SHINE

SHINE

By Nancy Segovia

Shine

Copyright © 2003 by Nancy M. Segovia

ISBN-13: 978-1484858486

ISBN-10: 1484858484

First Printing 2003

Published by Faith and Reason Publishing; all Scripture references are from the King James Version unless otherwise noted.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

Cover Design by: Simon Parry

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my family: husband Jake and wonderful daughters: Delores, Jamie, Jody, Andelaine, and Joy. I’ve never understood why they love me so much, but I am grateful that they do.

I also want to thank my wonderful editor, whose tireless effort has made this work so much better.

Table of Contents

Introduction

PART I

Chapter 1 − Getting to Know You,

Getting to Know All About You

Chapter 2 ‒ What’s Love Got to Do With It?

Chapter 3 − Crackpots and Lovers

Chapter 4 − Ready, Willing, and Able

Chapter 5 − Walk the Talk

Chapter 6 − Be Careful

What You Pray For

PART II

Chapter 7 − Walk a Mile in My Shoes

Chapter 8 − Who Me?

Not Me, Couldn’t Be

Chapter 9 − Here Come ’da Judge

Chapter 10 − The Lifter of My Head

Chapter 11 − People Are

More Important

Chapter 12 − The Dirty Word

Chapter 13 − The Bottom Line

Afterword

About the Author

The Gardener

My soul wintered in a valley of grief,

Bitter icicles clung jealously to all that I touched,

Cold and hateful, my snow-bound thoughts,

Lifeless and barren in that once fertile land.

The Gardener brings spring to my frigid soul,

Gently melting its layers of ice,

And surely stripping through its layers of rot,

He lovingly plants His garden.

He carefully nurtures His sweet blossoms rare,

Love, hope, and courage bloom in the sun,

The twisted brambles and deadly weeds

Withdraw their poisonous roots from my soul.

The garden is fruitful, the Gardener generous,

With Christ as the Gardener of my soul

I will reap a harvest of living fruit,

Eternally nourished, I will bloom in the Son.

by Nancy Segovia

Introduction

Walk through almost any wetland meadow and you see tiny, bright yellow wildflowers that dot the fields like pinpoints of sunlight on a grass-green carpet. So small that from afar you almost overlook them, yet up close so numerous they are impossible to miss. Their little cup-shape buds wave gently in the breezes. Their glorious light draws the eye.

The meek and diminutive buttercup grows in meadows around the world. And although some people see only a weed that needs to be yanked, others behold a beautiful wildflower. Children, however, know its secret, how when you hold it under your chin in the sunlight, your skin reflects its bright yellow light. It is almost as if the flower’s true nature shines not only off you but through you.

Light. From Scripture we know that Jesus was and is “the light of the world” John 8:12. Scripture tells us that when we accept Jesus as our Savior, His Spirit and His light come to dwell in us. We also know that we are called to let this light shine through us. In Matthew 5:16 Jesus commanded us, “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.”

Yet often His light in us is dim or “hidden under a bushel.” Mud from the toils and trials of life hide its beauty. Other times it flutters in a storm of sorrows. Like a delicate blossom in a whirlwind, it is on the verge of being blown away.

But always His light survives, waiting like the buttercup for a moment of sunlight to reflect its glory. Finding that Sonlight, protecting it, nourishing it, and letting it shine through us onto others is a lifelong task. But unlike the buttercup that gives only momentary joy, when we let His light shine through, the joy it provides lasts for eternity.

Allowing God’s light to shine through you is not an easy task. It means being honest with yourself and others. It means putting aside petty grievances and annoyances. It means following Jesus’ commandment in John 15:12, that we “love one another, as I have loved you.”

A tall task, perhaps an impossible task. That’s what I used to think. But it is not impossible, not when we know that Jesus is always here to help us, and not when we break it down into simple steps. These are not necessarily easy steps, but they are simple ones. We don’t have to take giant steps, like Mother Teresa, and give up our families, jobs, or personal interests to let His light shine through. We can start here, now, today, in our homes, jobs, and churches by taking one small step at a time. You begin by seeing and knowing the light, and then follow by cleaning away one small muddy patch at a time, or by sheltering the light when the storms blow, so that the light continues to shine regardless of the circumstances.

These steps are not like the steps in a staircase. You don’t have to climb them in a particular order to reach the top. You can take them independently of each other, singly or altogether. You can skip a step, or two, or three. You can go from bottom to top in one giant leap. How you progress makes no difference to God—what matters is that you progress.

You can do it if you are willing to let God work in you and for you. And, when you have accomplished this—even if only for the briefest time, if only once a day or once a month—you will know that you have become a “buttercup for Jesus,” letting His light shine through you and onto others.

PART I

And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment.

Mark 12:30

Chapter 1 − Getting to Know You,

Getting to Know All About You

He saith unto them, But whom say ye that I am? And Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.

Matthew 16: 15−16

One Sunday my pastor asked us to share our thoughts regarding Jesus, about whom we believed Him to be. Some answered, “My Savior,” others, “My Redeemer,” and still others, “The lover of my soul.”

I thought about their responses for a while. All the things they said were true, but they were too ethereal for me. Who was the Jesus that I had come to know recently? Who was He to me personally?

Finally I spoke up and said, “Thank you, Jesus, for being my teacher and my friend.” For this was the Jesus I had come to know best at that time in my life.

However, knowing Jesus as my teacher and friend did not negate the other things that Jesus was and is for me. Instead it emphasized the things that Jesus was doing in my life as I struggled to know Him more fully. He was my teacher, and He continues to teach me to love and know Him better. He is a friend who will never hurt me, fail me, or desert me. He is my light and one with whom I must continually seek connection.

Our connection to this source of spiritual light can be compared to the natural process of photosynthesis in which the buttercup absorbs sunlight to help it grow. It doesn’t need to know the source of this light. It doesn’t need to recognize it or acknowledge it. Photosynthesis is an inherent process, part of its nature and a vitally necessary one for its well-being, because without the ability to absorb light the buttercup dies. So desperately does the buttercup need the sun, that in yet another genetic process, phototropism, it turns its face automatically toward the light. The buttercup continually turns toward the light to absorb as much of its life-giving energy as possible.

In the same way the buttercup turns to face the sun to receive the full benefit of its light, we must also turn our faces toward the Son. Unfortunately, for some of us, myself included, this is not an instinctual process. It is something we must learn and practice. To do this we must first come to know and recognize the source of the light we need. We must come to know the Son.

How do we know Him? Secular historians and some modern Christian scholars have sought to find the “historical” Jesus. Academic conclaves such as the Jesus Seminar have searched nonbiblical, historical records for clues to the identity of the man Jesus Christ. What they have been able to determine, without using the Bible as a reference, can be summed up in three short sentences: Jesus was a human being. He was born. He died. That’s it. All the rest is speculation.

Without the Bible, therefore, we know nothing about Jesus except for those three basic facts. At this time we have no historical records outside of Scripture to tell us who and what He was and is. It follows, then, that to know Jesus, we must turn to Scripture, and specifically the New Testament.

The Old Testament also points the way to Christ. It includes many prophecies about the coming Savior, including His names (Isaiah 9:6). However, to really know the man Jesus Christ—to know His thoughts, His character, His heart—we need to turn to the New Testament.

Reading the Bible may seem a daunting task. There is so much to learn and study. But I have discovered the simple way to do this: one verse at a time. Read a verse, then reread it one word at a time, and then one sentence at a time. Have next to you during your Bible time a good dictionary and a Hebrew/Greek concordance. Close your eyes and let the meaning of each word sink in. Ponder how one word relates to the other. Think on all the various meanings of that particular word, and determine if one meaning is more relevant to you than another. If there is a scriptural notation in your Bible about a word or phrase, look it up and study its meanings or how the word or phrase is used in other places in the Bible.

The meaning of some verses may be relatively simple to discern. Others, however, may be so complex that it may take years to understand their full meaning and to comprehend all the nuances of and clues to Jesus’ true nature that God provides for us. However, this should not discourage you from trying. Rather, it should encourage you, because the layers of meaning point to the majesty and unimaginable mysteries of God and can lead you to a deeper understanding of who He really is.

For example, consider John 1:1, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” According to the original Greek in which this verse was written, Word translates as Greek logos, which has multiple meanings including reason. Thus this verse could be translated, “In the beginning was the reason, and the reason was with God, and the reason was God.”

Once I began studying the verse in light of this translation, hundreds of questions and ideas popped into my mind. It was more than I could wrap my mind around, and even the answers I’ve come up with leave me with more questions, such as, If God is the reason, what is He the reason of? Is He the reason for our existence, our purpose, the universe, all of creation?

Studying the New Testament in this manner seems a tall order, and for someone like myself, who is not always motivated by the need for improvement, the rewards may not seem worth the effort. Yet the reward is worth the effort, and God is faithful to help us seek Him. If you want to know His Son better, ask Him for the grace, strength, persistence, and self-discipline to do this, and He will answer your prayer with whatever you need to accomplish this goal.

The reward: By studying the New Testament you are guaranteed to come to know Jesus better. Once you come to know Him, you are guaranteed to come to love Him.

People say they love chocolate cake, or their new cars, or their new computers, or their whatevers. Why is that? It’s because they have come to know the attributes of, and the potential pleasures that might be received from these things.

Chocolate cake, for example, has a certain rich flavor that gives satisfaction other desserts can’t match. Chocolate cake fans know this and come to depend upon it; with each bite this knowledge is reaffirmed.

The same is true of those who love new cars, computers, etc. They know the benefits and attributes of their toys, and they depend on those characteristics to satisfy them.

So too, when you have come to really know Christ, you will come to depend on Him for the kind of satisfaction and love that only He can give. When you have received that love you will begin loving Him in return. Love begets love. The act of receiving love leads to the act of giving love, and more specifically, giving love back to God and to others.

By knowing Jesus we can begin to love Him. By loving Him we fulfill His greatest commandment: “And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment. And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these.” Mark 12:30‒31

The first part of this commandment is fulfilled as you begin to know Jesus. But to love Jesus with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength takes time and effort. Learning to do this leads us to the next step in becoming a buttercup for Jesus.

PRAYER

Father, help me to really know who You are and to know Your son, Jesus. Help me to not only know about Him, but to know Him as my teacher, friend, Savior, and lover of my soul. Help me to know that He is always there for me like a best friend and lover. Help me to hear His voice and to be able to see His Spirit in all things whether they are good or bad.

Help me to love You as You should be loved. Help me to find the light of Jesus so that I might shine in Your son at all times, in all places, and under all circumstances.

Chapter 2 ‒ What’s Love Got to Do With It?

Behold to obey is better than sacrifice…

1 Samuel 15:22b

When I first came to know the Lord and started hearing Him speak to me, on occasion I would come to understand that He wanted me to do something specific. But I am by nature stubborn and rebellious, so my automatic reaction when I am told to do something is to say, “NO!”

My next response, “And you can’t make me!”

I tried this response on God more than once. (I can be an amazingly slow learner). But eventually I learned that this sort of reply to God’s commands just doesn’t fly. Although He won’t make me do anything I don’t want to do, He can make my rebellion and stubbornness so uncomfortable that doing what He wants is a much more pleasant alternative than continuing in my obstinacy.

More than once I have been given a firsthand opportunity to know what Jonah must have felt like in the belly of that whale. Jonah basically told God, “No, and You can’t make me,” and then got swallowed by the whale as the result of his refusal to obey. It wasn’t until he repented and decided to go along with God’s will that he was set free.

God, in His great faithfulness, has also allowed me to suffer the consequences of my obstinacy. And like Jonah, I eventually made the decision to obey God, to do what God commanded.

You see, it is our decision to make―to obey God or to ignore Him. Unlike the buttercups that have no choice in the matter, which He created to always face the sun, He gave us the ability to make choices, to exercise our right of free will. We can be disobedient when we want to. Our Father in Heaven, who is faithful in all things, will not violate the right He granted us to make that choice.

