“You were cleansed from your sins when you obeyed the truth, so now you must show sincere love to each other as brothers and sisters. Love each other deeply with all your heart.” (1 Peter 1:22 NLT)
Living as forgiven, as a new creation in Christ Jesus, is a learned behavior. It doesn’t come without effort. It often seems easy when we’re new to the faith, our new, clean heart is so full of love for Jesus, loving others seems like the proverbial “piece of cake,” but, unfortunately, that doesn’t last.
Understand, it’s not like love gets hard for everyone, but mostly for those who should be the focus of our love anyway: family, close friends, brothers and sisters at church. So, why is it sometimes so hard? Largely because we lose focus. We too quickly forget how hard we are to love at times. We let little things, often things we do ourselves, stand between us and our love for others.
Too often, we project onto others the very things we can’t stand about ourselves but can’t overcome. In my own life, when I tell someone something, especially my wife, I (a) expect her to remember word for word and (b) remind me what I said when I forget. No problem, right? Of course, until she expects the same thing of me, then it becomes irritating.
Then, the plot thickens when someone we don’t know well, or a stranger, irritates us with the way they drive, speak, walk, think – it can literally be anything about them that just “rubs us the wrong way!” Then automatically, we don’t even stop to think about it (big mistake), we voice our opinion: “Look at that gaudy outfit! Who would EVER wear their hair like that to church? Where’d that guy get that piece of junk to drive? How did that couple think they belonged in ‘THIS’ restaurant/church/business/etc.?”
Our contributions vary with context, but all to the same end: we don’t love well. We end up revealing our own insecurities about how we see and feel about ourselves, but it’s so much easier to see it in “them” than in ourselves. Why does any of this stuff even matter? Because how we think about and treat another person reflects not only how we see ourselves but can often be a measure of our love for Jesus.
Pastor Rick Warren wrote: “When you’re dealing with people who are offensive or irritating, you need to look past the behavior to the pain. Everything we do is motivated by something. When people hurt others, it’s because they’re hurting on the inside. Hurt people hurt other people. The more you understand about someone’s background, the more grace you’ll show them.
Think of a person you find to be difficult or irritating. You probably know nothing about their background, so you don’t cut them any slack. You don’t know that maybe they lost their parents at a young age. You don’t know that maybe they were molested. You don’t know that maybe they’ve gone through two marriages and their spouse just walked out on them. You don’t know their story, and that’s part of why you’re not showing them any grace.
The Bible says in Proverbs 19:11, “A person’s wisdom yields patience; it is to one’s glory to overlook an offense” (NIV). It’s easy to take offense from people you find difficult. But when you’re wise, you don’t get offended easily. Why? Because wisdom gives you patience. (See Daily Hope Love Overlooks Offenses – 08-10-24)
These and many other reasons are why it’s so important to learn to look past people’s irritations.
Food for thought.
Blessings, Ed 😊
Walking With Jesus 