DUCKS’ BACKS OR SPONGES

 “Do not hate your brother in your heart.  Rebuke your neighbor frankly so you will not share in his guilt.”  Leviticus 19:17

 “Whoever of you loves life and desires to see many good days, keep your tongue from evil…seek peace, and pursue it.”  Psalm 34:12-14

Choosing the right path to true peace—discerning between peacemaking and peacefaking— is not always easy.  Just knowing that sometimes we must confront, even though it is uncomfortable, doesn’t solve all the problems that go along with trying to be wise. 

 If we move too quickly in one direction— speak our minds as a sort of knee-jerk reaction— we might be plagued with regret for the rest of our days for spouting off things we didn’t really mean after a while. 

If we convince ourselves to wait it out and see if our resentment or hurt indeed will roll away like water off a duck’s back, sometimes, even if it doesn’t roll away, we listen to the Evil One as he uses one or more of several tactics to convince us not to go back and revisit this Thing with our sister or brother.  (Many of us err in the first way because we are the type who know from past experience that if we convince ourselves to wait it out and see if our resentment or hurt indeed will roll away like water off a duck’s back, we might once again end up despising ourselves for our fearful or slothful paralysis.) 

How do we grow a heart of wisdom in this matter so that we will neither react “knee-jerkfully” nor allow the devil to falsely placate us into a deadly malaise that will surface in some bizarre way down the road?  My friend Candy calls this bizarre kind of surfacing “coming out sideways.” That paints a pretty graphic picture, doesn’t it?

Something that has worked for me is the Jericho solution.  When some hurt lingers until the next day and I am tempted to “speak my piece” as a means of finding my peace, I begin praying specifically and purposefully about it for seven days.  After this weeklong prayer vigil, I will notice that I am either greatly prompted to have the discussion or else the thing has faded from bright red to pale pink, and the sharp edges have been whittled down to a smoothness that no longer has pricking power.  

 

Whether we can be a duck’s back about an offense or for some reason can’t help being a sponge about it is important for us to learn and admit to ourselves. Somewhere in our anger and hurt, we might have missed the possibility that we have likewise been part of the offense. 

If we don’t deal honestly with ourselves and our brothers and sisters, we might miss the possibility that we, too, have offended, and according to the spirit of Matthew 5:23-24, our gifts to our Father will not be accepted.  What a terrible plight!  We must be diligent to pray to be delivered from such costly deception.

PEACEMAKERS OR PEACEFAKERS?

“If your brother sins against you, go and show him his fault, just between the two of you. If he listens to you, you have won your brother over.” Matthew 18:15

There is more of a reason to want peace than just to horde the comfortable feelings it brings. We want not just to be peace-horders but peace-givers, peacemakers.

Jesus tells us in Matthew 5:9 that peacemakers are such a blessing to Him that they will be called “Sons of God.” Paul presented the same high calling to the Roman Christians: “If possible, so far as it depends upon you, be at peace with all men” (Romans 12:18). Peter agrees as he echoes Psalm 34: “Let him who means to love life and see good days…seek peace and pursue it” (1 Peter 3:10-11). And these are just a smattering of all the Bible says about the virtues of peace.

Because of the abundance of scriptures pointing us toward living peacefully, we might have picked up a dangerous stereotype worth examining. There is more to this “peace” than meets the eye, and this command from Leviticus 19:17 can help us uncover some of its less obvious aspects: “Do not hate your brother in your heart. Rebuke your neighbor frankly so you will not share in his guilt.”

Hey, what's going on here? The second part of this scripture doesn’t seem to fit with the first half. This could simply mean that if we know a brother’s (or sister’s) sin and don’t help him/her see it, we could be held partially responsible. But if this is true, why is it in the context of not hating him? Rebuking doesn’t sound like peacemaking, so perhaps we could just chalk up the seeming contradiction of both commands to the often misunderstood Old Testament way of thinking akin to “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” After all, we know that Jesus nixed that way of thinking in His Sermon on the Mount when, with His “You have heard it said, but I say,” He set out to teach us about the higher law of love.

But this argument just won't hold up. For right there in the same book with Jesus’ Beatitudes, He further instructs His disciples: “And if your brother sins against you, go and show him his fault…” Obviously, then, Jesus, whose every word was in harmony with all His other words, meant that sometimes to achieve real peace, something active must happen.

Yes, certainly sometimes peace can be achieved quietly and passively; we can and should just flat purposely overlook some sins against us. Other times, however, true peace that will keep us from hating our brother or sister in our heart must be something that we more actively “seek” and “pursue.” At these times we must confront our brother or sister whom we need to forgive. In this light, the warning in Leviticus not only lines up with the teachings of Jesus but makes a lot of sense its own context: Whatever our brother or sister has done to us cannot possibly be worse than our hating him or her for it.

