11/8/2017 0 Comments The Delicious Dish.Matthew 7:3-5
3 “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? 4 How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? 5 You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. During my prayer time this morning, I was asking God to bless a friend of mine. This friend is one who is constantly in need of prayer. She is a very sweet, yet love-blind woman I have known for years. Every relationship she enters is with “Mr. Right”, until she realizes he is actually “Mr. Wrong”. As her friend, I can often see the red flag about the new love of her life before she can, but she stubbornly dismisses my misgivings and falls hard for whomever has caught her eye. Praying for her as she moves from crisis to crisis is a full-time job. As I was asking God to open her eyes to see the glaring truth about the repeated folly she commits, I felt a jarring in my heart as he revealed my own propensity for getting into the same mess again and again. The passage from Matthew came to mind as well as the more grotesque line from Proverbs 26:11 “As a dog returns to its vomit, so fools repeat their folly.” Wasn’t I just as likely to fall into the same sin patterns I found comfortable? As I sat there praying for the scales to fall from her eyes so she could see the truth of her situation, my vision sharpened and I was able to see the truth of mine. I had fallen into the ruts of the past and was making the familiar journey into a sin that was second nature to me. He opened my eyes to see that I was once again following the same pattern of behavior that I had before. I was metaphorically pulling up a chair to a big pile of throw up and getting ready to fork in behavior I know I can’t handle! (My stomach turned just typing that line. Good thing God knows how queasy I am and how vivid my imagination is, sometimes nausea is a part of true repentance!) As remarkable as my life is now, the temptation to fall back into the “easy” ways still exists. Every time I step in faith, the devil presents me with a new opportunity to turn back to the old way of being; he knows my sin of choice and would love to see me back there. My enthusiasm and fervor to do more for God is usually met with opposition that wants to watch me fail and then blame God, but not this time. The perfect storm of bad decisions, bad timing, and bad planning passed without too much turmoil this time. I prayed for guidance and worked for resolution and successfully gouged some of the splinters out of my eye. I refuse to pick up my fork and dig into the steaming plate of fresh puke the devil had served up for me today.
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AuthorI am a Christian, a wife, a mom, and a part-time basket case who wants to be a full time writer.
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