"But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” –Matthew 5:44
“Whoever is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and he who rules his spirit than he who takes a city.” –Proverbs 16:32
We’ve
all had that one person in our life that we need a little extra strength not to
knock them through a wall or push them off a cliff, right? Maybe it’s a brother
or sister, an ex, or a co-worker at work who just says the wrong thing at the
wrong time and gets under your skin a little easier than anybody else. You know
that person who causes you to have to leave the room and take several deep
breaths before you unleash fiery venom of nastiness at them. Yeah, we all have
a person come to mind when we read this. God knows I’ve had certain people in
my life that have required an extra measure of grace.
I
remember a kid when I was in high school who was just the most annoying person I’ve
ever met who would poke at me all day when I was trying to study just trying to
get a rise out of me so I’d want to beat the tar out of him. I wasn’t the only
one who he’d do this too either. Many times a day this kid would take a beating
from people for doing the same thing to them. It was definitely a big cry for
attention, that’s for sure! So how can we handle this kind of person in our everyday
lives so we don’t lose our cool and ruin our testimony? Well the truth is we
can learn a great deal about ourselves when we’re pressed by these kinds of
people. God is very possibly teaching us patience to react out of a spirit of
kindness instead of vindictiveness. Believe it or not these kinds of people who
require a lot more grace are actually helping us become more Christ-like in our
walk as Christian men.
It’s
easy to love the people who are nice to us but it requires a whole lot more
from us to love the unlovely people who are unpleasant and mean-spirited to us.
God has commanded us though to show his love to these people and “kill them
with kindness” in order to reach them. Many times these people can be won over
by our kindness while there are some people who may never change but the only
thing we can do is control how we react to them. We are responsible for own
actions, not theirs. Have you ever seen a football player get tripped or their jersey
grabbed by an opposing player so the player who had it done to them gets up and
pushes the offender only to have the referee throw the penalty flag at the
second offence costing his team 15 yards because he didn’t see the first
penalty? A general rule of thumb is that the reaction to an offence will be what
gets caught. Men, learn to keep your reaction in check and don’t lose your
cool. You’re the one who loses if you don’t react in the correct way. God is
using the difficult people in your life to teach you more about yourself. You
can’t escape it, these people are out there. You must learn to go through life
to be stretched so you can learn better self-control. You don’t grow in your
walk as a Christian man if everything is easy and you only love the people who
are good to you. Embrace the challenge and love the unlovely people around you.
Don’t go into shut down mode with these people and hide. Instead, ask God for
strength to keep your cool and to practice good self-control. This is manly behavior.
Anybody can react negatively but a real man responds well.
The hard to love people around us
can be as unpleasant as a rock in our shoe but God asks us to embrace the
challenge and step forward anyways to show them love.
No comments:
Post a Comment