Ephesians 4:31-32 Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you. (NIV)
If ever we needed some wise words from God, we sure do need these today.
There’s too much division and rancor among us, presently. Instead applying grace to restore goodness, we nurse our wrath and spit out our anger. We live in stressful times because we have created them with our suspicion and anxiety, our conspiracy theories and unsubstantiated misgivings. We forget too easily that faith is the remedy to what we fear and that love is how we should show our faith. If we’re too busy complaining about other folks and too focused on maintaining our point of view, we’ll miss the bigger picture that God sees: the diverse beauty of humanity.
We are all finite beings and only have a certain number of days to live on Earth. As we grow older, we can sometimes mistake our mortality for the end of the world. Even though many generations have come and gone before us, we may delude ourselves into thinking that we’re living in the end times. We’re not – we’re just approaching the end of our own lives which can be hard to accept, so we interpret our existential crisis as being the end of everything we cherish. We find it hard to think that the world will go on without us, so we live in fear and doubt, instead of dwelling on the love and grace of God which are boundless and endure forever. If, instead of fretting, we place our existence into the hands of God, He takes away our futility and makes this life-long journey meaningful which is why God encourages us to ‘be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.’
Q: What am I afraid of most? How can faith diminish my fear?
Prayer: Lord Jesus, lead us with Your love and help us to share Your grace. In Your Sacred Name, we pray. Amen.
Today’s image is John’s latest drawing called “Breakthrough.”