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#5 Who Can I Count On?
Concrete Walls or Flexible Cables?
Bear with each other and forgive whatever
grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you.
(Colossians 3:13)
Isn't it easy to get fed up
with God's people? The problem, quite frankly is that the church of Jesus Christ
is made up exclusively of redeemed sinners. And these wretched sinners - I'm one
of them - have an awful habit of showing their true colors. If we're going to
come down like a ton of bricks on everyone who shows his true colors, then there
is going to be an awful pile of bricks around the place. It's amazing how far a
little forbearance will go.
I'm not saying we turn a blind eye to things. I'm not saying
we shrug our shoulders or let anything go. Christian grace isn't license. It's
an attitude that begins to bind together the most disparate groups of people -
different in race, social position, and education.
How on earth are you going to get people this dissimilar into
one new community? You won't, unless there is Christian grace, Christian
attitude, and Christian action.
Anybody who's been around the church for a while can talk
about forgiveness. We've all heard so much about it. It's easy to shrug it
aside. Recently I heard a new wrinkle on the idea that renewed my appreciation
for what it involves.
It came from a TV program about stock car drivers. You say,
"That will be real helpful on forgiveness, I'm sure." Well, it was. As a group
sat in class learning how to be stock car drivers, the lecturer said that the
first thing to remember about stock car racing was this: Concrete walls are very
unforgiving.
Unforgiving people remind you of concrete walls. You've got a
bit of momentum in your life, you've gone off track a little, you're heading for
trouble - but fortunately, somebody has put a concrete wall in your way.
Kaboom! And that solves everything.
No, it doesn't. It just makes things ten times worse.
One day I would like to go up in a fighter plane and land on
the deck of an aircraft carrier in a rough sea.
Just imagine coming in on one of those fighters. You see the
aircraft carrier down below, its flight deck the size of a postage stamp. "I
sure hope they know what they're doing," you say. You swoop down at two hundred
miles per hour, and as you hit the flight deck, you discover, unfortunately,
that someone's built a concrete wall across your path. Kaboom! As you
splatter yourself on the windshield, you moan, "Well, at least I'm not in the
ocean."
No, they don't build concrete walls across flight decks. They
string a cable across, designed to catch a hook on the underside of the plane.
The cable has all kinds of give in it. It takes the steam out of the plane's
speed and brings it to a halt.
The difference between forgiving and unforgiving is the
difference between concrete walls and flexible cable. Forgiving is necessary in
the fellowship of believers all the time. There's always some evangelical nose
out of joint somewhere. And the last things that bent evangelical noses need is
to be smashed into concrete walls.
Is there someone in your life who needs your forgiveness?
Father, thank you for your forgiveness - for your example and enablement,
Amen.
~Stuart Briscoe~
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