This fact remains true no matter how much our rebellion and disobedience hurts us, no matter how much it grieves Him to see us suffering because of our poor choices. For God does weep over His children. Like any loving parents whose children are in pain, who want only the best for their children and whose hearts break when their children suffer the consequences of their actions, our Father in Heaven also wants only the best for us and grieves over us when we suffer the painful consequences of our disobedience.

It says in Genesis 6:6, “And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.” And Psalms 95:10, “Forty years long was I grieved with [this] generation, and said, It [is] a people that do err in their heart, and they have not known my ways.” And Ephesians 4:30, “And grieve not the holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption.”

Because the Scriptures make it abundantly clear that the Holy Spirit is God’s spirit, (I’m not even going to try and explain the Trinity; that mystery of faith is better left in other hands), then what the Scriptures are saying here is that we should avoid causing grief to God. The cause of this grief, as the other verses point out, is our disobedience and rebellion against His ways.

At this point the question, “What’s love got to do with it?” comes into play. The answer is simple. You can’t grieve over something you don’t care about, and the deeper the love, the deeper the grief. God’s love for us is unequaled in all the earth. As the apostle puts it in John 3:16, and which is so frequently quoted, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

Sacrifice your own child? I am the mother of five daughters and the grandmother of six grandchildren. After I became a Christian I tried to imagine giving up one of my children to save some stranger’s life. The bottom line is always: “No way! It ain’t gonna happen. Over my dead body!”

So we are faced with three unquestionable facts. First, God loves us as no other on earth or in Heaven. Second, when we disobey Him, it grieves His heart. Third, the greatest commandment He gave us is to love Him with all our hearts, minds, souls, and strength. Jesus says in Mark 12:30, “And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment.” To do less is disobedience.

When we apply this concept of obedience to Jesus’ command to love God, it takes on a whole new dimension. Jesus was very specific. We are to love God with all our hearts, minds, souls, and strength.

For me, this seemed impossible. How could I show God that I loved Him? How could I put Him first in all things? I mean, I couldn’t fix Him a fancy dinner to show how much I loved him. I couldn’t massage away the tensions in His neck. I couldn’t even make sure His laundry was done on time. So what was I supposed to do?

Because I am by nature a very touchy-feely type of person, I wanted some physical way to prove my love for God. I wanted an earthly way, a human way to express my love for a God I couldn’t physically embrace.

I was pondering this conundrum throughout the time when I was taking a class, “The Philosophy and Theology of Love.” One of the books I was required to read was The Story of a Soul by St. Therese of Lisieux. I came across a statement in that book that was so simple yet so profound that I will never forget it. Basically it said that God doesn’t want our hard work―He wants our love and obedience. Later the author expressed another, related idea: anything done without love is essentially worthless.

Talk about a revelation. It was a lightning bolt right between my blind eyes. I know, I know. The Bible says the same thing. But again, I can be an amazingly slow learner.

The bottom line was that if I want to show God how much I love Him, then I should worship Him for who He is. That is, for His goodness and righteousness, or His holiness, if you prefer. And, I should obey Him.

Worship has always come easy for me. It seems I was created to worship God, and the Scriptures appear to bear this out. Psalms 102:18 says, “This shall be written for the generation to come: and the people which shall be created shall praise the LORD.” Again in Psalms 22:27, “All the ends of the world shall remember and turn unto the LORD: and all the kindreds of the nations shall worship before thee.” Psalms 66:4 says, “All the earth shall worship thee, and shall sing unto thee; they shall sing [to] thy name. Selah. Again, “All nations whom thou hast made shall come and worship before thee, O Lord; and shall glorify thy name.” Psalms 86:9

Many more verses deal with worshipping the Lord, but I think you get the idea, so I will quote only one more for a final emphasis on how we are created to worship God. Isaiah 66:23, “And it shall come to pass, [that] from one new moon to another, and from one Sabbath to another, shall all flesh come to worship before me, saith the LORD.”

Worshipping the Lord is so integral to God’s creation that Jesus said in Luke 19:40 that if the people didn’t worship Him the very rocks of the earth would.

For me, worship is easy because it is the only time when I feel completely whole. When I am in His presence, worshipping Him, I leave everything else behind. All my fears, worries, doubts, and insecurities vanish in His glorious presence. With that kind of reward for worship, it is little wonder that I enjoy it so much and have no trouble bowing before Him.

However, obedience is another matter. As I mentioned before, I tend to be rebellious, stubborn, and disobedient. But not long after I had this “amazing” revelation about the role of obedience as an expression of love, I recalled that Jesus said pretty much the same thing in John 14:15, “If ye love me, keep my commandments.”

Well, duh! How dense can I be? Of course! Obedience to God’s command is the ultimate expression of love for Him.

Again, we ask, “What’s love got to do with it?”

I have been married a while now, and though sometimes it seems like an eternity (only kidding, Honey), I can still remember the first blooms of romance, how I longed for a smile from my future husband, and how when I received it, my heart would glow like a buttercup in the sun. I can recall how I wanted to please him and how I felt devastated when I did something that displeased him.

In other words, when we are in love with someone, we think of pleasing them first and put our own desires on the back burner because gaining their approval— their love in return for our love—becomes the most important thing in our lives.

That’s what love’s got to do with it.

Obedience to God’s commandments is the natural extension of loving God. We love Him, so we want to please Him, and we please Him by being obedient.

This is simple to say but sometimes not so easy to do. In earthly love relationships, the “bloom fades from the rose” over time, and people generally settle into a give-and-take type of relationship. Putting the other person first can metamorphose into, “Sure, Honey, I can do that, but let me finish washing the dishes first,” or some other conditional response.

This is usually the only model for love that most of us experience before we come to know Christ as our Savior. Consequently we fall into the habit of putting ourselves first and our loves second. And sometimes our love for others becomes conditional upon them loving us first and them proving that love to us before we reciprocate.

But Jesus’ love for us is unconditional. It is not based on give or take. It is based on His giving and then His giving some more. He loves us even before we come to know and accept Him. He loves us regardless of our obedience or disobedience. He loves us so much He died for us.

Some people, skeptics and cynics, might consider this type of love to be foolish because it does nothing but give and give and give and often receives nothing in return. Or worse, it’s returned with scorn and contempt.

But lovers have a habit of making fools of themselves for the sake of love. Some might even consider them to be “crazy in love.” Yet, when you are involved in a love relationship so deep that it is the only thing that matters in your life, it is nearly impossible not to make a fool of yourself for the sake of love. In fact, if you obey Jesus’ command to love God with your whole heart, mind, soul, and strength, you just might be considered a crackpot.

PRAYER

Father, help me to learn to love You so much that I will want to do only what You want me to do. Help me to be obedient, not because I am afraid of punishment, but because I want only to please you in all things.

Help me to worship you in spirit and in truth. Help me to know what the truth is and to be obedient to it. Help me to follow you with my mind, spirit, will, emotions, and my whole heart so that Jesus’ light might shine through me at all times, in all places, and under all circumstances.

Chapter 3 − Crackpots and Lovers

Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.

1 John 2:15

I heard a story once about a servant and his cracked pot. Every day he took his cracked pot to the river to fetch water for his master, and every day the pot leaked water all the way back to the house. So much water, in fact, that the servant had to make two trips to get enough water to fill the household vessels.

Finally, after many years, the drippy, leaking pot spoke to the servant. “Good man,” said the pot, “I fear I have been an imperfect tool all these years, for I am cracked and have caused you extra work, making your job all the more difficult. And I am very sorry. Why don’t you throw me away and get a new, whole one to use?”

The servant was more than a little surprised to hear the pot talking to him, but he took it in stride and answered, “My good and faithful pot, you have served me well. For the water you leaked helped the flowers that line my path to grow, thus easing my toils and lifting my heart. Without you, they would have withered and died a long time ago, and so would have my soul.”

The lesson here appeared obvious to me. We are all imperfect, but God can use our imperfections to help others and ourselves in ways we can never imagine.

But as I studied about loving Jesus more, another thought occurred to me. Cracked pots can’t hold much. The bigger the crack, the emptier the vessel, but empty vessels are exactly what God needs. God can’t come in and fill us with His Spirit and His love if we are already full of other stuff. In other words, if we are full of love for this world and its stuff, then there is no room for God’s love and for loving God completely in return.

There is an interesting verse in 2 Corinthians 4. Verse 7 says, “But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us.” I found it interesting because one of the many definitions of earthen vessels according to Vine’s Dictionary is potsherds (shards)—broken pieces of crockery. And potsherds are very, very interesting, at least to archaeologists.

When archaeologists discover a new dig site and begin excavating, usually one of the first things they look for is the midden heap, the ancient equivalent of a garbage dump, because that is where they most likely will discover ancient potsherds. From these potsherds they can determine a wealth of information. From the type of firing processes and materials used they can determine the age of the settlement. From the designs and glazes they can determine whether the village traded with other local or foreign cultures. From preserved food residue they can determine what type of agricultural activities the people engaged in, and so on. In other words, from potsherds archaeologists can determine what kind of stuff the ancient peoples had in their lives.

What a fascinating concept. I found myself asking, What kind of potsherd am I? What kind of stuff am I holding? Am I holding Jesus in me or a bunch of other junk? Well, the answer was soon apparent. I recognized the need to empty myself of all that was not of God, specifically those things that involved my selfish pride and ambitions. But how?

Here again comes the question: “What’s love got to do with it?”

For me, love—love for God—has everything to do with it. To love God completely there had to be nothing else in me except that love. I needed to empty my pot so that God could fill it. But again the question, How? arose.

The Apostle John said it best in John 3:30, “He must increase, but I must decrease.” This became for me a vital clue, but not the full answer I was seeking. I still couldn’t answer: How?

I needed to empty myself of self and all its self-centered goals to make room for Jesus. At the time that I was ruminating on how to do this, I was studying for my course, “The Philosophy and Theology of Love,” when I discovered some medieval writings by some early Christian saints. Over and over again as I studied these saints, I learned that they wrote continually on the concept of selflessness: to be empty of self, its desires, and its single-minded focus on the individual instead of on God.

That was a tough task, one I failed quite miserably. As I read I discovered that I am no saint in the classic (canonized) sense of the word (though I am according to the biblical definition). I quickly realized that, for me, becoming selfless was impossible.

As I stewed in my pot, which was now filled with recrimination and guilt, my pastor happened to speak on this very verse. He pointed out that the verse reads first, “…He must increase,” and afterward appear the words, “so that I might decrease.”

Duh!

I had been going about it all backwards. I sought selflessness, the decrease part, came first—an act I instigated by choice, and then the Jesus part (His increase) came second.

I say that I had it backwards because letting Jesus come in first is a lot like pouring water into a pot filled with mud. If you keep pouring in water, and pouring, and pouring, even into a cracked pot, eventually the water washes away all the mud, and all that’s left is clear, clean water. Letting Jesus’ love fill us up first will surely and completely wash away all the mud in our lives.

And that’s what love’s got to do with it.

We must keep our faces turned toward Jesus and His great love for us at all times in the same way the buttercups do when they turn to face the sun so that they can grow and shine.

If we keep our thoughts on Jesus’ love for us, if we let God pour His spirit into us and keep on letting Him pour it into our pot, cracked as it may be, eventually it will push out anything that is not of God, and we will be filled only with His Spirit and His love. Selflessness will be achieved, not through our efforts, but through His great love.

Once this happens, once we are filled with God’s love, it is impossible not to return that love. We will become like young lovers, foolishly, ecstatically in love with God and exhibiting all the signs and symptoms of a couple in love.

Almost anyone who has had a crush on someone knows the signs. You talk about the other person constantly, you write his/her name over and over again, you hold mental conversations with that person, you glow when he/she smiles at you, you wake up thinking about them and your last thoughts at night are about them. You have become a crackpot because of the great love in you.

