It's funny how easily I forget things . . . like how my heart seems to be caked and encapsulated with dirt. It's easy enough to dust it off and feel sufficient for a while, but you can't brush off the dried filth in my valves, hardened vessels and obstructed coronary arteries. I need some invasive procedure for that. Good thing Jesus knows how to revive me . . . because I can't do it.
Anyway . . . I'm recognizing how easy it is for me to ignore and push away certain issues. Certain themes, struggles and sins seem to resurface and help me to realize how much I truly need a savior. Helps me to realize how full of wrath I am by nature, how wretched I truly am - more than I like to acknowledge on a daily basis.
Why is it that it's so much easier to stereotype people, to build up walls, to callous my heart, become bitter and prideful?
It's funny how time makes you more distant and removed from a person, experience or situation. It really makes it easy for you to water someone down, to make them out to be a faceless, emotionless jerk . . . and then from that, you create a stereotype or a prototype . . . using my past wounds as a weapon against an entire genre of people. And that's not really fair, now is it?
It's funny how you become so removed . . . only to revisit concrete, objective things from that time period . . . and then you realize that you were wrong. That person did care, and they weren't the stereotype you made them to be. That puts a crack in my wall . . . which is starting to disintegrate.
But it's a good thing. I want to be wrong. My stereotype is very harsh, dismal and hopeless. It causes my pride to hypertrophy, and that it very sinful. I want to be robbed of my pride, of my stereotypes, of my hostility. Jesus didn't die so that I could be hateful or build walls.
Jesus is the one who dissolved hostility . . . God reconciling Himself to us. If God has shown me such mercy, love, and grace . . . and if scripture teaches oneness in the body of Christ, then it makes sense for me to follow suit. I am called to be an ambassador of Christ, which entails a great deal of love and acceptance, not hostility or stereotyping.
For he himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility . . . His purpose was to create in himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace, and in this one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near.
-Ephesians 2:14-17
It's interesting how we think something has sunk in and affects what we go through...until we really need to apply it. Then it's put to the test and we see it in a whole new way. The good news is, that's how we really learn it. (If we embrace it. It's hard.)
ReplyDelete