The Well
The Well |
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Connecting Hope to the Hurting | |
Friday
February 15, 2008
It's like this: When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a
child does. But when I grew up, I put away childish things. Now we see things
imperfectly as in a poor mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect
clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know
everything completely, just as God knows me now. There are three things that
will endure—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love.
1
Corinthians 13:11-13
As a latchkey kid in the 50s, I learned to do things my way. If I was hungry I ate whatever I wanted and rarely was it something nourishing. If I wanted to play I played. If I didn't feel like reading or studying I didn't. I developed my own belief system and it took God forty-five years to demolish it.
We believe what we hear if we hear it enough. That is why God wants us to understand the power of the spoken word. If I think something about someone or even myself and then speak it out loud, I am literally speaking it into existence. So, I spoke into existence that God did not love me and that became a vital part of my belief system.
Growing up I knew of only one Pentecostal church. They met in an old commissary building across the tracks from where I lived. Oddly enough, they met on Friday nights. I can remember standing outside that building and wondering what in the world they were doing that they had to do so loudly! When people told me that they ran up and down the aisles shouting, that they jumped over pews, and that they spoke in tongues, I received that as something bad.
Over the years I heard the same disdain spoken from other people everywhere I went; even from many pulpits. So, every time I met a Pentecostal person I shied away from them. I guess I set myself up to eventually become one of those loud, dancing, tongue-speaking people. Then, and only then, could I repent for the judgment I placed on this group of God's children.
Paul warns us that we need to put away all of our childish beliefs. We need to submit to God, take Him at His Word, cutting nothing out, and love one another. If we could just cast out the spirit of religion and the spirit of unbelief from ourselves God would allow us a foretaste of the Kingdom of God. That is part of the Holy Spirit's function (Romans 8:23), and we would experience true worship instead of empty rituals.
I have many friends who are Baptist, Methodist, and Catholic. We do not try to sway each other to come over to our way of believing, but we allow each other the freedom to share the ways we experience God. We allow ourselves the freedom to even enter into each other's realm and support each other at different times and give ourselves to worshiping with them – their way. When we do this I sincerely believe our Father smiles. Until we get to Heaven and experience Holy worship, God has given us tools to endure our differences and they are: faith, hope, and love, and only one of those will go with us to glory – that is love!
Father, I praise You because You are merciful, gracious, and perfect in love. I honestly don't know how You tolerate our pettiness and the way we persecute people who believe differently that we do. Help us get out from under denominationalism and into You!