When your cracked pot is filled with God’s love, then you too have become a crackpot for God. It’s the best thing that can happen to you.

That is, if you are ready, willing, and able.

PRAYER

Show me Your love, Lord. Open my eyes that I might see it and feel the reality of it. Help me respond to that love with love. Help me to realize that I only love You because You first loved me. Father, help me to not only love You but to fall in love with You.

Help me to be “crazy in love” with your Son. Help me to love Him so much that loving Him almost hurts. Help me to be consumed by a passionate desire to be closer to Him, so that I might never do anything that will separate me from His glorious love, and that His light might shine through me at all times, in all places, and under all circumstances.

Chapter 4 − Ready, Willing, and Able

Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.

Matthew 6:10

Okay, I was ready now. I had the information I needed, and I thought I was willing. I mean I felt willing. I prayed and prayed to be able to love God completely. I was being obedient, right? I mean what’s wrong with wanting to love God more? I knew it was my heart’s desire and that there are no bad prayers, right? But I soon discovered another very disconcerting problem, one that left me floundering in a sea of confusion.

One night at a Bible study, an elder in our church happened to speak on the selfishness of most of our prayers. How we pray for this thing or that thing, or something or the other along those same self-centered lines. He pointed out how even praying for healing for our loved ones can be considered selfish if we are praying because we can’t stand to lose them or see them suffer. We are not praying for their benefit. We are praying for our own needs or comfort.

I was struck by his truth in regard to my relationship with God, how a lot of my prayers had been about me and for me. So much for selflessness!

But the problem I faced was more complicated than that. How could I pray to love God more without being selfish, or more specifically, self-centered? For this type of prayer is totally self-centered. But how could I achieve a greater love for God if I did not pray about it?

For some reason, the folks I shared this conundrum with at the Bible study that night did not seem to understand the problem I faced. So I said yet another self-centered prayer, asking God to resolve this problem, because I knew I didn’t have the answers and, apparently, neither did anyone else.

I left there feeling a bit frustrated, but hopeful, for I had grown enough in the Lord to know that He always answers this kind of prayer. Matthew 7:7 says, “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.”

There are many interpretations for this verse, and I don’t particularly agree with them all, especially the ones that use it to claim material blessings. I don’t believe, as some do, that all we have to do is claim a new car, a new house, a new job, a new whatever, and stand on this promise to receive it. God never promised all of us material prosperity. If He had, He would have never said, “For ye have the poor with you always, and whensoever ye will ye may do them good: but me ye have not always,” Mark 14:7. Nor would He have left so many instructions in His Word for their care. Nor would He have called them blessed as He did in Luke 6:20, “And he lifted up his eyes on his disciples, and said, Blessed [be ye] poor: for yours is the kingdom of God.”

It seems pretty straightforward to me that God, who knows everything, plans everything, and cares for each and every one of us, has, in His great wisdom, allowed there to be poor people, and at the same time ordered that those more fortunate should care for those that are unable to care for themselves.

However, this does not mean that He does not grant us the desires of our hearts. He does, when and if He sees fit, and sometimes in response to our prayers.

I heard a story once that seems to explain this concept. It goes like this: There once was a boy who prayed daily for a pony. He grew into a young man, and he still desperately wanted a pony. Finally, God said to the teen, “Okay, son, I’ll give you that pony. But if you had just waited a little longer, I had this bright red Mazaratti just waiting for you to become mature enough to enjoy it.”

The Bible is clear in 1 Corinthians 2: 11 that no man can know the mind of God. It says, “For what man knoweth the things of man, save the spirit of man which is in him? even so, the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God.”

The pony story makes that point well. When we pray for some material blessing, God, who knows our needs even before we ask, has a plan already in place to fulfill them. However, His plan may not be the same as ours, and if it is different, we can trust that it is always better than what we asked for. The old saying, “Be careful for what you pray for, you just might get it,” seems to be especially appropriate in these types of instances.

However, when it comes to spiritual blessings, the Lord never withholds His hand, never says no, and is always faithful to answer these types of requests. So I left the Bible study concerned, yet trusting that God would solve the dilemma I now faced.

I had been home only about a half an hour and was loading up the dishwasher when it happened. I received the answer as I pondered who the Jesus is whom I had come to know. He is my Teacher, Rabboni, as Mary Magdalene called Him. And what did He teach us? He taught us to pray, among other things. And that’s when the answer hit me. He taught us to pray! He said, “Thy will be done.”

That was the answer! That was the perfect, most unselfish, and selfless prayer I could pray. And because Scripture states in Philippians 1:6 that, “Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform [it] until the day of Jesus Christ,” God had given me the confidence of Scripture, that He would answer this prayer. All my striving prayers were over.

It is almost impossible to describe the sense of peace that enveloped me and lasted through the rest of the evening and for several days afterward. Neither is my excitement easy to describe. It was so simple, so elementary, and I couldn’t understand why everybody wasn’t as excited as I was about this amazing revelation. I’m afraid I made rather a bore of myself, sharing this new insight with anyone unfortunate to be trapped in my presence for five minutes or more.

Simple doesn’t necessarily mean easy, but in this instance my predilection for doing things backwards worked to my advantage.

Before I explain that, let me explain exactly what agreeing to, “Thy will be done” fully means. It means, at least for me, surrendering totally and fully to God. It means trusting fully in God and not withholding one iota of your being from His care. This trust is what makes you able to surrender to Him, and for most, this trust develops after you come to know and love Him. Trust is the logical consequence of coming to know and love someone who is trustworthy. It is the natural sum you reach when the other two components are combined.

In my case, the trust came first and the knowing and the love followed. It is typical of me to have to learn the hard way, to overlook the obvious, and to get the simplest things backwards. And when I accepted Christ as my Savior, I followed my traditional patterns.

For months prior to my salvation experience I had been treated for depression, an anxiety disorder, and bipolar disease. In addition, I suffered from frequent panic attacks. I was an emotional basket case and on so many drugs that, at one point, my physician stated that if he couldn’t get me stabilized with my current levels of medications that I would have to be hospitalized. So my decision to turn my life over to the Lord was based on desperation.

In plain words, I had tried everything but Christ and had no place else to turn. I had used illegal drugs, sex, food, and alcohol, and had tried almost every religion except Christianity in my search for peace and healing, all of which failed and left me even more miserable. Jesus Christ was my last hope, so in desperation I turned my life over to Him completely.

It has always been my policy to trust people until they prove themselves otherwise. I used this policy when raising my teens. Boy was that hard, but it worked. So when I turned my life over to Jesus, I did the same thing. I made a conscious decision to trust Him completely until He proved Himself untrustworthy.

I soon found out that I had not misplaced my trust. I admit to knowing a lot about God, Jesus, and the Bible from a historical standpoint, book knowledge, if you prefer. But when I surrendered to Him, in no way did I know Him personally. There is a big difference in knowing about someone and knowing Him personally.

In today’s information-saturated society, we can know almost everything there is to know about the president, but very few of us can say that we know him personally. So it was with me: without knowing Jesus personally, I decided to trust Him completely. I had nothing else in my life I could trust, and He seemed to me the most logical place, the only place left to put my trust.

In the months following my salvation experience, I would frequently speak aloud the words, “I will trust in You.” No matter how bad things looked, no matter how many bills piled up, no matter how crazy my thoughts became, I repeated those words. When a panic attack would strike and I my heart would start racing and I wanted to run into the streets screaming in terror, I would repeat those words and think to myself: If God wants to take me home, now, okay. So be it. I will trust in You.

It still amazes me the way the fear—a major symptom of panic attacks—would flee when I said, “Okay God, whatever you want.” As a result of this surrender to God’s will and my trust in Him, it was only a few months or so before I was off all the medications.

I am not saying that every day is a good day, for I still have some rough ones on occasion. The difference is that now I trust God to get me through them. What has been harder for me is to trust God with my finances. For some reason, I can’t seem to get a firm grasp on this concept and its application to my financial dealings. I continually have to re-surrender this area of my life to God. But He repeatedly shows me that He is faithful in this area as well.

I’ll never forget the time when both my husband and I were unemployed. We had run out of firewood (which we used to heat our two-story home) and had no choice but to use our electric baseboard heaters to keep the house warm. At the time we were living in the high elevations of the Colorado Rocky Mountains where the winter temperatures are frequently well below zero. In a space of two months our electric bill had run up to a total of over eight hundred and fifty dollars.

Our electricity was provided by a privately held corporation, so it was not subject to federal regulations concerning disconnection of service for nonpayment. In other words, if you don’t pay, they shut off your service regardless of the weather, the temperature, or your circumstances. Ours was due to be shut off at five p.m. on a Friday, and there was no way we could pay the bill. It might as well have been eighty-five hundred dollars instead of eight hundred and fifty dollars. There was no way we were going to come up with that kind of money.

I was worrying myself into an emotional meltdown, and I kept repeating, “I will trust in You,” but it wasn’t making it from my lips to my heart.

Sometime around midmorning, our insurance agent called. Two months prior, our home had been struck by lightning. Over twelve hundred dollars of electronic equipment had been destroyed. (My husband works in electronics and was working out of the house at the time, or trying to, that is.) We had been waiting and waiting for our settlement check, but it had not arrived.

That morning, as the clocked ticked down on our electric service, our insurance agent called to say that our settlement check was ready and in her office. All we needed to do was pick it up and cash it.

Praise God! It was large enough to pay the electric bill and buy groceries.

I have received numerous “in the nick of time” blessings like this, so I feel as though I should know better by now. But still, I sometimes worry and fret about the bills and finances. Obviously, this is an area of my life that still needs work, and I know that He will be faithful to complete it. Ugh! More lessons for me to experience, but someday I will get it right.

However, when it comes to the other areas of my life, I know I have given them over to the Lord simply because I trust Him so completely; therefore I was able long before I was willing or ready.

As mentioned in previous chapters, I am also very rebellious and stubborn. The Lord has worked on these, and is still working with me on them, and so I have become, at least most of the time, willing.

With the revelation I had received in my kitchen, I was also now ready, but as usual I wanted more. I admit to having an addictive personality. If I like something, I want more of it, always. And I always want more of whatever it is than is good for me.

I feel so blessed that with God it is more than okay to be obsessive and addictive. He desires for us to want more of Him, is willing to give us as much of Himself as we desire, and there is no question that He is good for us. We can’t O.D. on God.

I decided to look up the verse that had come to me while I was loading the dishwasher, the one in which Jesus teaches us to pray, and I read it in its entirety. It is found in Matthew 6:10, “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.”

I was struck immediately by the little word in. Now, I know that other Bible versions translate the word in as on, and I know that those translations are more universally accepted than the King James Version. But this particular translation seemed more relevant in light of the verse that came to mind: 2 Corinthians 4:7. “But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us.”

I am an earthen vessel for God’s use. Jesus said to pray that God’s will be done in earth. In other words, in us, in me. That’s what surrendering to and trusting in His perfect will is all about. That’s what happens when you let your cracked pot be filled with His Spirit. His will will be done.

I was now, finally, ready, willing, and able. It was time to “walk the talk,” to let His Spirit, His light, shine through me, like the light on a buttercup, and onto others.

PRAYER

Father, help me to trust You completely, to know with every cell in my body that You love me and only want what is best for me. Increase in me until I become totally surrendered and filled with You.

Help me to become an empty vessel waiting to be filled with Your love. Wash away all my sin and selfishness and fill me up with Your love. Help me to let “thy will be done” in all places, at all times, and in all circumstances.

Chapter 5 − Walk the Talk

He that saith he abideth in him ought himself also so to walk, even as he walked.

1 John 2:6

In the course of my writing career I have had the pleasure to work as a book reviewer, which has given me the opportunity to read the work of many great authors. It also became the source of one my most agonizing lessons in humility.

