Greetings in our Lord!
Today I'm sharing another Max Lucado devotional--seems so often he gets right to the heart of where I am! You, too? So let's "Ouch" and "Oh, me" together. But first our scripture:
John 3:17 KJV
For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.
They Don't Know What They Are Doing
by Max Lucado
Anger. It's a peculiar yet predictable emotion. It begins as a drop of water. An irritant. A frustration. Nothing big, just an aggravation. Someone gets your parking place. Someone pulls in front of you on the freeway. A waitress is slow and you are in a hurry. The toast burns. Drops of water. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip.
Yet, get enough of these seemingly innocent drops of anger and before long you've got a bucket full of rage. Walking revenge. Blind bitterness. Unharnessed hatred. We trust no one and bare our teeth at anyone who gets near. We become walking time bombs that, given just the right tension and fear, could explode.
Yet, what do we do? We can't deny that our anger exists. How do we harness it? A good option is found in Luke 23:34. Here, Jesus speaks about the mob that killed him. "'Father forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.'"
Look carefully. It's as if Jesus considered this bloodthirsty, death-hungry crowd not as murderers, but as victims. It's as if he saw in their faces not hatred but confusion. It's as if he regarded them not as a militant mob but, as he put it, as "sheep without a shepherd."
"They don't know what they are doing."
And when you think about it, they didn't. They hadn't the faintest idea what they were doing. They were a stir-crazy mob, mad at something they couldn't see so they took it out on, of all people, God. But they didn't know what they were doing.
And for the most part, neither do we. We are still, as much as we hate to admit it, shepherdless sheep. All we know is that we were born out of one eternity and are frighteningly close to another. We play tag with the fuzzy realities of death and pain. We can't answer our own questions about love and hurt. We can't solve the riddle of aging. We don't know how to heal our own bodies or get along with our own mates. We can't keep ourselves out of war. We can't even keep ourselves fed.
Paul spoke for humanity when he confessed, "I do not know what I am doing." (Romans 7:15, author's paraphrase.)
Now, I know that doesn't justify anything. That doesn't justify hit-and-run drivers or kiddie-porn peddlers or heroin dealers. But it does help explain why they do the miserable things they do.
My point is this: Uncontrolled anger won't better our world, but sympathetic understanding will. Once we see the world and ourselves for what we are, we can help. Once we understand ourselves we begin to operate not from a posture of anger but of compassion and concern. We look at the world not with bitter frowns but with extended hands. We realize that the lights are out and a lot of people are stumbling in the darkness. So we light candles.
From No Wonder They Call Him the Savior
© (W Publishing Group, 1986, 2004) Max Lucado
Grannyfay back:
I've been feeding a poor near-starved cat. Someone dropped it or it strayed, or for whatever reason, she's here. She's black, gray and white with white stockings. I've been calling her Boots part of the time and Baby the rest. :)
She's been terrified of me but as I feed her and talk to her--and even sang "Jesus loves little kitty" to her the other day--she's starting to warm up. This afternoon she was waiting for me and when I took her food out, she came right up to her pan with me standing there--but she had to hiss and carry on before she could eat. She wanted me to know she'd been mistreated and although she was hungry, she wasn't ready to trust me totally.
Aren't we like that with God? We want what He has to offer but we still hiss and carry on--not ready to fully trust Him yet?
As Jesus and Bro. Lucado said, "We don't know what we're doing." And we're quick to judge others who don't know what they are doing, either.
But if we could only realize that God's not "out to get us". He didn't come in the form of man to condemn us. He came to save us.
Yes, maybe if we could realize that--just maybe we'd stop "hissing and carrying on" and fully trust God! And reach out to others in love so they could learn to trust Him, too.
God Bless!