Daily Java: Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you. (Matthew 5:11-12 NIV)
What are you, stupid? People abuse me and I am happy? What kind of world is it when you are happy when people do stupid things to you?
It is the world of forgiveness, that’s what it is. Not really happiness, as such, as we think of happiness, but forgiveness. A world in which the fact that people are doing things to hurt you is a mark of your calling in Christ Jesus.
And since they are hurting you because you are acting like Jesus, is it really going to be spiritually productive to lash out at them?
That doesn’t mean to necessarily let people walk all over you all the time. The apostle Paul was quick to use his Roman citizenship to get out of problems if he felt that the problems would not help the cause.
Jesus was plain to say that people didn’t like him, so therefore they would not like us. It was only logical. We know they killed Jesus, but then we are surprised they don’t like it when we emulate him
So what do we do? As the apostle Paul did, there is nothing wrong with using the court system to help when we can.
But there are some times when we cannot do that for one reason or another and a wrong against us is going to go unpunished, or at the worst, unnoticed by the world. We have been hurt, and the world goes, “Eh. So what?”
God said he would avenge and repay, that vengeance is his. The hardest thing in the world is to leave it to him. But he loves us and he will notice.
And besides it puts you in the best company anyone can hang out in: the company of the saints of God. They all had the same problem.
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