As a Christian, I want to love everyone, but recently the Lord convicted me of not loving certain people. I didn’t even realize I was neglecting to love them! God showed me this sin when I recalled some people who had hurt me. I may never see them again, but as I imagined interacting with them, my flesh wanted to defend myself and tell those people they were needlessly cruel (even liars,) but those self-justifying thoughts neglected any concerns about their lost souls. Then I considered other people, and my fear wanted to avoid them, perhaps even judge them as careless or even foolish, without considering their lost souls. Then God reminded about even more people: ones I like. God reminded me that even nice people I encounter may not know the Lord. My shyness about not speaking to them about their need for a Savior is still a lack of sufficient love. In all these cases, I did not consider heaven when I considered my past, present, and possible future interactions with different people. I did not have sufficient love (or any) for these people, and God showed me this scary reality!
I would guess some people have treated you poorly, maybe even abused you. Like me, you may have walked away from them (or ran from really bad ones) and felt glad to be free of their poisonous influence and treatment. But years after the bad interactions, you may have (as I have sometimes done) wished you could go to those people today and show them the good person you are and somehow show them that they were wrong to treat you the way they did. Perhaps you also wanted to tell those people they had the wrong idea about you. I have never gone back to those people, but since the thoughts have occasionally popped into my mind, I felt the Lord asking me if their opinion of me was more important than my care for their lost soul. I felt so convicted. I felt sorrow, realizing I had thought about myself, but never about their lack of Christian faith.
Then Facebook sent me a link to a post a friend had made. The photo showed some very confused people who live in a lifestyle that is sinful. Many people commented on the photo my friend had posted, and they wrote angry words about those people. At first I exited the page, not commenting, and deleted the Facebook email that linked the post. But as I walked away from my computer, the Lord convicted me. Although I had not joined the angry people, writing harsh things about the people living the sinful lives, I had also not said anything positive. I had not prayed for those lost people. So I walked back to my computer, retrieved the Facebook email from my “trash” file, and looked at the photo again. I wrote a comment saying I needed to pray for people who were so confused, because they are sinners like us (and I made sure to say “us” to include myself as a sinner.) I said that those people are deceived, and they need to know they have a Savior who died to save them from their sins, and this is why I needed to pray for them. I did not tell anyone else in FB to pray for them, because I did not feel a conviction to scold anyone. I wanted to speak for myself, and speak of what I felt convicted to do and say.
After that I did pray for those people. There are some people I know who are also confused and living in similar lifestyles, and I pray for them. I had not, however, considered praying in general for strangers who also live like that. Yet why couldn’t I pray for strangers in those lifestyles too? The Lord had already called me to love people in unusual places, such as people at the piercing and tattoo parlor where I went with my daughter to get her ear cartilage pierced. I brought back flowers and a personal thank you card for one young man. As fierce as he looked, he thanked me, and I think I saw a tear in his eye. In my card, I had spoken of my faith in Christ. Later when we saw him again, he had the card displayed in the office he used. He may have looked fierce, but he had a gentle heart. How many other people look different from us, and perhaps some even live outside of God’s will? I am not saying that man lives outside God’s will—I just don’t know how he lives. Perhaps they also have gentle hearts. I need to pray for them and care about their souls.
Now when it comes to clerks at stores, so many of them are very nice and very easy to like. But the devil tells me there is not enough time to tell them about Jesus or that my speaking of him may offend them. But what about me not loving them? That is what Jesus convicted me of doing when I did not speak of the Lord’s love for them. I have spoken, in general, of the Lord many times, but he convicted me to speak directly of Jesus by name. Sometimes I simply say, “The Lord Jesus bless you,” to the cashier if the grocery line moves so quickly that I lack time to speak about Jesus in detail. At times I do get a chance to talk to a clerk who works different shifts. Perhaps she is at the cash register one day, but another day she is stocking the shelves. Then I have had a chance to speak more about the Gospel. And this has not been a burden. These men and women have been a joy to me. They are intelligent people with hopes and dreams. They have fascinating stories to share, if I simply take the time to ask them questions and listen. So I have been working on listening more, after asking questions.
God will still need to work on my heart, but I am so thankful for his conviction. I want to be more like Jesus. When he saw the woman at the well, with his omniscience, he knew she had married five husbands, and she had not married her current lover (John chapter 4.) Yet Jesus loved her and he did not consider her someone too lowly for him to speak to. And in Mark 2:16, the Pharisees said that Jesus “eats with tax collectors and sinners,” as an accusation. But Jesus truly was a friend of sinners, because he loved them and gave them a chance to turn their lives over to him. Not all did, since the rich young ruler rejected Jesus’ advice and walked away from him (Mark 10:22.) But even when this sinner walked away from Jesus, remember in the verse prior (Mark 10:21 a) “Jesus looked at him and loved him…” Even when people reject him, Jesus loves them.
Are there any people we should avoid, even as we love them? Yes, Paul warns us, in 1Cor.5:11 “But now I am writing to you that you must not associate with anyone who claims to be a brother or sister but is sexually immoral or greedy or idolater or slanderer, a drunkard or swindler. Do not even eat with such people.” And Jude confirms that some sinners have sins that can be dangerous for us when he says in verse 23b “Show mercy to still others, but do so with great caution, hating the sins that contaminate their lives.” We do have to show caution when we share the Gospel with some people. They may harm us, and God may not even call us to speak to them. Sometimes God wants us to pray for them first. At other times, we only pray, because God wants to send someone else to speak the Gospel to them. But if we do not pray first, we cannot discern whether God does want us to speak or stand back and only pray or pray first and later speak to them. God’s plan will differ, depending on the individual who he wants us to minister to.
Often, when family members reject the Lord, they also reject our testimony, because we are so closely related. They may even scorn our faith. Yet someone else can speak to that family member. Only the Holy Spirit can confirm this, but I have experienced this truth. At times God has given me a strong sense that I should no longer speak about the Lord to that person. Some people have a mysterious sense of anger towards us, and we have to walk away from those people (perhaps they are jealous of us.) But we can continue to pray for them. God may have to break those people in a strong way, as he did with the Pharisee Saul, who had to be knocked off his horse and struck blind for three days, until he softened and became the gentle Apostle Paul (Acts 9:3-8.) But often, because those people know us and our weaknesses, they will reject the Gospel from us, but accept it from a stranger. That is OK, because our main concern must be for their souls. As long as God calls them to himself, we don’t have to be the one who leads them to the Lord. Technically it is the Holy Spirit who leads us to the Lord anyway. We are just his vessels.
But if we do not care at all about people’s salvation, then we must begin, today to do so. We can pray for those people. Often we cannot speak about the Lord to many people anyway, because their hearts are like unprepared soil. We must pray for the Lord to rebuke Satan off those people’s minds (Zech. 3:2a and Jude:9) and then pray for God to soften their hearts. Then God may allow us to share more about Jesus, or he may not. Our job is to love those people, pray for them and then act as God calls us to do (as I felt lead to do with the card and flowers I took to the tattoo/piercing parlor.)
I pray I have encouraged you with this week’s post, especially as I share my sins and weaknesses. I also pray my post does not feel scolding to you. Instead I pray this post inspires you to pray, and then let the Holy Spirit guide you. I can tell you what works for me, and I can encourage you to follow the Holy Spirit. But the actions you take must come from your own conviction with the partnership of the Holy Spirit. I simply want to tell you what God is doing in my life and to encourage you to find the joy (at times conviction too) that I have found in the Lord. So may you be blessed this week as you do your best to love others, and to forgive yourself if you have fallen short, as the Lord has shown me recently. May our Lord bless you this week!