Month: May 2017

Love From The Center Of Who You Are

Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil, cling to what is good. Be devoted to one another in love. Honor one another above yourselves. [NIV]
-St. Paul of Tarsus, Letter to the Romans, 12:9-10

Every generation has challenges to face. The daily news keeps reminding us of that. Global and local events also remind us that there is always darkness, there is always evil, there is always sorrow, there will always be hate. The questions is though: when you face challenging situations in your heart, in your home, in your community, in our nation, will you have enough light, enough good, enough joy, enough love to overcome?

Probably not on your own. We need friends to help us make it through. I believe that we especially need the Lord, who faced the darkest hate in our world – and he overcome it with light and love. He can send us friends, he can send us wisdom and strength, he can be with us as we strive together to overcome our hatred.

In our world we aspire to love others, but often succumb to hating others. As we seek to serve and lead in our homes and communities, may we be empowered by the Spirit of the Lord to let go of hating others. May we love from the center of who we are in Christ, to hate what is evil and cling to what is good, to love our enemies and bless those who curse us.

May these quotes on love and hate inspire you to honest reflection, candid confession, and a lighter tomorrow:

Hatred paralyses life; love releases it.
Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it.
Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.

You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.
-Anne Lamott

We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
-Jonathan Swift

In time we hate that which we often fear.
-William Shakespeare

Hatred is the coward’s revenge for being intimidated.
-George Bernard Shaw

It is easy to hate and it is difficult to love.
This is how the whole scheme of things works.
All good things are difficult to achieve;
and bad things are very easy to get.
-Rene Descartes

Hate is too great a burden to bear.
It injures the hater more than it injures the hated.
-Coretta Scott King

If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself.
What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.
-Herman Hesse

Hating people is like burning down your own house to get rid of a rat.
-Henry Emerson Fosdick

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
-James Baldwin

When we don’t know who to hate, we hate ourselves.
-Chuck Palahniuk

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.
Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.

Why Trying To Be A Good Person Is Bad For You

I’ve always tried to be a good person. I’m a pleaser, so often my attempts to do good are driven by my desire to make others happy. I certainly try to be a good person as a way to love God and love my family and friends.  I like trying to be a good person.

But if I’m honest, trying to be good can sometimes be bad for me and my community. How?

In my effort to be a good person, and to appear as a good person, guess what typically happens? Yes, that’s correct: lots and lots of denial, rationalizing, defensiveness, and well intentioned but maybe naive help.

My desire to be good can undermine my acceptance of the not-good within me or coming from me.

In one of the stories that Mark tells about Jesus, the religious lawyers confronted him about why his disciples ate with unwashed hands. Jesus, it seemed to them, was okay with lawbreaking. He, however, turned their questions around on them, accusing them of hypocrisy.

It’s ironic, since the Pharisees and religious lawyers were so committed to being good people and devout followers of Israel’s God. So how was it that in their attempts to be good they were bad?

In the teachings of Moses God makes it clear that people are to honor their parents, especially in their old age – and this includes caring for them financially and being a blessing to them (instead of being a negligent or abusive curse).

But the Pharisees had found a way to designate their finances and time to God as a way to both look pious and avoid the expense and difficulty of caring for their aging parents. They found a way to avoid keeping  commands of God by coming up with a way to be devoted to God.

In this case, their attempts to be good people was bad for their parents.

Jesus then goes on to make a bigger point about unclean hands and being good people. He was accused of defiling his body by eating with unwashed hands. But Jesus points out that it’s not what goes in that defiles the body, but what comes out. Don’t worry about the food that goes in to the stomach, pay attention to what comes out of your heart.

This is provocative stuff. Jesus describes twelve inter-connected evils that are already in our heart: immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, pride, and folly.

My first instinct, and probably yours too is to scan the list and see which ones apply. As an act of humility we might pick a few we all struggle with. But this is where our addiction to being good corrupts our judgment. Jesus is saying that all of these evil thoughts are in our hearts.

And if we’re always looking for ways we’re not guilty of them, we’ll be blind to the ways we are guilty. And if we’re never convicted, there’s nothing to confess and repent.

Everyone agrees Jesus was a good man. So how was it that Jesus was crucified for being seditious (a law-breaker and a political threat) and for blasphemy (slandering against God). He was put to death by men and women who thought of themselves as good people seeking to be devout followers of God.

The irony? In trying to be good and devout people they killed God.

Hypocrisy is undermined by humility. It takes humility to confess the evil thoughts within our heart. It takes humility to hear from others how we have wronged them, even though we thought we were doing the right thing.

Being good can become a vague assertion that can prevents us from being honest and humble about the bad that is really in us. And that’s bad for us.

Who then can be good? Only God is good. The rest of us, well, maybe we should give up on trying to be good and work to act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with God.

This is, ironically, what Jesus strives for us to become and do.

Forgiveness is Spring For the Soul

Spring is a season of new beginnings. If you were going to pray and work for a new beginning with people in your life, what would be key actions to take and attitudes to cultivate?

I’ve found that forgiveness is central to the season of spring in my relationships. I resist forgiveness though. I either don’t take it seriously enough, or I don’t want to admit that I did something wrong and need to make amends.

I’ve always appreciated Kierkegaard’s take on Christianity and forgiveness – he puts it in a way that startles me and even rattles me. He doesn’t let me settle with platitudes about living out my faith – he challenges me to re-examine my assumptions and habits.

Maybe he can do that for you too – even better, re-inspire us to keep learning how to forgive and love as Christ does for us, and the world.

“Christianity’s view is: forgiveness is forgiveness; your forgiveness is your forgiveness; your forgiveness of another is your own forgiveness; the forgiveness which you give, you receive, not contrariwise, that you give the forgiveness for which you receive.”

“It is as if Christianity would say: pray to God humbly and believing in your forgiveness for he really is compassionate in such a way as no human being is; but if you will test how it is with respect to the forgiveness, then observe yourself. If honestly before God you wholeheartedly forgive your enemy (but remember that if you do, God sees it), then you dare hope also for your forgiveness, for it is one and the same.”

“God forgives you neither more nor less nor otherwise than as you forgive your trespasses. It is only an illusion to imagine that one himself has forgiveness, although one is slack in forgiving others.”

“It is also conceit to believe in one’s own forgiveness when one will not forgive, for how in truth should one believe in forgiveness if his own life is a refutation of the existence of forgiveness!”

“For, Christianly understood, to love human beings is to love God and to love God is to love human beings; what you do unto men you do unto God, and therefore what you do unto men God does unto you.”

“If you are embittered towards men who do you wrong, you are really embittered towards God, for ultimately it is still God who permits wrong to be done to you. If, however, you gratefully take the wrongs from God’s hand ‘as a good and perfect gift,’ you do not become embittered towards men either.”

“If you will not forgive, you essentially want something else, you want to make God hard-hearted, that he should not forgive, either: how, then should this hard-hearted God forgive you? If you cannot bear the offenses of men against you, how should God be able to bear your sins against him?”

“If you have never been solitary, you have also never discovered that God exists. But if you have been truly solitary, then you also learned that everything you say to and do to other human beings God simply repeats; he repeats it with the intensification of infinity. The word of blessing or judgment which you express concerning someone else, God repeats; he says the same word about you, and this same word is blessing or judgment over you.”

“Such a person will certainly avoid speaking to God about the wrongs of others towards him, about the speck in his brother’s eye, for such a person will rather speak to God only about grace, lest this fateful word of justice lose everything for him through what he himself has called forth, the rigorous like-for-like.”

Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, p348-353