’t measure up to our own standards. What a joke that is and an insult that must be to the Risen Lord. As a matter of fact, it is those same people who Christ may put in our path so that we can illustrate to them what true, non judgmental, love looks like. Romans 5:5 says “The love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit which has been given us.” The challenge is do we use that love of God to the best of our abilities and in a way that would be pleasing to him? Jesus Christ lived His human life modeling for us what it looks like to live a divine life, full of compassion, grace and mercy. I fully realize that we as sinners our never able to even come close to approaching the life of God incarnate on this earth, but yet my utter lack of tolerance in some situations still startles me. I am reminded to run to the cross and repent when these episodes of judgement are revealed to me, so that I can live a radical life as one who is beloved by a God who forgives me of ALL of my sin through the blood of my savior Jesus Christ.
Without that assurance, I would be truly dead in all my transgressions, with no hope for redemption or eternal life. God calls us to a life of forgiveness, which is counter cultural in a world that demands an eye for an eye at best, and a much more uneven retribution against those who have harmed us at worse. In the Lord’s prayer, we ask God to “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” We have seemed to forget what He is really teaching us here, that He forgives us without limit, an unpayable debt ( The meaning of 70x 7 ) and expects us to have our hearts positioned in the same manner. Only a complete and radical trust in a Source greater than ourselves, and a total abandonment to our own flesh, can empower us to truly forgive the wounds inflicted upon us by others. May the Lord of all strength, power and glory give us the ability to do so. For there in lies true freedom, free of judgement and revenge, the truest Christian who can say they did their best to follow the example for which He died upon the cross, forgiveness of our sins. For even in His last breath, in Luke 23:34 Jesus turns to His accuser and says “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”
Prayer: Father God, help us to become more like Jesus and less like ourselves each day we live on this earth. We simply cannot live out the Christian faith in our own strength. Amen!
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