Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is-his good, pleasing and perfect will.
Romans 12:2 NIV
Paul lays out in Romans 12, foundational doctrines for a passionate and victorious Christian life. To live out this life, Paul starts by teaching the Romans how to defeat their personal insecurities. If we cannot deal with and defeat our own inner insecurities, we risk compromising our Christian life.
Spiritual insecurity prevents us from accessing all the power that comes to us through our relationship with Jesus Christ. Through our relationship with Christ we have access to the kingdom of God, and we have power and spiritual gifts. We have the channel to eternal possibilities. We live in Christ’s forgiveness.
But the worst thing that could happen would be for us to be insecure about who we are in general and who we are in Christ. It will frustrate and limit our journey. It will make us look at ourselves in narrow ways, and we will miss the benefits of living with the Spirit’s enablement. We will think that the scriptures are motivating, but not realistically possible.
Insecurity is not just lacking self-confidence. When we are insecure, we are dangerous because we want others to give us security. So, we put too much pressure on others, when God is the one who has the answers. When we are insecure, we create unsafe emotional spaces for ourselves and those around us.
Paul’s answer to the threat of human insecurity is to choke out what feeds insecurity: feeling the need to conform. When we make the choice to stop living with the need to conform to the pattern of this world, we can defeat insecurity. When the thoughts, opinions, and impulses of our culture no longer hold us down, we are free to live a Christian life.
When physical beauty and material wealth are no longer our goals and ideals, we can live a life that is transformed and renewed. Then, insecurity will fall away, and we can begin to understand God’s good, pleasing, and perfect will.
Why has my pain been perpetual
And my wound incurable, refusing to be healed?
Will you indeed be to me like a deceptive brook
With water that is unreliable?
Jeremiah 15:18 AMP
Chapter 15 of Jeremiah is an exchange between God and Jeremiah regarding captivity for Israel. Jeremiah is bold and transparent as he speaks with God. He complains about how lonely he is, and he talks about the pain that he lives with, feeling the pain and fear of his fellow Israelites. Jeremiah hates having to prophesy such things, and he is about as sad as a man can possibly become. Jeremiah has no one to share his experience with, and no one to talk to. He feels hurt by what is going on around him and by God.
Everyone of us knows hurt and pain, and what Jeremiah admits is that his pain and hurt caught him off guard because he is God’s prophet. Some of us have the impression that God ought to exempt us from experiencing hurt because we are saved. Jeremiah believes this so much that he uses the image of God being a dried up, deceptive brook.
While we might not call God deceptive, all of us have been hurt enough to wonder if God lied to us when He told us about grace. We often remember how powerful God is in the midst of our pain and we believe that He has been unfair or dishonest because He does not shield us from life’s many arrows, even when those arrows come from other Christians.
However, many times our hurt takes us to places that we’ve locked away instead of dealt with. As long as no one pushes our buttons or says the wrong thing, that old nature is suppressed. But, every so often people will get to us, and we prove to those people that we haven’t been totally sanctified.
Instead of allowing hurt to take us back to our old nature, we should bring our hurt to God, but we need to be willing to wait for Him to answer. Just like Jeremiah was transparent with God in verse 18, we need to stick around for God to answer us like He does for Jeremiah in verse 19: “If you repent, I will restore you that you may serve me; if you utter worthy, not worthless, words, you will be my spokesman” (AMP).
There is life after hurt. We don’t have to live with hurt suffocating us like a blanket. We can live on after we’ve been hurt. There may be lingering pain or wounds, but the fact that many people have been hurt in life-shattering ways and continue on proves to us that there is life after hurt.
We can take God’s words to heart and address hurt. To do this we need to stop feeling sorry for ourselves. There is no value in feeling sorry for ourselves, and God makes it clear to Jeremiah that worthy, not worthless, words are what will help Jeremiah. What God implies to Jeremiah is that He is not going to work on Jeremiah’s heart in this season, He is going to work on his attitude.
Our hearts are strong enough to get hurt and keep on ticking, so when we are hurt, we need to check our self-pity at the door and take that time to examine our attitude towards the situation. When we approach these situations with love and healing in mind, only then can the hurt be dealt with.
Again Jesus went into a synagogue; and a man was there whose hand was withered. The Pharisees were watching Jesus closely to see if He would heal him on the Sabbath, so that they might accuse Him [in the Jewish high court]. He said to the man whose hand was withered, “Get up and come forward!” He asked them, “Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do evil, to save a life or to kill?” But they kept silent. After looking around at them with anger, grieved at the hardness and arrogance of their hearts, He told the man, “Hold out your hand.” And he held it out, and his hand was [completely] restored.
Mark 3:1-5 AMP
The pharisees here wanted to end Jesus’ ministry. However, Jesus fired back at them the word of God, and exposes them for using the word of God to benefit themselves. The pharisees had become uninterested in helping those around them and were more interested in cultural control and synagogue profit.
Jesus knows that the pharisees set this up. Regardless, Jesus asks the man with the withered hand to “get up and come forward.” Then Jesus asks the Pharisees about the Sabbath law and whether or not one can do a good thing on the Sabbath. The pharisees can’t respond, because they know that what Jesus is doing is right, even if it breaks their customs.