I was new to the field and volunteered to write a review for a person who had become an online friend. I began reading her novel with enthusiasm, but soon became dismayed at the poor writing, plastic characters, and predictable plot. I agonized over the review, because I knew it would not be the glowing report she was expecting. In the end, I wrote the most compassionate and honest review I could. Needless to say, she did not receive it well. In fact, she was so angry about it that she posted it on a writer’s forum to which we both belonged.

The attacks from her supporters were immediate and vicious. My anger escalated as I read post after post calling me everything from mean-spirited to misguided to unprofessional. My reputation was at stake, and my pride was sorely wounded.

I retaliated immediately with posts that gave page numbers and word-for-word quotes of the glaring and distracting errors in this author’s novel. I even went so far as to state that I was so angry that I was “refusing to turn the other cheek.”

Less than twenty-four hours later as I was relating the whole messy story to a close friend, she asked me the question that has become so well known in Christian circles: What would Jesus do? Then she pointed out how, when Jesus had been falsely accused before Pilate, he had said nothing in His own defense.

I was immediately convicted of numerous sins: pride, stubbornness, rebellion, disobedience, to name just a few. But in my eyes, my biggest sin was not “walking the talk.”

Everyone on that forum knew I was a Christian. I had never hidden that fact. So my Christian testimony, by which others would judge me and my faith, had fallen woefully short of the mark. I had set a very poor example by speaking angry words, providing plenty excuse for others to say, “If that’s how Christians act, then I don’t want anything to do with Christianity.”

It is our actions (in this case, my words) that the world uses to judge us and to make a decision to accept or reject the Lord. There’s an old saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” And what better picture of Christians do non-Christians receive than the ones we give them by our responses to others and to life in general?

This is especially true online where our words create a picture of who we are. If we respond, as I did, in a flame war of negativity, then we are not walking the talk, and our actions will speak louder than any preaching we do about the glories of following Christ.

If we act as non-Christians, if we respond as they do to attacks, insults, disappointments, and all the other upsetting things this world throws in our paths, then non-Christians have no way to identify us as any different from themselves; our actions, our responses, are what they use as measuring sticks. If our actions are as close to Jesus’ as we can make them, then we measure up. If they are not, then non-Christians have no way to calculate the difference between themselves and Christians, for no such difference exists.

We can have a glowing verbal testimony about what the Lord has done for us. We can quote chapter and verse from the Scriptures, but unless our walk matches our talk, then everything we preach will fall on deaf ears in the best-case scenario. In the worst case, our walking testimony can actually be a detriment to their salvation, distancing people from God instead of drawing them closer.

Mahatma Gandhi, a leader in the historical battle for India’s independence and nationalism, was once asked about Christianity. His answer: "I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ."

I know this to be true from my own experience with a talking but not walking Christian. For years, prior to accepting Jesus as my Savior, a friend who was a born-again believer was always in my face, preaching at me about accepting Jesus as Lord. Yet this person was judgmental, unforgiving, rigid, and extremely closed-minded. This person would rant and rave at me about my poor decisions, faults, and failures, and quote chapter and verse at me about how wrong I was.

I ended up searching for God for over twenty years. But I never once seriously considered Christianity because I didn’t want to become like this person, because this person’s walk was not an example of God’s love in action. It was not something I ever wanted to emulate. But during my long, painful search for peace and fulfillment, this person’s walk was the only example of Christianity in action that I had ever seen, and it was this example upon which I based my assessments of Christians as a whole. This person’s walk provoked me to run as far away from Christianity as I could.

Fortunately, many years later, God placed a woman in my life who was different. Christ’s love shone through her actions. She accepted me; she never judged my past, my current actions, my sins, my failings, or me. And she eventually led me to the Lord.

From this personal experience I knew the importance of my walk matching my talk. But I ignored what I knew and allowed sin to hide the light of Jesus in me. Unlike the woman who led me to the Lord, whose light always shines bright, my buttercup had been hidden by muddy puddles of anger, pride, and disobedience. The light and love of Jesus no longer shone through.

I immediately repented both to God and to the people on that forum. I posted a long, detailed apology for my words, even going so far as to explain how I failed to walk the talk, and humbly asked their forgiveness.

I really dislike eating humble pie. But the alternative, knowing that I had failed to please the God whom I have come to love so much, was worse.

Which brings us back to, “What’s love got to do with it?”

I can explain that with a picture. I was deep in prayer once, concentrating on the image of Jesus on the cross and how great His love for us must be to have gone through that kind of horrible torture and death. A picture of a little girl, about four or five years old and dressed all in white, came into my mind. She was holding a wreath of flowers as she stood at the foot of the cross. As she held it up to Him, He freed Himself from the cross, stepped down, removed His crown of thorns, and placed the wreath on His head.

I pondered this image for weeks. What struck me most was the way in which Jesus so readily accepted her offering and the great pleasure she received when He did so.

It reminded me of the way our own children make a gift for us. They may spend hours slaving over it, giving it all their attention and time. And even though the final results may fall well short of perfection, it is the best they can do. Their pride in their gift is only as great as their heart’s desire to please their parents. It is so great that, when they finally offer it to us, all it takes is our smile to make all the work and time worthwhile.

Yet often many parents, myself included, are so busy, so wrapped up in getting dinner ready, supervising homework, watching the news, that when our children bring home their treasured gifts, we barely take the time to acknowledge them.

It is hard to face the fact that we may have severely disappointed our children. It is harder still to face the fact that our children may take away from the experience that they are not worthy of receiving our attention or love, and that what they created was not even worthy of that small smile of gratitude. It is a spiritual wound that often takes years to heal.

What was so different about the vision I had received was the absolute attention that Jesus gave the child’s gift. The way He willingly came down off the cross and not only accepted the wreath of flowers, but actually used it to replace His crown of thorns. It spoke of a love so deep, so complete, that even Jesus’ ultimate mission to die on the cross could be temporarily put aside, for the moment, to attend to the needs of one small child. The love He showed her by His actions was matched only by the joy on the child’s face when He accepted her gift.

Jesus said, “…Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 18:3)

I have thought long and hard on this verse, but it wasn’t until I had this mind-picture that the full meaning of it was revealed to me. The young girl in that vision wanted nothing more than to please Jesus. She wanted to ease His pain by replacing His crown of thorns with a wreath of flowers. Her love was so encompassing that the thought that He might be too busy to accept it or that he might not like it never crossed her mind. Her love for Jesus did not allow those kinds of doubts.

In her childlike, uncomplicated love for Jesus, she exemplified everything we should try to emulate in our love relationship with Christ: total acceptance of His love for us, total dependence on that love, total trust in the goodness and faithfulness of God, and a total devotion to pleasing God with our actions, thoughts, and words.

When all these elements of totality—total love, total trust, total devotion to pleasing God—are thoroughly integrated into your heart, they will enable you to walk the talk, for it will be your heart’s desire to please God with your actions as well as your words. When this happens, you can rest assured that the light of Jesus is shining through you and onto others. You are on your way to becoming a buttercup for Jesus.

PRAYER

Father, help me to be like your Son, not only in my words but in my actions and my thoughts, for my thoughts are where my actions begin.

Help me to always remember that I am an example to others and to let the love You have for me shine through at all times, in all places, and under all circumstances. Help me never to make another stumble on their way to You by actions or words not worthy of You.

Chapter 6 − Be Careful

What You Pray For

Pray without ceasing.

1Thessolonians 5:17

I was now ready, willing, and able; at least I was as able as my limited abilities could make me. It was my heart’s desire to know and love Jesus more. I wanted so desperately, and still do, to know Him completely and to allow Him to be the lover of my soul. I prayed constantly, and still do, for this to happen. But I wasn’t at all prepared for the consequences of my prayers.

During a four-month period I went through a stage in which I was angry with almost everybody in my church. On three occasions during this time I made up my mind to leave the church and find a new one. Unfortunately, or, in reality, fortunately, the small town in which I lived did not have a lot of Spirit-filled churches to choose from. So I was forced to deal with my anger. It was that or lose my only means of Spirit-filled Sunday worship.

Finally, in desperation I went to my pastor and explained my anger and the reasons for it. “I don’t feel like anything I say anymore is received or understood. I’m at the point where I don’t even want to open my mouth in church anymore.”

Tears filled my eyes as I continued, “I have been so angry that I’ve almost left the church three times in the past four months. I have to battle with myself to go to church because I’ve been so angry with everybody, yet I love church. I don’t know what’s wrong, but I can’t go on like this.”

My pastor didn’t even take time to think the problem over. He looked at me and said, “You know, Nancy, you’ve got a sincere, desperate desire for the Lord. All He’s doing is stirring up the muck inside of you. It’s coming to the surface so that He can get rid of it. You depend too much on others for your confirmation and affirmation. God wants you to depend on Him only. Now, you can quit sharing in church if you want to, or you can deal with it.”

Those aren’t his exact words, but that’s the gist of it.

I knew immediately, in my spirit, that his words were true. It was just like the cracked pots I had been meditating on. Later that day, in three different ways I received confirmation from the Lord that my pastor had assessed my problem correctly.

I have always been insecure and suffered from a major inferiority complex. I have always doubted my abilities, my gifts, and myself. To feel secure I often look to those around me—family, friends, church, etc.—for words of encouragement and praise.

My Father in Heaven, however, knows that if I am to love Him and His Son as completely as I want to, then I must turn to Him for confidence and affirmation. That was what He was trying to do in me, but as usual I overlooked the obvious and wandered about lost and confused and angry. When I didn’t get what I was looking for from others, I got angry, real angry. I started believing that they didn’t respect me, had no compassion, were self-absorbed, worldly―my list went on and on. So I determined that I would leave this hypocritical fellowship and go someplace else. Fortunately there was no place else to go. So God’s will was done, eventually.

Have you ever thrown a stone into a clear, still pond and watched the way it stirs up the muddy gunk on the bottom? The bottom of our hearts is like that. When we ask the Lord to fill our cracked pots with His Spirit, He comes in and starts to gently push up all the gunk deep within us. It rises to the surface, where the overflowing stream of His Spirit washes it away.

That was exactly what was happening in me. The Spirit of God entered my cracked pot, and by the gentle process of displacement started pushing the mud and slime from the bottom of my heart up to the surface so that I could deal with it, eliminate it. Unfortunately, I didn’t recognize the hand of God in my life. I acted like a total jerk, blaming and judging others for what was really my problem. It wasn’t until my pastor pointed it out to me that I could surrender my needy, hungry ego to the Lord, ask His forgiveness, and acknowledge that what He was doing was indeed an answer to my prayers.

To be totally in love with God, I needed to be totally freed from all dependence on others. I needed to turn to only Him for confidence and affirmation. God was trying to get through to me, but like the Apostle Paul, God had to show me that, “it is hard to kick against the goads.” Acts 26:14 NAS. To kick against the goads refers to a method of controlling oxen that was used in biblical times. To get the animal to move, the ox driver would prod it with a goad―usually a long, pointed stick. If the ox was particularly stubborn, instead of cooperating with the driver it would kick back at the goad.

I received this verse the very afternoon after speaking to the pastor. I pondered it for a while and then researched it. I discovered that it roughly means to be stubborn and rebellious to the point that these acts might actually end up hurting you.

Much better for me, I decided, would be to go with the flow: to allow God’s Spirit in me to displace spiritual mud and not fight it. Once I made that decision, I felt such peace and joy. I realized that the “slights” I had received from others were not really slights, as had I perceived them. They were the hand of God working in me to answer my prayers for a closer communion with Him.

It is hard to go through this life-long refining process, but now that I know the reasons for it, I am somewhat more willing to continue with it.

I heard a story once about a man who was watching a jeweler refine silver. The jeweler smelted it down, cleaned off the dross, smelted it down again, cleaned off the dross, and repeated the process over and over again.

Finally the observer couldn’t contain his questions any longer. “Why do you keep repeating that process? What’s the point? What are you looking for?”

The jeweler responded, “I will continue to do this until the silver is pure enough that I can see my reflection in it.”