In His Beatitudes, Jesus referred to peace in the deepest, most heartfelt sense, even if it means going to some trouble to achieve it. Otherwise, we are not peacemakers but peacefakers.

Sometimes making the peace and keeping the peace requires action, even risky action. After all, you might wonder, what if confrontation makes things even worse? (This, by the way, is the same excuse often used when parents don't want to ruffle their kids' feathers, even though their feathers are obviously dangerously infested with mites, fleas, lice, ________ [fill in the blank with whatever vermin is disgusting enough to cause you to say, "Whoa! Enough of this vile stuff!" and start ripping feathers out with a vengeance in order to save the child.] )

If your heart can't finally drop it, prayerfully, carefully take action to stop the infection. Stop the faking. Make the peace.

TUNING UP FOR THE SYMPHONY

“The Sovereign Lord has given me an instructed tongue to know the word that sustains the weary. He wakens me morning by morning, wakens my ear to listen like one being taught. The Sovereign Lord has opened my ears, and I have not been rebellious, I have not turned back.” Isaiah 50:4-5

We can trust the hands of this Surgeon, this Potter. Though He will not wrangle us down and tie us to His Wheel—or His operating table (whichever metaphor works better for you), He invites us through His Spirit, His Word, to trust Him to make the pain it will require be worth it to us in the end.

There are some of you reading this who are still not entirely certain that a daily ritual of Bible study and prayer is something worth adopting. You are not fully convinced that this sort of thing will give a good enough return for the time sacrificed. May I please give you a little personal testimony: I began writing devotionals as a means toward the end of helping others become involved in and hopefully fall in love with that living and active Word of God that is our lifeline and anchor. I had to do it because, you see, before I began my regular early morning quiet times in the presence of God about twenty years ago, my life looked all right, my vessel appeared on the outside to be useful and functional, and maybe even a little impressive in some respects, but there was some festering unrest inside that needed to be cleaned out before I would have enough room inside to hold the Treasure. In spite of my appearance to others, in spite of my ability to look the part on the outside, this cauldron within burned uncomfortably at times, and I was never very certain how long my inner peace would last. Regardless of my outward appearance, peace was a fragile thing. This fragility and insecurity based upon my self-confidence held the Treasure at bay.

Setting aside time alone with God in prayer and His Word changed my life more than any one thing or person. Many of you well know what I speak of; you know the value of tuning up your instrument before the symphony begins. Every new day we are given is a symphony.

If you have been tuning up, pay attention to your symphony, and see if the melody is growing sweeter and the harmony truer than it was when you conducted it alone. See if the Treasure is taking over the territory of the terror.

ON THE POTTER'S WHEEL

“This is the word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: ‘Go down to the potter’s house, and there I will give you my message.’ So I went down to the potter’s house, and I saw him working at the wheel. But the pot he was shaping from the clay was marred in his hands; so the potter formed it into another pot, shaping it as it seemed best to him.” Jeremiah 18:1-4

We are all in the hands of some potter. Something is forming the shape of us all. Hopefully we have chosen to entrust ourselves into the hands of the One True Potter, our Creator, who alone knows what we were meant to be.

And if indeed He is our Potter in the truest sense of the word, He not only wants to mold us externally—that would be our circumstances, our talents, all our raw material, the way our lives look on the outside to others—He wants to fill us up with Himself so that all we look like, all we do, is purely motivated by and is all about glorifying Him.

But the shape and condition of the inside of these vessels influences how much of God we can contain. Maybe—even though no one may be able to see it from the outside—there might not be enough room inside for His Spirit.

It could be that instead of being an adequate receptacle for Him, we are clogged up with calcium deposits—hard places—so that we are no longer tender and vulnerable and approachable.

Or maybe we are filled with decaying, rotting debris—bitter grudges, festering unforgiveness— which might us to be broken and our insides exposed so that the Potter can file away all this stuff and reshape us according to His vision for us.

Rough calluses might need to be smoothed; offending, impeding debris might need to be chipped away.

Diligent students of the Word, does something hauntingly familiar spring to mind here, speaking of the need for something to be cut away? Hopefully it is this, from Hebrews 4:12: “For the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow, it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.” Yes, studying the scriptures can help us with all of this painful surgery we might so desperately need. Verse 13 and following go on to say that “Nothing is all creation is hidden from God’s sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of Him to whom we must give account.”

We are an open book to God, for sure, but whether or not He is allowed to use the scalpel of His Word to do the surgery on us is our call. He will not force that upon us.

He does, however, do much to encourage us to let Him. The Hebrews writer hastens to remind us of this wonderful truth: Jesus our High Priest has experienced this very life we live here on this very earth. And He has now gone before us to the heavenlies so that we can approach the throne of God with confidence and receive mercy and grace in our times of need.