For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it. What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul?
Matthew 16:25-26 (NIV)
It's an upside-down, inside-out type of faith. It's always pursuing, always loving, and it never ceases to amaze. It's leaving the 99 behind to find the missing one, choosing to die so that we might live. It's walking into the desert where others wanted to stay in the green pastures. It's winning when others say that you've lost, forgiving someone so that you might be set free. Where one plus one doesn't equal two, but one in unity. It's blessing those who persecute you. It doesn't make sense and yet to be without it is like trying to live without breathing. You're woven together with care and on purpose, created with a desire to be different.
This is different.
However, I say to you, love your enemy, bless the one who curses you, do something wonderful for the one who hates you, and respond to the very ones who persecute you by praying for them. For that will reveal your identity as children of your heavenly Father. He is kind to all by bringing the sunrise to warm and rainfall to refresh whether a person does what is good or evil. What reward do you deserve if you only love the loveable? Don’t even the tax collectors do that? How are you any different from others if you limit your kindness only to your friends? Don’t even the ungodly do that? Since you are children of a perfect Father in heaven, become perfect like him.”
Matthew 5:44-48 (TPT)
How are we any different from people that walk past us every day? We judge others based on our sight and preconceived ideas. We have all been hurt and let down by people somewhere along the line. Does that give us the right to label others based on our experience of hurt and shame? Thank God that He doesn't judge the way people do. No, our Father is like a surgent, He opens up the flesh, through skin and bone to look at our hearts. It doesn't get more personal than this.
If He made us in His image and placed a unique part of Himself in each one of us, then we have the priviledge to experience new parts of Him every day as we reach out to one another.
If only we could lay down our pride and choose to pick up the lens that God uses to see people, with how much compassion and love would we treat people with?
The Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.
1 Samuel 16:7 (NIV)
Chris Tomlin - Who You Are To Me ft. Lady A (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wms76AfllVE)
Phil Wickham - 1,000 Names (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gricEbvNhNg)
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