So too is the Lord working in me, cleaning me of all my impurities so that His reflection may shine through me and onto others. The refiner’s fire is a painful process, but it is now one that I can bear because I know the Lord’s hand is controlling the flame. He will never let it get hotter than I can stand, and in the end, the light of Jesus will shine through brighter and purer than ever before.

A buttercup covered in mud is not a pretty sight. Neither is a soul whose sins, insecurities, and fears prevent the light of Jesus from shining through.

PRAYER

Father, refine me and remove the dross that gets in the way of my receiving You in my heart. Help me to see you in all things, at all times, and in all circumstances.

Help me to not “kick against the goads.” Help me to be a willing participant in the refining process by seeing Your hand in my life and by cooperating with You as You make me to be all that I can and should be in Your Son. Help me to make my life one continual act of prayer and devotion to You so that Your Son’s light might shine through me and onto others.

PART II

And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.

Mark 12:31

Chapter 7 − Walk a Mile in My Shoes

This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you.

John 15:12

When I first accepted the Lord as my Savior, frequently I could be overheard saying, “The only thing wrong with Christianity is the Christians.” I admit to being cynical and judgmental and, unfortunately, I can still be overheard saying that from time to time. Unfortunately, it is also sometimes true.

In almost every church fellowship you will find someone who rubs you the wrong way. It can be the individual who thinks he or she is gifted as a teacher but is in reality a blowhard; the individual who thinks he or she has been given the gift of discernment but is in reality judging others by his or her own invisible yardstick; or the person who is simply loud, boring, and obnoxious. However, all of these individuals are children of God, and He loves each and every one of them as much as He loves you and me.

We are tasked with loving them as God loves us, but the problem is that some people appear unlovable. The solution is to see them as God sees them, a simple answer but not that easy to do.

I was at a meeting once in which a man was teaching who possessed not an ounce of people skills. This man was speaking about something or the other; I don’t remember exactly what. My mind had drifted away from the topic when the Lord showed me exactly how He sees this individual.

I saw the man as a young child, desperately wanting and seeking friends but without a clue how to gain them. He was constantly on the outside of the social group and wanting in. I saw the hurt, the loneliness, and the anguish this little boy, now an adult, experienced because of his inability to make friends. And I understood, in that moment, why the adult in front of me acted the way he did.

In other words, I saw briefly, but only in part, how God sees this man. Thereafter, whenever the man made an obnoxious comment, which he did regularly, I was able to overlook it because I had come to understand that this was the only way he knew how to communicate with others. His apparent arrogance was actually a cover-up for an underlying insecurity, fear of rejection, and plea for friendship.

This revelation forever changed my relationship with the man. Instead of getting angry when he offended me, I began to offer up prayers for his happiness and peace. I was able to overlook his insulting remarks, which I now realized he did not intend to be insulting.

I cannot honestly say that I love this man; however, I believe I have taken a step toward that goal. The Lord gave me understanding of the root cause of this man’s obnoxious personality. That understanding has, in turn, given me real compassion for him, a compassion that effectively nullified my initial, natural reaction to his obnoxious comments—a reaction that would normally be anger.

Jesus said, “But if ye had known what this meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice, ye would not have condemned the guiltless.” (Matthew 12:7) In many Bible translations, mercy in this verse is translated as compassion, which is the beginning of love in action.

This verse is also interesting because it emphasizes the importance of examining motives before judging the actions of others. In this example, Jesus was talking about David who, in a case of extreme hunger, went into the temple and ate the showbread, an act forbidden by ancient Judaic law. David should have been condemned for his act, however, Jesus said that knowing and understanding what God really wants makes a difference. And what God really wants is mercy or compassion for others rather than condemnation.

In the verses preceding Matthew 12:7, Jesus made a point of explaining why David ate the showbread. He was an hungered, or very hungry. The Hebrew word here is peinao, which has several translations, including hungry, to suffer want, or to be needy. It is the same word that Matthew used in 4:2 to describe Jesus’ condition after he had fasted for forty days and nights in the desert. In other words, David was starving, maybe starving to death. The Bible does not make that completely clear, but we can logically assume that David was so hungry that he had no choice but to eat the showbread or die of starvation.

So we see in the verses preceding Jesus’ statement that God wants mercy or compassion over sacrifice. Our compassion should be based on knowing and understanding others’ motives before we judge their actions or condemn them.

This is not always easy. It requires us to put aside our initial, natural reactions to the actions of others. We must put aside our initial hurt feelings, our anger, our tears, or whatever else that blocks our thought processes, and look deeper into the reason behind the offending remarks or actions.

Sometimes we can do this only by God’s grace, such as the revelation I received about the individual in that meeting. Sometimes it comes by prayer, and sometimes it comes by searching our hearts for a memory or a similar situation with which to compare, so that we can study the incident to uncover the underlying reasons for the person’s offensive behavior. When we have unearthed these hidden truths, then understanding follows. Compassion usually comes close on the heels of that discovery.

Compassion, love in action, is so critical that Jesus actually called David guiltless. This is quite a statement in light of his transgressions, which were considered heinous according to ancient biblical laws. Because of compassion Jesus considered David innocent of any wrongdoing when he ate the showbread. Jesus expected others to judge him guiltless as well.

It is important to differentiate between understanding, and the compassion it should provoke in us, and excusing someone’s inappropriate behavior. Understanding and compassion are ways for us to forgive others for their transgressions against us. They are not meant, however, to be tools used to excuse someone’s wrong actions or poor decisions. To understand another’s motives and show compassion are to acknowledge the guilty act and the guilty party. To excuse someone’s behavior is to deny the existence of wrongdoing.

If an individual fails to acknowledge his or her wrongdoing, and if you also refuse to acknowledge it, you become an accomplice to guilt. This is not compassion. This is enabling the errant behavior. In psycho-babble terms, you become a co-dependent and allow the wrongdoer to place the blame on you.

It is sort of the old “the devil made me do it” defense. The blame is laid on someone else, and the individual takes no responsibility for his or her poor choices.

It doesn’t work that way.

In the case of David, without a doubt he knew that eating the showbread from the altar was wrong, but he did it anyway because he was starving. He never tried to lay the blame on Saul by claiming, “Well, if Saul wasn’t trying to kill me, and if I didn’t have to hide out here in the desert, I wouldn’t have been starving to death, so it’s all Saul’s fault.”

In other words, David didn’t try to use the old, “the devil made me do it” defense. He didn’t try to whitewash his actions. He took responsibility for them. He offered no excuses.

Here is a man who, in desperation, broke a serious law of the Hebrew nation, but in compassion God forgave his transgression. God did not overlook it, did not excuse it. Rather, He acknowledged the transgression and the reason behind it, and then chose to forgive.

We are also asked to forgive others. Understanding their motives helps us accomplish this, but even when we don’t understand we must show compassion and we must forgive. We are not to excuse them or to lay the fault on someone or something else, that is, “the devil made me do it.” We must try to fully understand not only the reasons they’ve done what they’ve done, but also fully acknowledge their guilt, if they are indeed guilty.

If you excuse the offense, then there is nothing to forgive—forgiveness has no purpose. You cannot judge someone guiltless, as Jesus did with David, if there is no question of guilt in the first place.

The bottom line is that we must try to understand the reasons behind the actions, acknowledge those reasons and the guilt, and then forgive the offender. And even if understanding is beyond our capabilities, we must ask for grace and forgive anyway.

But it doesn’t end there. We are responsible also for our own actions and how others perceive them. How they perceive us is determined by how much of Jesus’ light shines through us.

If your buttercup shines brightly in the Son, then you have nothing to worry about. However, if clouds of anger, jealousy, pride, greed, lust, fear, or a self-righteous or judgmental spirit frequently overshadow your blooms, then there are still some dark areas in your life that need to be brought into the light.

PRAYER

Father, help me to understand those who hurt my feelings or make me angry. Show me who they really are and why they do the things they do. Allow me to see them as You see them.

Bless me with the grace to understand and to show compassion when I am so hurt or angry that I cannot do it by myself. Fill me, Father, with Your great love and compassion so that Jesus’ light might shine through me at all times, in all places, and under all circumstances.

Chapter 8 − Who Me?

Not Me, Couldn’t Be

Therefore if thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath ought against thee; Leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way; first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift.

Matthew 5:23−24

When I was in my early twenties I lived in a rented townhome. Located behind it was a two-bedroom apartment. Over time I came to make the acquaintance of the woman who lived in this apartment. One day we had the most amazing conversation. It went something like this:

“You know, you’re a really nice person. I would have never thought that. I always thought you were a real snob, you know, stuck up and all that,” she said.

I’m sure the look I gave her was one of dumbfounded amazement. Finally I managed to sputter, “Me? Stuck up? Why would you ever think that?”

“Because you never smile at anybody. You never even look at people.”

I pondered that remark for a long time, many years in fact. Finally figured out that I didn’t smile at people because I was afraid of them. My early childhood experiences of being the object of other children’s constant teasing had taught me that people only smiled at you when they were getting ready to hurt you. I had also learned that if I smiled at someone, they might not smile back, or they might do something even worse.

Also, somewhere in my childish mind, I determined that if I didn’t look at people, then maybe they wouldn’t look at me either. I could sort of become invisible to them, which, when I was very little, was a good thing. If they didn’t see me, they couldn’t hurt me.

Odd as it may sound, although I can now smile at people, I still can’t look most people straight in the face. I had a therapist once who made me practice looking him in the eyes. I couldn’t do it then, and I still can’t for the most part. I can’t even tell you what color my best friends’ eyes are, or even whether they wear glasses or not.

This experience taught me something: We are mostly responsible for how other people perceive us. My neighbor’s comment really threw me, but it served a worthwhile purpose because it pointed out a behavior pattern in me that I had been completely unaware of. That awareness helped me identify and understand why I acted that way. With this knowledge I was able to modify my behavior accordingly.

In much the same way as that man at that meeting who was clueless about his obnoxious behavior, I was clueless about my inability to smile or look at others. I didn’t know that people saw me as standoffish. In both cases, we were responsible for the way others perceive us.

In my case, the light of Jesus could not shine through because of the fear I had of being rejected and/or hurt. The light was hidden behind a cloud of fear. Others saw either a very shy or very stuck-up person depending upon how they interpreted my actions.

In the case of the man at that meeting, Jesus’ light was hidden behind a cloud of insecurity. This was similar to my own experience, but we dealt with our respective insecurity in opposite ways. I shied away from others to hide, while he put others down to inflate his sense of shrunken self-importance. In either case, our hidden wounds hid the light of Jesus that should have been shining through us and onto others.

In my case, once my neighbor pointed out the darkness to me, it became my responsibility to do something about it. It was my job to allow the light of Jesus to displace the darkness so that it could shine through onto others. My responsibility is described in the verse quoted at the beginning of this chapter. The responsibility for the way others see me rests strictly on my shoulders; therefore I must go to my brother and make things right between us. In addition, ought in this verse is the Greek word tis, which is translated in many ways including anything, certain thing, something, any man, diverse, something, etc. That definition, then, seems to cover just about everything no matter how big or how little the offense or ought might be.

Often it is easier to say, “Well, I can’t help it if so-and-so is mad at me. I didn’t do anything wrong. It’s their problem, not mine. Why should I go to them?”

But Jesus is clear: it is your problem, it is your responsibility. In my case, my actions were not wrong. They were simply learned responses to my hostile childhood environment. They had become ways to protect myself from further hurt―they were neither right nor wrong. However, the consequences of my actions, although not wrong, gave people a negative impression of me; therefore it became my responsibility to rectify the situation.

This responsibility, however, does not end with the way others perceive us. It extends into several other areas as well, including how we perceive the actions of others.

A woman in my church once said something to me that hurt me deeply. It was an opinion, passed on to her by another, of something that I held very dear to my heart. At first I just blew it off, but as time passed her words kept repeating themselves in my mind. I couldn’t understand why she had shared this other person’s opinion with me. “What was her purpose in doing so?” I asked myself. “Why would she tell me what this other person thinks? Is she just trying to hurt me? Is she jealous of what I treasure so much? Is she trying to steal my joy?”

