HURTING THE ONE YOU LOVE

“Jesus Wept...He...wept.”

(Jn. 11:35 Lk. 19:41) ;

In 1944 a group called, “The Mills Brothers” sang a song that became very popular entitled, YOU ALWAYS HURT THE ONE YOU LOVE. I’m sure its success could be attributed, for the most part, to how true to life its lyrics were. Years ago I heard an elderly preacher say the reason we hurt loved ones is because we know that no one else would tolerate it. He went on to mention how ironic it was, the one being hurt showing his or her love to the other who was doing the hurting. I remember all the hurt I caused my dear mother as a young man. Her tears streaming down her cheeks, while biting her bottom lip, hurt me more than a slap across the face ever could.

Twice it is recorded in the Holy Writ that our Lord wept. Our incarnate God has emotions. The difference between His and ours is He keeps His under control, they never run wild, so to speak. His are Holy emotions!  I think of how much grief I have caused Him over these many long years. While I kept hurting Him, He kept loving me! How little is preached or written on His life of personal hurts. We’re told He groaned and that He was grieved. Jesus was not only capable of being hurt physically, but emotionally. He was in the same skin as we, but with the absence of a sinful nature. 

As the sun is setting in both my physical and spiritual life, like many Old Disciples,  there have been some reversals from a few of my previous beliefs. One of the most life-changing is I no longer fear God hurting me in chastening. My greatest fear now is in me hurting Him with my living. I have spent some time meditating on Peter’s denial of Him and the events that followed. I do not think this man of clay that loved his Lord so dearly wept bitterly because of the personal embarrassment it brought him, nor the fact of letting himself down. I personally believe it was the hurt he saw in Jesus’ eyes when the Lord looked at him. Hurting the One person who would never hurt him was more than he could take.

“We’re told Jesus was, and is, ‘The Man of Sorrows’; it breaks my heart that I was and am the cause of much of it.”

(rds) 

An Old Disciple  

THE FLIPSIDE OF ANSWERED PRAYER

“And a vision appeared to Paul in the night; There stood a man of Macedonia, and prayed him, saying, Come over into Macedonia, and help us...And after he had seen the vision, immediately we endeavoured to go….”

(Acts 16:9-10)

We all desire answers to our prayers, and rightly so, but there is another side to answered prayer that one hears very little of today. We see this flipside in our main text. Paul was not content merely to get answers to his own prayers: he wanted to be an answer to others’ prayers. We each need to search our hearts and ask ourselves the question, “Has God used me lately to be an answer to somebody’s prayer?” Our opening reference is not an isolated one; this truth is found throughout the Bible. 

I think that being someone else's miracle is better than experiencing your own. It is a wonderful thing to be a WALKING MIRACLE in the lives of others. I wonder what we’d say if the Lord were to come to us and ask, “Choose one of the two: do you want me to answer your prayer, or do you want to be an answer to another's prayer?” As they say, This is where the rubber meets the road.” It is greater to be a blessing than to receive a blessing!  I think it is put up or shut up time.

During the Great depression a little girl was sitting on a street curb singing, “Jesus Love Me.” A passerby asked, “If He loves you so much why do you not have any shoes?” The urchin’s reply: “Oh, I prayed and asked God for some. But the person He told to help me hasn’t done so yet.” Humm, sounds like 1 Jn. 3:17 to me:“ But whoso hath this world's good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?”

An Old Disciple