MINUS REVENGE

Then I said to her, “You shall stay with me for many days.  You shall not play the harlot, nor shall you have a man, so I will also be toward you.” Hosea 3:3

    It’s pretty easy to do the right thing when there is nothing to cloud our motivation.  I can be gracious to a stranger.  I can love others who haven’t hurt me. However, if I am in relationship with someone with who consistently wounds me, my choices for relating are clouded by my unresolved hurt.  Let someone attack me long enough and my claws will probably come out. 

    Revenge, not forgiveness, is the natural response to pain.  If I’m a Christian, I may be far more subtle about the ways I make others pay, but I can still find plenty of ways to exact retribution. How many times have I said, “He has no idea how he hurts me when he does that!  I’ll give him a bit of his own medicine so maybe, then, he’ll understand.” 

    Ah, God’s character is above all that.  No matter how many times I stab Him in the back, he never pulls out a knife to pay me back.  Even when I have gone after other gods, He remains faithful to me to woo me to return.  It is His desire that this kind of faithfulness be cultivated in me.

    One of the hardest things God ever called me to do was to stay in a difficult place for three years.  I wanted to escape, to move to another place.  I wanted to be free from the memories that place evoked, free from remembering.  The Spirit of God spoke to me one morning through Psalms 37:3  “Dwell in the land and cultivate faithfulness.”  His best plan for my life was to teach me to serve Him faithfully in the middle of the wilderness, without traces of bitterness.  At the end of the three years, there was a glorious deliverance to a new place.

    I meet many who struggle against their chains, thinking them to be a death sentence.  Sometimes the bondage is of the enemy and we can certainly take authority over his designs for us.  But oftentimes, the ‘seeming’ bondage is a crucible, allowed by God, to develop our character.  In the midst of such crushing times, our motives, thoughts, and intents of the heart are pulled out of the deep for inspection and, if we allow, purified in the fire of God’s furnace.  God’s kind of faithfulness is developed in us.  The result can only be stunning for the rest of our lifetime.  The recipients of our undeserved graces may be moved toward and may not.  There is no guarantee.  But we change and our freedom is no longer dependent on their responses.

I want your glory to be revealed in me.  No more chains, no more churning.  Just the freedom to deliver your words and your grace without strings.  Amen