The Flame Of Hope

"How about, instead, we show them the love of Jesus."

WE CAN’T steal hope from another person. We can’t use teaching of Truths to condemn anyone. A lot of what we teach congregations has become methods coined by us and not God. We must not get stuck in them, so that what we say becomes right or wrong. “My way or the highway.” I’m not talking about sins here, but our view of what we think is God’s opinion. We are forever protecting Him by forbidding people to be themselves, and I assure you that God knows us inside and out and loves us anyway.

He loves the addict, still clinging to his habit, the man or woman locked in sexual sin, the prodigal who is living in a far country, spending all he has. Jesus ate with sinners and was criticized by the Jewish leaders. But, again, those I’m talking about here are people who are what the apostle Paul called weak (Romans 14:1;1 Thessalonians 5:14). We are each one of us at a different level of maturity. We cannot say, “I know more,” and condemn another for not seeing that Truth yet. We cannot proclaim Truth and remove hope from someone not eye-to-eye with us.

This picture goes easily to a mother and father and their children. There are things parents do not ask a four-year-old to do. There are things a fifteen-year-old knows how to do but from their age level. Anything that removes hope should not be said. Hope is a good thing. God delights in hope. We’ve overdefined the things of faith, hope being a part of faith, making commandments out of our traditions.

Jesus said this to the Pharisees. They allowed adult children a supposed spiritual reason to not take care of their parents (Mark 7:10). Hear me here. He used something to correct behavior, which looked okay on the surface, and was not an obvious sin. Though He listed sins in that same passage, it was what the Jewish leaders now allowed children not to do, something which God had never said to them, that He called out. I heard a young Jewish man teach that the Torah states they are not to add or take away from it. I remember thinking that same instruction is in John’s Revelation. Yet, the Pharisees had added their instructions. And we’ve made ours in incorrect interpretations.

Isn’t our self-reasoned teaching of John’s prophecy an addition to it? The same is said of how to receive by faith. Worrying about what faith is by letter and how to behave and be in faith becomes, in our teaching, the same kind of self-reasoned law. That person didn’t speak faith right. That one still fights fear and so isn’t in faith. Another looks more to man than to God, we say. Do we call them out, for the sake of being right? How about, instead, we show them the love of Jesus.

In the Word. There were those He healed who had no faith. The man at the pool of Bethesda. The disciples saw Him still the storm and had no faith. He stilled it anyway (Mark 4:40). A father spoke out his unbelief (Mark 8:24). Jesus showed compassion. Every word we speak needs to tell people, “God is love. He heals because He loves. He never refuses to heal because His love is so high and wide and deep.”

In our actions. What we say and how we react. Are we behaving like Jesus, who stared at His death, that moment in time every bit as weighted in His gaze, as anyone who’s ever contemplated suicide? We must know this. He was 33 and chose to die. We must behave like Jesus, hated for being a Jew, mocked cruelly for being a Jew, beaten and crucified for being a Jew, yet He had no guile in His mouth and did not condemn the thief but gave Him Paradise.

I’m asking you to examine your theology, what you are saying to others that puts out their hope, and to take your motives to the throne and give them to Jesus. Who is not concerned with our p’s and q’s but looks at the heart. Overlook the other man’s faults and cover them with love instead (1 Peter 4:8).

Illustration by Muhammad Abadi at Unsplash


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Suzanne D. Williams, Author
www.suzannedwilliams.com
www.feelgoodromance.com