The more I thought about her painful words the more hurt and angry I became. I came to several conclusions about the reasons for her actions. Most important, I realized she had no idea how deeply she had hurt me; she had tossed off the remarks without thinking. And I had hidden my pain well. She was as clueless about my hurt feelings as that man in the meeting was about his arrogance and pride.

But I was still angry, angry enough that I quit going to church for over a month and actually considered leaving that particular church body. But I don’t do well when I skip church. By the end of the month, I realized that if I didn’t get this problem taken care of I was going to be in deep sneakers emotionally and spiritually.

My first instinct was to go to her and tell her how much her words had hurt me. However, because I was so angry, I knew I couldn’t do this in love as we are commanded to do. My second plan was to go to her husband. I quickly ruled out that option because it was pointless and immature. Instead, I turned to a Christian friend who is one of the wisest women I know. I explained the situation, in detail, so that she would understand the depth of my pain. Then I asked her what I should do.

She responded with a simple question. “Have you forgiven her?”

Oh…well…DUH!

It still amazes me, sometimes daily, how I can overlook the obvious solution to a problem. I don’t think it is ignorance. More than likely it is just plain stupidity. I don’t use stupid here lightly, either. In my mind, dumb is when you don’t have the natural intelligence to make the right decision; ignorant is when you don’t have the necessary information to make the right decision; and stupid is when you have both the intelligence and the information to make the right decision but make the wrong one anyway.

I had been incredibly stupid about this whole incident. I knew all along somewhere down deep that I should have just forgiven her, that I should not have tried to judge her actions but merely have understood and accepted them, which is different than judging them.

Accepting something is a way to acknowledge a truth (reality) without judging its worthiness. This is somewhat difficult to understand, but it is an important step in forgiveness. It works like this:  someone hurts your feelings. That is a fact, a reality you must accept. Now, you have two choices: accept and forgive without judging the action, or refuse to accept because you have judged using your own personal values as the measuring stick for the worthiness of the actions that hurt you.

This is different than trying to understand the hurtful actions. Understanding can lead to compassion, which leads to forgiveness. You come to a conclusion but not a judgment, because judging leads to a sense of self-righteousness, a sense of being better than the person who injured you. Jesus understood this and displayed it beautifully as He hung on the cross. He said in Luke 23:34, “… Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”

But I was hurt, so I chose to ignore what I knew and let a spirit of self-righteousness run rampant in my heart. I judged instead of trying to understand.

She had hurt my feelings without knowing it, and I had taken that ball and run with it right into a spiritual and emotional free-for-all. I had judged her and found her guilty. Then I had allowed a spirit of self-righteousness to justify my anger. Because of this spirit of self-righteousness, I clung to my pain, because the pain justified my anger and, with it, my self-righteousness. In my mind I was the innocent victim and she was the big, bad ogre, so I was justified in feeling angry as long as I still felt the pain. And feeling justified was worth the pain, at least for a while.

I didn’t know how to forgive her, and so I prayed and asked God to help me. Within twenty-four hours the Lord reminded me of an incident from my past—wrongdoing on my part—that was comparable to what this woman had done. My shame over that past incident made it impossible for me to hold on to my unforgiveness, because I was as guilty as I had judged her to be. That insight enabled me to forgive her completely.

It is true that this woman had a responsibility for the way I perceived her actions. But because she had no idea that she had hurt me so badly with her words, she could not take responsibility for those actions. What Jesus states in Matthew 5:23−24 implies an awareness of a problem between you and your brother. Jesus said, “…if your brother has ought against you…” These words imply that you know that a problem exists between you and your brother, because you can’t fix a problem if you don’t know it exists.

Her obliviousness to the pain she had caused me was similar to my unawareness of my behavior before my neighbor pointed out how others perceived me. Only when I became aware of my habit of not smiling or looking at others was I responsible to correct it. Prior to that awareness, I had no responsibility to fix the problem because I didn’t know the problem existed.

My reactions to her painful words, however, were my responsibility. I had tried to use the understanding-compassion process, but instead of going from understanding to compassion, I had gone from understanding to judgment. Judging her made my pain and anger seem justified. If she was guilty, I was innocent. If I was innocent, I was justified in feeling angry. That led to a spirit of self-righteousness, that is, I was wronged, I was innocent, she was guilty, I am better or more righteous than she. And of course, these thoughts, this spirit of self-righteousness, led to even more anger, pain, and judgment.

My buttercup had been overshadowed by anger, pain, judgment, and self-righteousness. The light and love of Jesus no longer shone through me and onto others. And without His light in my life, I began dying spiritually. Much as a buttercup dies without sunlight, my soul began to wither too.

I had become caught in a spiritual quicksand, and the only way out was total forgiveness. That forgiveness, however, could only come about when I quit judging her actions and her character and began once again to let the light of Jesus’ love and compassion shine through.

PRAYER

Father, remove from me the need to be right. Remove any pride or self-righteousness that causes me to hold onto old injuries. Help me to realize that being right is not as important as being forgiven and forgiving others.

Bless me with the grace to ask for forgiveness from others even if I don’t really believe I need it. Grant me the grace to forgive others even when I know that I am right and they are wrong. Open my eyes, Lord, to the truth, and help me to see myself and others as you see me and them, at all times, in all places, and under all circumstances.

Chapter 9 − Here Come ’da Judge

Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven.

Luke 6:37

One of the things that most irritates me when I get angry with someone, or when someone hurts my feelings, is that somewhere in the understanding-compassion process, I begin to realize that I have to forgive them. The very fact that I have to forgive them usually makes me angry all over again.

Then when I surrender to God’s will and finally come to accept that I must forgive, I usually uncover another uncomfortable fact, one that is even harder for me to deal with. I discover that I have been judging them for judging me. So I not only have to forgive them but I have to ask their forgiveness for judging them. What a mess!

Judging others is something I struggle with regularly. It is so easy to fall into this mindset and so hard not to hold others up to my own standards.

For years my family struggled with unstable finances, though I learned to follow a budget and to stick with it for the most part. Then one day we were was asked to attend an out-of-state event. My first reaction was, “No way! We can’t afford to make that trip.”

My second reaction was, “Well, it is important. We’ll find a way, even if it means a certain amount of sacrifice for our family.”

I began taking pride in the fact that we were managing to attend this expensive event in spite of our minimal income and in spite of the fact that I had to borrow the money for the plane tickets. At the same time, I began comparing myself to another family, whose combined annual income was five times our own. This family wasn’t sure they could afford to come and said so quite plainly.

I started feeling real good about myself. “I am so good,” I thought, “I’ve managed to secure arrangements for this trip, and they can’t, even though they make five times as much as we do. What a great financial manager I am. What’s wrong with them? They’ve got their priorities all wrong. They’re greedy and don’t know how to budget their money.” And so on and so forth.

The Lord is faithful.

It was only a few weeks after these ugly thoughts entered my head that we began experiencing one financial setback after another, so much so that it looked like we wouldn’t be able to make the trip after all. I prayed and asked God why He had allowed all this misfortune to befall us, and God in His faithfulness quickly pointed out my sin of judging others and my spiritual pride. It seems you don’t have the first without the second coming in on its shirttails.

What had happened was that I began judging this family’s financial management skills and comparing them to my own. It didn’t matter that I didn’t know all the facts, that is, what their total monthly bills were or what other expenses they had. Once I began judging them by my own standards, I began taking pride in my abilities. By my standards, I was much better than they were. The more pride entered the picture, the more I felt justified in judging them, and so the deadly cycle began.

What totally escaped me during this period was that our finances are a blessing from God and have nothing to do with our own efforts. It also escaped my notice that my ability to manage our meager finances was also a gift from God. I was taking credit for something that I had no right to take credit for.

In addition, as I looked over that month’s financial activities, I realized that I hadn’t even lived up to my own standards. I had made a few large purchases and had neglected to pay several important bills. Yet, somehow that fact had escaped me as I went about judging others and taking pride in my management abilities. Talk about hypocritical!

A hypocrite is a person who says one thing and does another. According to the dictionary a hypocrite is  “somebody who pretends to have admirable principles, beliefs, or feelings but behaves otherwise; a charlatan, a fraud” (Encart Dictionary: Enlish – North American Edition). Hypocrisy is a type of lie—a lie in action. And, as we all know, lying is a sin. I had been very hypocritical when I judged this other family.

Jesus was clear on His stance about hypocrites. He said in Matthew 7:5, “Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.”

The Bible has a lot to say on this subject. For example, Isaiah 9:17: “…for every one is an hypocrite and an evildoer, and every mouth speaketh folly…” 1 John 1:10: “If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.” The Apostle Paul echoes this statement when he says, “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). All except one person, Jesus Christ.

When you study the New Testament, it becomes clear that Jesus the man was like us in every way, experienced the same emotions and temptations we do, yet in all these things He never fell into sin. Paul put it this way, “Seeing then that we have a great high priest, that is passed into the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast [our] profession. For we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as [we are, yet] without sin.” Hebrews 4:14−15.

Because Jesus never sinned, He never lied, but not because it was not within His power to lie. He did not and does not lie because it is against His nature to lie. God does nothing against His nature. It is not correct to say that God cannot do this or that, for God is omnipotent, or all powerful. God can do anything He wants to do. However, because He is all good, all just, and ever faithful, He will never do anything that contradicts His good, just, and faithful nature. It says in Numbers 23:19, “God [is] not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent: hath he said, and shall he not do [it]? or hath he spoken, and shall he not make it good?

Because He was totally God and fully man, Jesus could have lied if He had chosen, but He would not lie, because that would have been an act against His nature. What we are left with then, is the one man that never lied and never sinned in any way. This also means that Jesus was never hypocritical. He never lied by his actions.

When Jesus addressed the crowd that wanted to condemn the woman accused of adultery, He stated, “… He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” (John 8:7) No one picked up a stone. Why? Because they knew in their hearts they were not without sin. Only Jesus is totally without sin, and because of this, only Jesus had the right to judge and condemn her.

In the person of Jesus Christ is the perfect judge, the only judge who has the hereditary and moral right to judge anyone. Only Jesus is capable of passing a totally infallible judgment―a righteous judgment. Jesus put it this way, “Judge not according to the appearance, but judge righteous judgment.” (John 7:24) But only Jesus is capable of judging righteously based on His moral right and righteous nature to make a righteous judgment.

When we judge others, we exercise a right that is not ours. And because the very essence of the judgment process calls for evaluation and assessment of the characteristics, personality, and motives of another, spiritual pride often comes into play. We compare others against our gifts, our blessings, or other aspects of our personality, which we use as a standard. When others fall short of our standard (our glory), we feel proud. But if we are honest, we know that all fall short of the glory of God, and so we have no right to judge others.

But we do. At least I do, and then I have to repent, ask God’s forgiveness, ask the other person’s forgiveness, and then ask God for mercy, which, thank God, He is faithful to bestow.

PRAYER

Oh Father, help me never to judge others, especially when I have been judged by others. Help me to fully realize that judging others is a right that belongs only to Jesus.

Protect me from pride, especially spiritual pride, so that I might not compare myself to others and thus end up judging them. Help me to apply understanding and compassion whenever I feel that I have been judged so that Jesus’ light might shine through me at all times, in all places, and under all circumstances.

Chapter 10 − The Lifter of My Head

But thou, O LORD, [art] a shield for me; my glory, and the lifter up of mine head.

Psalms 3:3

I was taking a course called “Old Testament Themes” when I discovered a study of this verse conducted by Hebrew scholars. It had long been my favorite praise chorus, and so I was delighted to find a study from the Judaic viewpoint. What I discovered amazed me and added even more meaning to the Scripture verse and the praise chorus.

