The Lord desires that our relationships be godly and encouraging to one another.
We may have infrequent conflicts in our relationships, which is to be expected when we know that we are human beings with all our warts and idiosyncrasies, they can not be avoided, but can be worked through and growth experienced if there is the love of Christ.
However, there are those relationships that never seem to grow and create a sense of weariness, that causes us to want to run, nearly every time we are faced with a visit. I am convinced that the Lord does not necessarily require us to remain in all relationships we have had, except marriage. There is no question that marriage is for life.
The Lord some times tells us to leave a friendship, if that acquaintance is not interested in holiness, and makes continual attempts to thwart our own walk with the Lord. When we are continually negated, for whatever reason, we might want to reconsider remaining friends.
The Scripture is clear that "two cannot walk together unless they are agreed." For years I encountered certain people who were bent on treating me as though I had not a brain in my head. They did not respond when I spoke and never encouraged the path that I had chosen to take. In fact these people never had a encouragement for me in anything that I was doing that pleased me and the Lord. For years I thought that I was unlovable, that I must be ugly or stupid, then one day the light came on.
The Lord showed me through studies about God's love, hospitality and mercy that I was not what these people wanted to believe. I say it that way because I do think that they chose the route against me that they took, used of Satan of course, but enjoyed the notion that they were superior to me and fostered that same notion in others who knew them.
It was the "feather in the wind" effect. How we treat someone in the presence of others is like taking a feather pillow up on top of a hill on a windy day, slicing it open and then letting the feathers fly in the wind, after doing so, try to get all the feathers back again, it is impossible. When others see us negating another person, by various means, treating them as insignificant, ignoring their comments and desires and other forms of manipulation, those looking on will believe our actions and attitudes and do it too, even if they don't see a reason.
I am reminded of the story of the man who walked into an elevator facing the back of it. Four people walked into the elevator each one at a time and faced the back also. Finally when asked by one of the riders, why he was facing the back of the elevator, he stated, “to see what everyone else would do.”
If we open the feather pillow of indifference or manipulation toward a person, we can expect others to follow and we would be responsible for how many other people we cause to treat our target the same way.
God sees our manipulation and indifference to the cares of others. We can fool others, but we cannot fool God, He sees it all. I have added here an article on this matter of unloving selfish manipulation, it would be good to evaluate ourselves to see if we are a person described in this article by Steve Morris.
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