Grace. Something I’ve been learning over and over lately. It’s an incredible thing.
It’s also a remarkably difficult feeling to hold. It’s completely against human nature to want to love someone when I know the feeling won’t be reciprocated. I want revenge. I want them to suffer. I want them to feel the way I feel. I rarely admit to myself that revenge and suffering is what I want for someone who hurts me, but regardless of what I admit or don’t admit, the feeling is there.
Then I take a look at my own heart. A heart which wants to induce revenge on another isn’t exactly deserving of love either.
Elyse Fitzpatrick once said “Not one of us is more worthy of God’s love than the other. And if God graded on a curve (which he doesn’t), Jesus ruined that.”
It’s an all or nothing type of deal here. Either I’m perfect (which I’m not) or I’m a wretched sinner in need of God’s grace. When I’m mistreated, when I feel unloved, when someone hurts me–I need to realize that my heart is just as full of sin as the one who is hurting me.
I need not try to love someone who mistreats me only because God calls me to, but also because I am no more deserving of His love and grace than they are.
When I love someone because I think it’s what is right, or what will make God proud of me, my heart is in the wrong place. I am missing the point. When I love someone because I know that all of us have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, I might truly be able to see them as He sees them. A sinner none the less, but a child of His. A child in need of grace.
It’s also a remarkably difficult feeling to hold. It’s completely against human nature to want to love someone when I know the feeling won’t be reciprocated. I want revenge. I want them to suffer. I want them to feel the way I feel. I rarely admit to myself that revenge and suffering is what I want for someone who hurts me, but regardless of what I admit or don’t admit, the feeling is there.
Then I take a look at my own heart. A heart which wants to induce revenge on another isn’t exactly deserving of love either.
Elyse Fitzpatrick once said “Not one of us is more worthy of God’s love than the other. And if God graded on a curve (which he doesn’t), Jesus ruined that.”
It’s an all or nothing type of deal here. Either I’m perfect (which I’m not) or I’m a wretched sinner in need of God’s grace. When I’m mistreated, when I feel unloved, when someone hurts me–I need to realize that my heart is just as full of sin as the one who is hurting me.
I need not try to love someone who mistreats me only because God calls me to, but also because I am no more deserving of His love and grace than they are.
When I love someone because I think it’s what is right, or what will make God proud of me, my heart is in the wrong place. I am missing the point. When I love someone because I know that all of us have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, I might truly be able to see them as He sees them. A sinner none the less, but a child of His. A child in need of grace.
For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous. Now the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that, as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. (Romans 5:18-21)
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