So don’t lose a minute in building on
what you’ve been given, complementing your basic
faith with good character, spiritual
understanding, alert discipline, passionate patience, reverent
wonder, warm friendliness, and generous love, each dimension fitting into and developing the others. With these qualities active and growing in
your lives, no grass will grow under your feet, no day will pass without its
reward as you mature in your experience of our Master Jesus. Without these qualities you can’t see what’s
right before you, oblivious that your old sinful life has been wiped off the
books. 2 Peter 1:5 - 9 (TMSG)
In last
Friday’s devotion Peter gave us a different perspective on developing genuine
Christian personality. While our first
five words dealt with developing inner
strength (character, understanding, discipline, patience and worship), the big
fisherman now turns from focusing on personal growth to caring for the church
family, Christ’s body. Warm
friendliness is familial
affection – that which you know (by instinct) to do for those close to you; for
those to whom you feel most predisposed to be kind.
And now today
Peter takes us even deeper into the world’s population. Generous love is much more expansive in its reach than just the
family. The word is agape, God’s kind of
love. That kind of love is sacrificial
and is an inclusive offer to everyone. When
it comes to being compassionate in response to the needs of people, it matters
not whether I feel
anything like affection for a person - I give myself to that person’s need, family,
friend or stranger. And I do it largely
because of my love for God. I extend
myself as God extended himself in Christ dying on a cross for me; because of me!
What does that look like in Real
Time?
Did you ever
have one of those “can’t believe I
did that” moments?
A few decades
ago I was serving a church in North Florida.
A woman who was a member of our church brought her 30-something son, Ted[1] to my
office. She was worried about his
faith. The young man was dying of AIDS-related
issues.
The Mom
unfolded the story of how her son had been drawn into a “party lifestyle” and
how it had wrecked his reputation, his health, and made him a slave to drugs,
alcohol and sex. And now that he was
beyond what the doctors could do, she was worried that he’d gone too far for
even God’s help.
I listened
intently to what the mother was saying, but I was watching the son. His head was down, eyes scanning every part
of the carpet in my study. His shoulders
were slumped over, arms folded as if to hold himself together. It was as if he was enduring an ordeal of
having his insides displayed on an examining table. Life had indeed broken him in many ways.
I had the
sense that all Ted really wanted at that moment was not to be in some preacher’s
office hearing his mother describe all his failure.
When the Mom finished
outlining her son’s sad story there was a very uncomfortable silence for what
seemed an hour (but probably only a minute or so). And then it happened – I got up from my
chair, went to where Ted was sitting and hugged him, held him for a while. I told him, “Ted, I’m so sorry for what
you’re facing, but God loves you, and I’ll do my best to be your friend.”
What was
strangely a matter of “generous love” about this encounter was the fact that I’m
rarely impulsive, but I had just hugged someone who was HIV-infected, dying
because AIDS had taken-over his life. In
the early 90’s it was still largely unknown how “contagious” AIDS might
be. We had been warned often to be
careful about direct contact with the “untouchables”.
After Ted and
his Mom left my office I slumped back with a sigh at my desk and had that “can’t believe I did that”
moment. The hug had been a spontaneous
moment of one human being, driven by compassion reaching out to another. But I’d touched the leper – and now (I
thought) I’m probably going to die too.
The outcome
of that brief moment is not a miraculous tale of physical healing. There were some awkward moments and
heartbreaking pain in Ted’s life and death some months later. But Ted’s Mom shared with me that they had
many moments after that day when they talked of his faith in God, and she was
comforted that he felt loved and secure in Christ.
For You, Today…
You might need to touch a leper today. Or you might be the leper.
Either way, be generous with love – just like your
Father in Heaven!
No comments:
Post a Comment