The Dithering of a District Diva

SUBSCRIBE to The Love Dare! Get The Love Dare in your Inbox!

I’ve had a month off, y’all — from just about everything besides conducting interviews. While I haven’t written about The Love Dare since Christmas, like a good jedi, I haven’t forgotten my teaching. The Holy Spirit is a fire that scorches me whenever I am tempted to act (or whenever I actually act) in an unloving manner. That’s an encouraging sign! The more you open your heart up to correction by the Holy Spirit, the more He will correct! Though it hurts my pride, it’s great to know, “the LORD disciplines those he loves, as a father the son he delights in.” Proverbs 3:12. And as the saying goes, “A bad day for the ego is a good day for the soul.”

But of course we all have our tricks to cheat on or get out of the things that are challenging. Mine is withdrawing. If I don’t have to be around people, then I won’t have to worry about drama, or getting hurt, or hurting others. Instant peace, right? Well, wrong.  As today’s Dare shows, God has created us to be in community with each other and to cherish each other as our own selves, something we can’t possibly do if we’re not interacting with others! So let’s start the bus up again and keep it rolling to Day 11:

Love Cherishes

Today’s Scripture(s): “Husbands ought also to love their own wives as their own bodies.” — Ephesians 5:28 Or, for the singles, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Mark 12:31.

Today’s Lesson: Stephen and Alex Kendrick, The Love Dare authors, ask us to consider two scenarios. The first is that you have a totaled car. Of course, if you can, you cash it out and try to by a new one with whatever money you get from your old one. The second is you severely broken hand. You don’t amputate it, you get x-rays, put it in a cast, treat it gently, do everything you can to heal your hand and get it working again. While both solutions seem reasonable to answers to the problems presented, only the second scenario explains how God expects us to treat the people in our lives.

When our relationships with people are broken, we can be quick to dump them, hoping to trade them in for new models with less problems. But when we rid people from our lives, we are not freeing ourselves, we are actually allowing something very valuable to be stolen from us.

We don’t often understand that every person has value. In Ephesians 1:18, Paul’s prayer for the Church in Ephesus is “that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in his holy people.”  Our eyes have to be opened to the fact that all of God’s people are a rich inheritance! We are valuable to Him.  We are so valuable that He sent His Son Jesus to die on the cross to save us.  And do you know what Christ’s reward was? Us! God said He would give Christ “the nations as His inheritance.” (Psalm 2:8).  We are so valuable to Christ that all He wanted in exchange for His death and sacrifice was us.  And since we are all so precious to Him, as Christians, we must start seeing each other and our relationships with each other as valuable, as well.

1 John 4:20-21 says: “If anyone says, I love God, and hates his brother, he is a liar. For if he does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen? And we have this commandment from Him, that he who loves God should love his brother also.” That means that our relationship with people ought to be a direct reflection of our relationship with God.

Now that we understand how valuable we ought to be to each other, the next step is putting that understanding into practice every day; how should we love each other? We know that we are to “love your neighbor as yourself,” as Christ commands in Mark 12:31, but what does that mean when some people don’t even love themselves and treat others the same way?  If we see the value in others — and ourselves — the way we act changes. Christ explains that we are to love each other as Christ loves us (John 13:34-35), and Christ showed His love for us by sacrificing Himself for us.  That means we have to sacrifice ourselves for our brothers and sisters. We have to meet their needs, and put them ahead of our own.  When we sinned for the trillionth time, when we broke God’s heart day after day, Christ didn’t throw in the towel with us, or write us off. Our sin drew Him to us. He came to earth to be with us because we were lost in sin. And just like when Adam and Eve sinned in the garden, God did not push them away, He went looking for them, asking “where are you?” In the same manner, then, we are to be drawn to sinners, not cast them away.

We don’t always understand each other’s value in our lives, but the devil does! John 10:10 says that the enemy’s goal is to steal, kill and destroy. He’s not trying to steal your replaceable things, but the things of supreme value to you, which are people. He has peeked into your future and knows that if you remain friends with this person, she’s going to get saved, or he’s going to help you build a church in a new location, or they’re going to help you win people for Christ. That is why the enemy attacks relationships so strongly and seeks to tear apart families. So we have to have conviction about our relationships; we have to say “this person is mine, I’m holding on to her, I’m not letting him go, these people are precious to me!” Colossians 2:8 says “do not let crafty and deceitful schemers take you hostage.” Don’t let them begin to root out that which God has planted in your life. The enemy can only steal what you allow him to take.

Once relationships are lost, it’s so hard to get back what was stolen. So, secure your relationships. And when you feel like you might be ready to let someone go because he or she has hurt you, look to 1 peter 3:8-9: “be like-minded, be sympathetic, love one another, be compassionate and humble. Do not repay evil with evil or insult with insult. On the contrary, repay evil with blessing, because to this you were called so that you may inherit a blessing.”

Check the condition of your relationships, family! It will reveal to you the condition of your soul.

Today’s Dare: Choose an action that says to someone “I cherish you.”

Scriptures I’m Meditating On:

1 Corinthians 12:21-26:

21 The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” And the head cannot say to the      feet, “I don’t need you!” 22 On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be       weaker are indispensable, 23 and the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor. And the parts that are unpresentable are treated with special modesty, 24 while our presentable parts need no special treatment. But God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it, 25 so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. 26 If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.

Mark 10:51:

“What do you want me to do for you?” Jesus asked him.

Song of the Day: “I Need You to Survive”

Buy THE LOVE DARE!
//

Comments

comments