The man who Jesus healed did not ask to be found in the middle of all of this drama, but amidst that drama, came a powerful healing. If the man had tried to avoid this drama, he would have missed out on his powerful, spiritual healing. Similarly, we may lose out on powerful workings in our lives if we try to avoid drama.
Within drama, God can meet us and bring healing and restoration to our lives. Jesus proves, over and over, that He uses peoples’ differences, judgementalism, and messiness to perform miracles. Jesus doesn’t wait until we’ve cleaned ourselves up to provide his miracles, but He provides them in the middle of our messy drama.
God can get to us, even if we are sandwiched between drama. God may even purpose drama for our lives. It allows God to demonstrate His power in our lives. We should stop attempting to sidetrack the tough drama in our lives. When we try to avoid drama and conflict, we are missing the freedom that comes from overcoming that drama or trial.
The unfolding of our spiritual walk takes place in the gentle scene of Jesus in the manger and the battle between Jesus and the pharisees. We cannot love Jesus if we don’t love both Jesus in the manger and Jesus who takes a whip and drives people out of the temple.
When we think about the messy things in our lives, we have to come face to face with the reality that some of the Lord’s strongest work happens in the middle of our drama. If we avoid drama and conflict, we are avoiding God’s work in our lives. If we think that being in the middle of stress, tension, and drama is the worst thing in the world, we miss the opportunity to surrender to the Lord in those moments and exercise our faith.
“Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to them; then come and offer your gift." Matthew 5:23-24 NIV
“Reconciliation always brings springtime to the soul.” — Brother Roger
If reconciliation always brings springtime to the soul, then conflict must feel like a brutal polar vortex. Because of this, most people avoid conflict at any cost, and they nurse resentment, anger, and misunderstanding instead.
One of the highest challenges in human relationships is communication, and this may be because people are always communicating to avoid conflict. We understand why. We don’t want to get into the messiness of conflict, but avoiding that messiness leads us to avoid relationships themselves.
Emotions aren’t always able to be controlled and human language is fragile and fails to convey our hearts. However, Jesus was not afraid of conflict. In fact, Jesus encouraged it. For Him, conflict was not a negative experience. He saw it as a way of protecting one’s relationship with God.
The text shows us that you can let conflict find a lodging place in your heart and mind until it infects your worship. Jesus presses this issue so seriously that He equates it to the urgency people have about not committing murder. The Lord is extremely serious about how we deal with our anger.
We are to steward our human conflicts and take them seriously, because our anger parallels the intensity of murder. Jesus underlines this by saying, “I want you to leave your gift at the altar and go and be reconciled.” It was important to the offering to give with a reconciled heart.
Jesus wants us to make it a priority to live in reconciliation with the people in our lives. We need to apply attention and effort to handling conflict. We need to grip conflict and use it to protect our relationships with the people around us and God.
When we spend every day fighting and trying to live a life that is in line with God’s will, people will cause conflict in our lives, and we will cause conflict in theirs. It is just a part of being in relationship with people. So, we need to learn how to manage conflict, not avoid it. This is because it affects our worship and offering to Jesus.
God receives our offerings when we are in conflict with Him. He hears the prayers of the sinner. This is because He is the one who brings healing in our relationship with Him. However, when we have conflict with others, God makes it clear that we are the ones who need to bring healing in those relationships.
God doesn’t atone for our transgressions against each other. We have to do that and fight to build healthy relationships. When we stop seeing conflict like bondage and treat it like a measuring rod, we can then go from where we are to a place of maturation. We can use these moments to grow and to bring the Christ in us into those moments and into our lives.
"Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?" Jesus replied: "'Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."
Matthew 22:36-40
Jesus didn’t want to send a signal that it is perfectly fine to have ritual faithfulness or institutional regularity and not have healthy, human relationships. Part of having a faith commitment to Christ is a commitment to honor Him in our human exchanges.
This week’s text comes right after a Sadducees’ attempt to trap and discredit Jesus. In this hostile environment, Jesus responds to the Sadducee and explains how to turn our hearts and thoughts towards healthy relationships: “Love the Lord your God with all your passion and prayer and intelligence.’ This is the most important, the first on any list. But there is a second to set alongside it: ‘Love others as well as you love yourself” (Matthew 22: 37-40MSG).
If we don’t first build a strong relationship with God, we will never understand how to have healthy relationships with others. When we have a strong relationship with God, we don’t need to be needy in our other relationships. We are already filled and satisfied. By rooting our relationships with God, dangerous emotions like jealousy fade away, because we know that God, in His providence, connected us for mutual benefit, not competition. Our strengths and weaknesses can then cover each other and build each other up.
But we can’t expect all of our relationships to be for our benefit. Jesus said when He returns, the righteous will ask Him, “Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’ and He will reply, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me” (Matthew 25:44-45 NIV).
It is important for us to be able to help those who cannot help themselves. Because all of our relationships are built on our relationship with God, we can bring God’s healing to those from whom we will never receive any material benefit. If we approach relationships with a utilitarian mindset, we have completely misunderstood our relationship with God.
God hasn’t knitted us together so that one person must give up everything for the other, but so that we can benefit from each other—not simply materially but spiritually.
If we want to live our best, God-honoring lives, we need to look at our relationships. We need to ask ourselves how healthy they are, but even more, we need to ask ourselves, how healthy is our relationship with God?
