SCANDALOUS
June 13th, 2022
LOVE IS…Not Easily Irritated or Quick to Take Offense (v. 13:5)
1 Corinthians 13:8, 13, ‘Love never stops loving. It extends beyond the gift of prophecy, which eventually fades away. It is more enduring than tongues, which one day will fall silent. Love remains long after words of knowledge are forgotten…Until then, there are three things that remain: faith, hope and love—yet love surpasses them all. So, above all else, let love be the beautiful prize for which you run.’ (TPT)
Loves doesn’t fly off the handle. Everyone else, but LOVE, does.
Talk about scandalous, all the scandals that make the headlines these days. Isn’t listening to the news or following social media or grabbing a newspaper juicier and as riveting and entertaining as some of those scam magazines that propagate babies being birthed by men and aliens from other planets now living amongst us? We no longer need to subscribe to comic books and sneak to make 1-900 calls because it is all delivered to us on a momentary basis no matter where we look or watch or read. Many of the scandals that we wrap our brains around are because of so many in society ‘losing it’, upchucking their stuff on someone else who happened to be in the wrong place, experiencing the inability to count to ten and letting some things go. In fact, when was the last time you let something go, looked the other way, turned the other cheek?
I get it. Life isn’t for wimps. There are some things I see happen while I am out and about and it snatches from me typically a snide comment under my breath, or when I am driving, it might just blurt out. I tend to remind myself that it takes just as much effort to offer a blessing as it does a curse. And I sigh. Usually living out loud and aloud. I have been crushed by watching all the reports surrounding the shooting in Uvalde, TX, shootings anywhere, but especially in Uvalde—where not many ever even heard of the town until this happened—because of the senseless loss of little children who didn’t have a say in one thing that transpired that day. I worked there for a brief period of time, and while I know no one, I feel like America has adopted all those families and wished we could hold them close. But even if we could hold them close, many of us have no fathomable idea what it is like to wake up in their beds every day, nor walk in their shoes. There is not one thing I could say or do that would give them the peace that has been stripped from them. Except for Jesus, that is. Because Jesus equates peace, and it is something this world desperately needs. Anger and living livid and fury and antagonism—flying off the handle—that’s what kills people today, decimates each other, annihilates others, screams a final word you can never take back. I wish I could also offer them answers they desperately deserve; the truth is, the ONLY ANSWER is Jesus.
I think about Jesus and how patiently kind He had to have been. There were idiots in His day too just as in our day. People who simply didn’t think before they spoke, those that let it all hang out, no filters—Peter who cut off ears and denied Christ before the cock-a-doodle-doo welcomed a new day, Judas who sold him out for a mere few shekels, Nicodemus who imagined crawling back into the womb of his mother to be born again, Pilate who washed his hands of the singularly most important moment in his entire life because he didn’t have a backbone, those who mocked the woman who broke the alabaster jar of pure Nard over Jesus and anointed His feet with her tears because He was more than worth the cost. He sought demons out of chained agony and released a man bound by a legion of angry spirits and He even pursued me in my anger and way-words that have gotten me into trouble and very much misunderstood. I am grateful for a God Who takes the malice from the menacing and wrecks the wrecking ball and brings blessing to the broken and crushed in spirit. Love loosens the necktie after a long day. Love turns the other cheek. Love holds a door open and waits on a parking space and pays someone else’s tab and stops to really listen about someone else’s plight and drenches the feet of Jesus everyday with tears of liquid gold.
Romans 7:24-25, ‘I’ve tried everything, and nothing helps. I’m at the end of my rope. Is there no one who can do anything for me? Isn’t that the real question? The Answer, thank God, is that Jesus Christ can and does. He acted to set things right in this life of contradictions where I want to serve God with all my heart and mind but am pulled by the influence of sin to do something totally different.’ (MSG)
So many weddings happen every year during the month of June; so many ‘I do’s’ are spoken that eventually become ‘I don’t’s’, because we understand so little about love, God’s love, and the gentleness of it, the patience of it. What would happen if we too loved like that, if we took a deep breath and inhaled frustration but exhaled facilitation, inhaled exasperation but exhaled blessing?
