My sister recently picked up a copy of Matthew Kelly’s I Heard God Laugh at a church sale. She said she thought it looked like something that would interest me, so, curious as to what it would contain, I read it. I enjoy devotional-type books, so I figured I had nothing to lose.
To be honest, the section that probably caught my attention most was but a few paragraphs long, yet it provoked me to think. The author posed a simple question. “What image do you have of God?”
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“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy…”
Jealousy is probably the single most frequent cause of breakdowns in relationships. It slips in so quietly and under so many guises that the truth isn’t realized until it’s too late – or it may never be realized at all. And so the person goes through life, wondering why they can’t seem to hang onto friendships for long, never realizing that they are taking themselves with them everywhere they go. It was probably at least five years ago that I randomly came across a video of a young man explaining how friends sometimes become enemies. (If it had been released a few years later, it would have been a classic TikTok, but this was before those days.) He explained a concept that I have frequently seen throughout my life. And this was his statement. “When admiration becomes jealousy, offense is the result.” (That’s my paraphrase…I don’t remember his exact wording, lol.) The end result is that offense leads to the eventual breakdown of a relationship. Do you ever stop to wonder how God uses everything for our good and His glory? I was reading in Philippians recently and came across a passage I’ve read many times without ever grasping the depth of what Paul is actually saying. At the time that he wrote the Gospel, he was imprisoned in Rome for being a supposed threat to the Roman Empire with this new religion he was preaching.
(As a matter of fact, he was in prison mainly because of the jealousy of the Jewish religious leaders, who, making their choice to reject Jesus, were now doing everything possible to prevent the message of Jesus from taking any further hold on their followers. The Romans were merely being used as pawns…attempting to keep the religious leaders happy so they didn’t have a revolt on their hands. Plus, Paul was clearly an influential person – he’d gotten crowds so riled up in Ephesus a few years earlier that one of the officials of the city had had to get involved to prevent a riot. That being the case, it pleased the Roman leaders to keep him in jail.) I want to show you something interesting here through Paul’s declaration in Philippians 1:12. Do you ever just flip open your Bible and start reading wherever it opens? I did that this morning. My Bible has a habit of opening to Jeremiah 17, so when it opened to Jeremiah, I thought I knew where this was going. But no – it had opened a page earlier in Jeremiah 15. In this particular passage (v 15-18), Jeremiah is complaining to God about how unfair the treatment he’s receiving is.
Basically, he’s like, “God, you see all this junk that’s going on. I’ve loved Your words, and they’re my delight. I’m not taking part in all these detestable sins going on around me – in fact, I’m indignant at this behavior because Your hand was on me. So why hasn’t this pain in me been healed already? Why haven’t my adversaries been dealt with?” Then, he makes a rather cutting statement to God. “Will You indeed be to me like a deceptive brook with water that is unreliable?” Growing up, my parents always told us kids to be kind to each other. To put each other’s needs first. To respect them and each other. It wasn’t until I was a teenager that they were able to put a name to the culture they’d tried to cultivate in our home. “A culture of honor.” The term came from a preacher we just happened to be listening to one evening. As the senior leader of a large church on the west coast, he’d done his best to cultivate a culture of honor in his congregation.
The minute he used the term, my dad said, “That’s exactly what we have!” It was merely terminology for what he and my mom had striven to demonstrate and cultivate in our home throughout their lives together. |
Sarah GraceHi! I'm Sarah Grace, and I'm so glad you stopped by the Wings of Heaven blog! You can find short posts for easy reading or longer, more in-depth musings! I hope you're blessed! Archives
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