Beheading was a popular form of execution in Old Testament times. A person convicted of a crime or a prisoner of war often faced the executioner with his head bowed, awaiting the fatal stroke of the sword. The only one who could stop such an execution was the king. If the king deigned, he could walk to where the prisoner knelt, place his hand under the person’s chin and lift his head up, thus pardoning that person, granting the prisoner mercy and a stay of execution.

What a totally wonderful revelation about the lifter of my head. The king, who was a shield, that is, a protector, was also the dispenser of forgiveness and mercy. The same power and might that God possesses and displays so readily in the Old Testament He uses now to totally forgive us and grant us mercy.

Until I came across that Judaic Scripture study, I had always interpreted this verse to mean that God was one whom we could turn to when we were feeling down or blue. However, I now realized that He is also the One we can turn to for mercy and forgiveness. That this powerful protector, this shield, this rock, this fortress, had a softer, more compassionate side was, to me, a new revelation.

I know, I know. The New Testament tells us this repeatedly. But sometimes I have to hear things several times before they sink in. For some reason, seeing this in the Old Testament, where God repeatedly demanded sacrifices and atonement for sins and where He hardened His heart against the Israelites time after time, made more impact on me than the verses in the New Testament. It also brought me right back to the New Testament and the only true king.

The Bible makes it clear that there is only one King of Kings, one person with the right and the power to grant mercy to us all. That person is Jesus Christ, who is both God and man. Not only does Jesus possess the right and power to grant us mercy, He also possesses the compassion to do so.

Although many Bible translations interchange mercy and compassion, using one for the other in multiple verses, there is a subtle but important difference between the two virtues.

The Bible uses four different words for mercy and compassion. In Hebrew, mercy is checed, compassion is chamal. In Greek, mercy is eleos, compassion is splagchnizomai. The importance of the difference between the two words is that mercy is a virtue, an inherent characteristic, but compassion is an action based on the result of that acquired virtue.

God is merciful and compassionate. Jesus, while merciful, is also compassionate in a very special way. He feels for us, empathizes with us, has sympathy for us because He is and was one of us. He became human like us. He is Emmanuel, God with us.

In the chapter, “Walk a Mile in My Shoes,” I discussed how the understanding-compassion process is the basis for showing mercy. And although it is true that you can perform an act of mercy, the act does not happen as a stand-alone entity. It happens because of the understanding-compassion process that occurs within you first. It works like this: understanding + compassion = mercy.

To better understand this process, let’s look at a few New Testament verses.

But when he saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion on them, because they fainted, and were scattered abroad, as sheep having no shepherd.

Matthew 9:36

And Jesus went forth, and saw a great multitude, and was moved with compassion toward them, and he healed their sick. Matthew 14:14

Then Jesus called his disciples [unto him], and said, I have compassion on the multitude, because they continue with me now three days, and have nothing to eat: and I will not send them away fasting, lest they faint in the way. Matthew 15:32

Then the lord of that servant was moved with compassion, and loosed him, and forgave him the debt. Matthew 18:27

Shouldest not thou also have had compassion on thy fellowservant, even as I had pity on thee? Matthew 18:33

So Jesus had compassion [on them], and touched their eyes: and immediately their eyes received sight, and they followed him. Matthew 20:34

We can identify several key elements of compassion in each of these verses. First, it is a feeling, an emotion: I have compassion. Second, it provokes action: moved with compassion. Third, compassion always precedes the merciful or compassionate act: touched their eyes.

What is implied but not stated is that Jesus felt compassion and was moved by compassion because He understood what it means to be human. He was, after all, one of us, Emmanuel, God with us; therefore He felt what we do, suffered like we do, and thought as we do. Paul made this clear when he stated, “For we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as [we are, yet] without sin.” (Hebrews 4:15)

The New American Standard Bible translates this a little more clearly. It says, “For we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but One who has been tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin.”

The word sympathize here is very interesting. It is the Greek word sumpatheo, which primarily means “to have compassion.” Its secondary meaning is, “to be affected with the same feeling as someone else.”(Strong’s Concordance) Thus, in Jesus we have not only God with us, but also a person, a human being who possesses the same feelings that we have. And because He possesses these feelings, He understands us completely and is moved by compassion to aid us.

This is not to say that God the Father does not have compassion. He does. He is perfect in every way. But Jesus is our assigned mediator, our unique high priest who is not only with us but is one of us, someone to whom we can go whenever we need help and understanding.

Because He shows compassion to us, He commands us to show compassion to others. We do this by striving to understand and feel what they feel, and then allowing those feelings to blossom into acts of mercy. He says in Matthew 12:7, "But if you had known what this means, 'I DESIRE COMPASSION, AND NOT A SACRIFICE,' you would not have condemned the innocent.” (NASB)

Compassion combined with understanding results in acts of mercy―love in action. In other words: understanding + compassion = mercy. Mercy  is love in action or the performance of merciful actions such as granting forgiveness, feeding the poor, sheltering the homeless, caring for a sick neighbor, or any other activity performed with compassion and understanding. When we do these things the light of Jesus shines through us onto others.

However, applying this formula takes time. It takes time to think about and determine the reasons behind someone else’s actions. It takes time to let the feeling of compassion replace our initial feelings of hurt, anger, envy, etc. It also takes time to perform an act of compassion, time that we don’t often make for our families, let alone those in our church body or in the community in which we live.

All good things take time. Even the buttercup takes time to grow before it can bloom and reflect the sunlight. Time is our most precious gift. It really comes down to priorities. When we get our priorities straight, we will find that we have time for the truly important things in life.

PRAYER

Father, let me show mercy to others at all times, in all places, and under all circumstances. Let me never be guilty of taking revenge or of being unforgiving. Let me never be guilty of turning away from those in need of understanding, compassion, and mercy.

Grant me the grace to not only understand and have compassion, but to put that in action. Even as you are the “lifter of my head,” help me be the same to others so that Jesus’ light might shine through me at all times, in all places, and under all circumstances.

Chapter 11 − People Are

More Important

Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all [is] vanity.

Ecclesiastes1:2

I was in the middle of reviewing and correcting some final page proofs for one of my novels when my agent called. A major publisher was interested in another book I had written, but my agent wanted me to do a significant rewrite before he submitted the manuscript. Oh goody! I thought, sarcastically. I was a student then, pursuing a master’s degree in religion, and it was finals week, and now I had not one but two manuscripts to rewrite. In addition, I was supposed to attend a family reunion the following week with my entire family in tow. Talk about stressed out!

Then a good friend called and needed a favor. “Okay,” I said, thinking that I could squeeze it in somehow. Then another call for a favor, and then another. The requests for my time and attention kept piling up. The deadlines loomed closer, and my mood was deteriorating as quickly as time was running out. I became a screaming banshee as the stress mounted.

When yet another friend called to ask a favor, I began to think, No, no, I just can’t do this. I have to say no to something. But then the Lord stopped me short with four simple words: “People are more important.”

Another one of those “Duh!” moments. I took a deep breath and pondered the mess I had gotten myself into. I had too much to do and not enough time to do it. I was stressed, irritable (a classic understatement), and my grumpiness was affecting my whole family. My children were fighting constantly, and my husband was snarling morning, noon, and night. And I was the cause.

People are more important…

I heard the whispered words repeatedly in my mind. And I decided to pay attention. I called my agent and asked for an extension on the deadline, and then I spent the time I had allotted to correct the manuscripts studying for my finals instead. I also made time to finish up the favors I had promised to complete for my friends.

As my sanity and serenity returned, I began to ponder the dilemma I had gotten myself into. I realized that my pride had played a role in creating that mess, for I had prided myself in always meeting my deadlines, no matter what. I would boast to others, “I always meet my deadlines. You can count on me because I never miss a deadline.” But my family could no longer count on me because I had put my work, studies, and reputation for always meeting deadlines ahead of their needs.

I guess that comes from working in the newspaper business, where you meet publication deadlines regardless of what it takes. Meeting deadlines is a good work habit, but taking pride in your ability to do so is not, especially if you meet deadlines at the expense of others, because people are more important.

As I pondered this simple truth, I realized how many times I didn’t take time to make people more important than the stuff of daily life. There were friends and relatives I never called because I didn’t want to spend the time. There were homebound people in my church whom I never visited because I didn’t want to take the time.

And then there were my children…

I realized that I said to them way too often, “Not now, I’m working,” or, “Not now, I’m studying.” I realized that of all the people whom I should be making time for, my family should have been at the top of the list, but they were coming in dead last. Of all the things in my life, they are, in reality, the most important things God has blessed me with. All the rest is just vanity, just things I want to do for myself for one reason or another. But those reasons pale in the light of the truth God had shown me: people are more important.

People are so important that Jesus laid down His life for them. He made the ultimate sacrifice that we might have eternal life. The sacrifice of His life for others, if nothing else, proves how important God thinks people are.

Jesus commanded us to love our neighbors as ourselves. He showed us how, too: by compassion with its attendant requirements to understand others’ motives and to act on that understanding. But the understanding part doesn’t really require much effort of us, just a little time to think. Acting on that understanding, however, often requires some sort of concession on our part.

Sometimes we have to give up some of our precious time. Or it may mean giving up some of our hard-earned money. Regardless of what is required of us to perform an act of compassion, if we want to shine with the light of Jesus, if we want to be like buttercups and have the light of the Son shine through us onto others, we must follow Jesus’ example of understanding, compassion, and sacrifice, and we must take the time to do so.

The Apostle John wrote, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13) Most of us will never be called to make this ultimate sacrifice, but if we pay attention, if we give our time to the Lord, we will find that we are called, sometimes daily, to make little sacrifices for the benefit of others.

When we are obedient to this call, that’s when the light of Jesus really shines through us onto others.

PRAYER

Father, help me to get and keep my priorities straight. Help me to realize that stressing over things that need to be done is not Your will for my life. Help me to realize that after You, the people in my life are more important than anything I might want to do or have to do.

Help me to place them first on my “to do” list at all times, in all places, and under all circumstance so that Jesus’ light might shine through me and onto others.

Chapter 12 − The Dirty Word

Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any [man] will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.

Matthew 16:24

I was familiar with this verse before I accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior, but I had never really studied it. After my conversion I pondered it frequently, always wondering what my cross was. I came to the conclusion that being a writer but never getting a book published was my cross. However, when I sold my first novel, I discarded that idea.

Then I decided that having an addictive personality was my cross. But when the Lord showed me I could have all of Him I wanted, and He actually wanted me to want more of Him, I realized that my addictive personality was actually a blessing and not my cross.

Back to square one. What was my cross?

As I pondered the understanding + compassion = mercy formula, I happened upon this verse again, and the words “deny yourself” leapt out at me. This was my cross: me, myself, and I. My flesh, if you prefer, that part of me that always seeks to put my needs and wants first. That selfish part of me that refuses to submit to others. This was my cross.

This is what Jesus meant when He said, “…let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.” If not, why would He have put the words deny himself before the words, “take up his cross?” He put them there because there is a connection between them: denial of self is the cross you must bear if you want to follow Jesus. If this were not so, Jesus would have simply said something like, “Pick up your cross and follow me.”

The Greek word Matthew used for deny is aparneomai. It means to deny, but it also means to forget oneself or to lose sight of oneself and one’s own interests. This brings us to what has become in our society a dirty word, sacrifice.

Among the many definitions for sacrifice in Encarta Dictionary: English (North America) is the following: “a giving up of something valuable or important for somebody or something else considered to be of more value or importance.”

Because we value ourselves and our desires, often above anything else, to deny ourselves as Jesus said we must do often requires an act of sacrifice. We must give up our claim to what we want for a higher claim, the claim that Jesus has on our lives when we surrender completely to Him.

I repeat the unfortunate fact that I stated above: sacrifice has become a dirty word in our society. Sacrificing our wants and needs for others is a foreign concept to many people. In our “me first” society, sacrifice holds such negative connotations that making an act of sacrifice for the good of others is beyond some individuals’ comprehension.

