Luke 12:49-53 (The Message)
“I’ve come to start a fire on this earth—how I wish it were blazing right now! I’ve come to change everything, turn everything right side up—how I long for it to be finished! Do you think I came to smooth things over and make everything nice? Not so. I’ve come to disrupt and confront!”
There are things we do not want to hear. Even in God’s Word! The Prophet Jeremiah (and other prophets) got in trouble because they said what God wanted them to say, not what the people wanted to hear.
God’s word is not only a word of peace; it is also a word of challenge which brings unrest It is not just to comfort the afflicted; it is also to afflict the comfortable!
It does create division among people between those who hear and those who don’t want to hear. (And sometimes those who won’t hear are those who appear to be the most religious. At least the most set in their ways.) This is true because God’s Word is fire. It challenges our hypocrisy and our religious closed mindedness as it seeks to create a dangerous spirit in us. The spirit of love! The kind of love which brings God’s kingdom to this world in ways which make it a different and better place for all.
To live as God’s chosen people is to live as radicals who dare believe in love as the most powerful and most important power in all of life. It is, I fear, what is most missing in our world today. The spirit of love which “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things”. (I Cor. 13:7) And we seem to be so indifferent about it!
“The opposite of love is not hate,
it’s indifference.”
Elie Wiesel
Prayer thought for the week: “Lord, help me to hear what I don’t want to hear and dare believe more than I dare believe. Help me to not be indifferent to what the spirit of love calls me to be and do. Amen
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