I use to think of myself as a pretty patient person. I’m
flexible in difficult situations, I’m pretty easygoing. Africa has taught me
–well, Jesus has- but through Africa , He has
taught me that I am not a patient person, and anytime I need patience, it isn’t
going to come from me but only from Him.
It was after lunch on a Sunday afternoon, and I had just
taken a shower. Usually on Sunday
afternoons we (all the kids and us) all pack into the living room of House 4A
and watch a movie. I sit on the floor because the backless benches hurt my back
after half an hour, even though the floor isn’t much more comfortable. I sit
down, and 3 kids are already laying on me, smelly from playing outside. So by
this point, I’m already thinking about how I wasted the shower I just took,
which as a side note, was a cold shower. Next thing I know, I have been drooled
on for an hour, sneezed on, had my hair pulled, and my back hurts from sitting
hunched over on the floor. I was starting to get really annoyed, I mean like
really, and I wanted to leave the room. I think I even told myself that I was
going to leave if Matthew drooled on me again.
Then, I heard Jesus voice, even in the midst of this now
humorous situation. “You have been trying to love these children, these people,
this place, with your own love. This is impossible. Only through me can you
love them, and that goes for the people back home too.” I was completely struck
by this.
Too often I try to love through my own power and strength, and it is impossible. This seems to be a
reoccurring thing God is teaching me, so I want to repeat it for you to hear
too. You may already have this lesson down, God doesn’t teach us all the same
lesson at the same time, but I need to hear it. I need to read it. I need to
say it, again. And again. And probably again.
I can do nothing
apart from Christ.
Especially love. God is love, so how could we love without
Him?
I just finished reading “The Hiding Place” by Corrie Ten
Boom. As I was reading it, God showed me this lesson of love. Corrie was so
impacted by her sister Betsie’s love and immediate thoughts of Jesus and other
people before herself. It turned their nightmare Holocaust experience into a
deepening relationship with Jesus Christ. I had read a verse Sunday morning
that was just completely random, but as I finished “The Hiding Place”, I
realized that it went so well with what I was reading and learning.
Psalm 119:87-88
“They have
almost made an end of me on earth, but I have not forsaken your precepts. In
your steadfast love give me life, that I may keep the testimonies of your
mouth.”
Now, the drool, the sneezes, and the smell are nothing
in comparison to what David was experiencing in this chapter, and they are nothing
in comparison to what Corrie and Betsie experienced, but it’s the same lesson.
Corrie says in one of the last chapters that she had to learn that no
transformation and no strength could come from her, but only from God. And when
she needed the power to forgive her persecutors, she couldn’t do it. It had to
come from God. She said, “And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness
any more than on our goodness that the world’s healing hinges, but on His. When He tells us to love our enemies, He
gives, along with the command, the love itself.”
The only way I can glorify God is through forgetting myself
and loving His way. God promises us that He will lift us up and make us
powerful, but we have to trust in Him first.
God’s love is powerful, let it fill you and drive you in
whatever you do in life.
1 John 4:7-8
“Beloved,
let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born
of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God
is love.”
John 13:34-35
“A new
commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you,
you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my
disciples, if you have love for one another.”
John 15:5
“I am the
vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, it is he that
bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.”
Philippians 4:19
“And my God
will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ
Jesus.”
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