Others associate sacrifice with dire consequences, so dire that they believe it’s beyond their ability to accomplish. They think of Jesus’ ultimate sacrifice of death on the cross and believe they will never be able to imitate His great example of love in action.

But such beliefs are not true. The King of Kings receives and rewards even the smallest act of sacrifice. Jesus said: “For whosoever shall give you a cup of water to drink in my name, because ye belong to Christ, verily I say unto you, he shall not lose his reward.” (Mark 9:41)

Now, I admit that today, with our modern conveniences, it is not much of a sacrifice to give someone a drink of water. In Jesus’ time it was much more difficult, for water had to be drawn from a well and then carried back to the person who was in need. It also could have been a life-saving act if the needy person was in dire circumstances, such as in the parable about the Good Samaritan.

However, even today, giving a person a drink of water requires a small sacrifice on the part of the giver. It means first taking time to understand and acknowledge the person’s need. Second, it means feeling compassion for the person. And finally, it means stopping whatever it is you’re doing, putting aside for the moment your own needs and wants, denying yourself, and completing the act of mercy.

No act of sacrifice is so small that God will not acknowledge and reward it. Some of the smallest acts of sacrifice will carry the greatest rewards. Each is a way for us to deny ourselves, pick up our crosses, and follow Jesus.

For example, consider the story Jesus told in Luke 21: “And he looked up, and saw the rich men casting their gifts into the treasury. And he saw also a certain poor widow casting in thither two mites. And he said, ‘Of a truth I say unto you, that this poor widow hath cast in more than they all: For all these have of their abundance cast in unto the offerings of God: but she of her penury hath cast in all the living that she had.’” (Luke 21:1−4)

In our worldview she gave very little monetarily, but in God’s eyes her gift was worth more than all the gifts of the rich men combined. Why? Because the widow sacrificed, denying herself all the money she had left to give it to God.

The widow did indeed make a big sacrifice in God’s eyes even though it amounted to what others would think of as only a little thing. And so it is with us. When we deny ourselves something we desire or even something we need, as in the case of the widow’s mite, to help others or for some other equally good reason, God honors and rewards that sacrifice. Sometimes God gives the honors and rewards immediately, sometimes He waits for a later date. Either way, He is faithful to His promises. We can be confident that He will acknowledge our sacrifices.

But making these small and sometimes daily sacrifices requires one additional thing besides the understanding + compassion = mercy formula. It requires faith: faith in God, His wisdom, His love, and His mercy. It requires a faith that is almost childlike, one that never doubts or hesitates to do what needs to be done.

This type of faith is a gift from God, but God also gives us the opportunity to choose whether to be obedient and to follow what we know is right. Likewise we can choose to ignore it and go about our daily business with no thought of others or of God.

Unlike the buttercups that are programmed to continually turn toward the sun, God gives us free will. He gives us the choice to keep our faces turned to Christ, to see the needs of others, and to be obedient to what He shows us. Or we can choose to look the other way. If our faith is strong, we will be like the buttercups and automatically look toward the Son. If it is not, then the light is not in us, and it will not shine through us onto others.

PRAYER

Father, help me to know that giving up something I want or need for the benefit of others is not a bad thing. Help me to follow the example your Son set by His great sacrifice on the cross.

Help me to keep this in mind daily at all times, in all places, and under all circumstances so that the light of Jesus might shine more brightly through my buttercup.

Chapter 13 − The Bottom Line

Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.

Matthew 18:3

We were trying to teach our youngest daughter her colors while riding home in the car one Sunday afternoon. Spotting a herd of cattle, I pointed out the brown ones. My husband, ever the jokester, commented, “Yeppers, those are brown cows, and do you know why? Because they make chocolate milk.” For some years afterwards, my littlest one believed that chocolate milk came directly from brown cows.

Children have many unique and lovable characteristics, personal attributes that they generally outgrow. But what makes them so special to God, I believe, is their ability to have complete faith and trust in Him and love for others as a result of a God-given faith in His goodness and the goodness of His creations.

If a parent tells a child something, then it must be true according to the way children view the world and their parents. In children, before they learn otherwise, there are no doubts, just total acceptance of the veracity of their parents’ statements. They not only believe their parents but they depend on and trust that their parents will take care of them always and love them completely. In return, children love their parents unconditionally and with total abandon.

Jesus made two important comments about children. “Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew18:3) And, “Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 19:14)

To understand the role of childlike faith in God’s kingdom, it is necessary to understand a little bit about Heaven in general. When you study the New Testament you see that Jesus made many comments about the Kingdom of Heaven. He said: “Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” (Matthew 3:2) “And, “Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 18:4)

These verses give us a glimpse into the nature of Heaven. We see that it is close by―at hand. And we see that we must humble ourselves to draw close to it. In other words, we must become as unassuming and as trusting as a little child.

Jesus further emphasized the nearness of Heaven stating that it was very close, even closer than some people believe. He said, “Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.” (Luke 17:21) However, it is only within us if we become as little children.

Now, it could be argued that the kingdom of God and the kingdom of Heaven are two separate realms, but I think not. Compare the following verse in Mark 10:14 to the verse in Matthew 19:14, “But when Jesus saw [it], he was much displeased, and said unto them, Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God.”

These verses are almost identical except for the phrase kingdom of God that Mark uses and the phrase kingdom of Heaven that Matthew uses. In spite of the duality of titles for God’s kingdom, both versions emphasize the need for a childlike nature to become a citizen of either one. However, to more fully understand the importance of our nature and our place in God’s kingdom it is important that we fully understand our heritage.

There are several other verses we can study that will give us a clearer idea about the nature of Heaven and our role in it. The first are found in Luke and its counterpart in Matthew: “And he lifted up his eyes on his disciples, and said, Blessed [be ye] poor: for yours is the kingdom of God.” (Luke 6:20) Whereas Matthew says, “Blessed [are] the poor in spirit: for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.” (Matthew 5:3)

Again in the New Testament, Matthew and Mark use the terms kingdom of God and kingdom of Heaven interchangeably. “Then said Jesus unto his disciples, Verily I say unto you, That a rich man shall hardly enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.” (Matthew 19:23). “And Jesus looked round about, and saith unto his disciples, How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God!” (Mark 10:23)

So what exactly does this mean? Does this mean that there is no Heaven for us to go to? And if there is a Heaven, if it’s the same thing as the kingdom of God, why did Mark, Luke, and Matthew use two different terms to describe it? Good questions, all, and the answers become apparent when you study the nature of Jesus, who is the ruler of these kingdoms.

God used the inspired writers of the Gospels, who used these phrases interchangeably, to show us that the kingdom of God and the kingdom of Heaven are one and the same. He wants us to understand that they are neither this nor that, but they are both this and that simultaneously.

In the same way that Jesus is both God and man simultaneously and yet two distinct entities, that is, Jesus the Son of God and Jesus the Son of Man, so too is the kingdom of Heaven and the kingdom of God one and the same, yet also two different realities, that is, the reality of the otherworldly kingdom, the place we know as Heaven, and the reality of a worldly kingdom within us.

And Jesus, who was and is of both realities, Son of God and Son of Man, is ruler of both kingdoms. Consequently, because He is both God and man, there must be two realms for Him to rule over, that is, the kingdom of Heaven and the kingdom of God. Because of Jesus’ dual nature, it follows that His realms must also have dual natures: one in the heavens and one here on earth.

What this means for us here on earth is that it is possible to have Heaven on earth because Jesus made it clear that the kingdom of God is within us, as is the kingdom of Heaven, because they are one and the same.

However, this is not the type of heaven that most of us think about when we hear the phrase Heaven on earth. This does not mean that we don’t have to work for our living, for the Bible clearly says otherwise. It doesn’t mean that we will have everything our hearts desire, whether that be the latest and greatest computer system (my personal idea of Heaven on earth), or the fastest and slickest car, or a living room size television set.

What’s more, to achieve this state of Heaven on earth there is a critical requirement we must fulfill.

You must have faith. More specifically, the faith of a child who still believes and trusts in its parents, who still believes all things are true and possible―such as chocolate cows producing chocolate milk―and who hasn’t yet learned the concept of impossibility. Who then should we believe and put our trust in? God, our Father in Heaven, the one whom Jesus called Abba, or Daddy. When we put our faith in Him, that is, believe in Him and all that He is, and when we trust Him completely, as does a small child with its parents, then nothing will be impossible for us, even including experiencing Heaven on earth.

“For verily I say unto you,” Jesus said, “If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.” (Matthew 17:20) Jesus added a second condition to achieving Heaven on earth, “Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.” (Matthew18:3)

With these two verses in mind, we can see how faith—believing beyond what our eyes and ears see and hear, and specifically childlike faith—leads us to enter into the kingdom of Heaven. And whom do we find in Heaven, whether it be Heaven on earth or the Heaven of the spiritual realms? Jesus Christ.

Thus, we have come full circle.

We have come back to Jesus in us and shining through us onto others. For what else could Heaven on earth be but all of Jesus’ thoughts, words, actions, and love being put into practice here on earth through us and by us? This happens when we shine with His love, when we empty ourselves to Him and let His light fill us and shine through us onto others―when we have faith, come to know Him, believe in Him, trust in Him, obey Him, and allow understanding, compassion, mercy, and sacrifice to be our shining examples of Jesus’ great love for us in action.

When we can accomplish this, then we can truly be called buttercups for Jesus and we will SHINE!!

PRAYER

Father, help me to be Your buttercup shining in the light of your Son at all times, in all places, and under all circumstances.

Afterword

However hard I try, I have not been able to walk the talk as much as I want to. I fail repeatedly and then give in to guilt and shame every time. I get angry, I sin, I repent, and then I do it again.

I am not perfect. But I take comfort in the fact that I will keep trying. I will continue to fight the good fight. And when I go to meet Jesus face to face, He will be there waiting for me with open arms simply because I kept the faith and fought the good fight.

This is God’s promise to you and me. Keep trying to shine, keep trying to be a buttercup for Jesus by keeping the faith and fighting the good fight, and you too will be among those crowned in Heaven when we meet Jesus face to face.

I have fought a good fight, I have finished [my] course, I have kept the faith: Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give me at that day: and not to me only, but unto all them also that love his appearing. 2 Timothy 4:7−8

My prayer for you and me is that when the day comes that we meet our Father in Heaven, that He not only gives us the promised crown, but pulls us up to our feet, looks us in the eyes, and says, Well done, good and faithful servant. You let my light shine through to others. You were my buttercup shining in my Son.

End

About the Author

Nancy Segovia has been a professional writer for over 20 years. She has achieved publishing success in adult fiction, children’s literature, newspaper journalism, feature magazine articles, and poetry.

Her other published works include, “When You Wish Upon A Star” and “Benjamin’s Pride,” both of which are scheduled to be released later this year from Faith and Reason Publishing. She has several other completed works that will be published by Faith and Reason Publishing over the course of the next few years.

Nancy Segovia has a Master of Arts in Religion from Northwest Nazarene University and a Master of Liberal Studies in Creative Writing from the University of Denver. Currently she writes and teaches college-level English classes. She is happily married and has five daughters, five granddaughters, and one adorable grandson. She loves to fish and is a prize-winning cook.

You can contact her at www.nancysegovia.com

Table of Contents

Introduction

PART I

Chapter 1 − Getting to Know You,

Getting to Know All About You

Chapter 2 ‒ What’s Love Got to Do With It?

Chapter 3 − Crackpots and Lovers

Chapter 4 − Ready, Willing, and Able

Chapter 5 − Walk the Talk

Chapter 6 − Be Careful

What You Pray For

PART II

Chapter 7 − Walk a Mile in My Shoes

Chapter 8 − Who Me?

Not Me, Couldn’t Be

Chapter 9 − Here Come ’da Judge

Chapter 10 − The Lifter of My Head

Chapter 11 − People Are

More Important

Chapter 12 − The Dirty Word

Chapter 13 − The Bottom Line

Afterword

About the Author