“And the high priest Ananias commanded them that stood by him to smite him on the mouth. Then said Paul unto him, God shall smite thee, thou whited wall.”
(Acts 23:2-3)
“And the contention was so sharp between them, that they departed asunder one from the other.”
(Acts 15:39)
The old term, “Living what you preach” is good in theory but doesn’t always work in practice, no matter how badly we may want it to. In the first text, mentioned above, Paul didn’t turn the other cheek, Matt. 5:39. And as to the second, there was no second-mile religion involved in either man’s case, Matt. 5:41. The truth is, in both cases cited, the incidences were contrary to what Paul preached to others.
I like what Oswald Sanders penned in his book, Paul the Leader. “In Christ we find inspiration from a real man who never failed, while in Paul we gain encouragement from a man who fell and rose again. A perfect man reveals what the ideal is: a man defeated and finally victorious discloses what, by the grace of God, we may become. We need Jesus on one side of us and Paul on the other if we are to walk in triumph.”
And what is the lesson we can all learn from this? Simple: we need to give one another elbow room. Paul asks the believers at Rome, “Preachest a man should not ... dost thou?” Then he went on to say that they do the same things. Not necessarily the same in kind, but the same by analogy. We who like to call attention to the smug on our brother and sister’s face need to look in the mirror: it can be embarrassing!
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