Including someone in your life today.
A lot of my life I live concerned with the ever pressing need of ME.
I spend my time, eating, pooping, buying myself clothes, and wondering about my own future.
I take up a lot of my own time.
A few weeks ago I was going through our discipleship material with a group that meets on Saturday morning and the theme was living for others. The photocopied fill-in-the blanks were reminding me of Christ’s attitude in Philippians and his call to live in the same way.
I have come to recognize that God is calling me to an invasion of my privacy by other people for the sake of the gospel. I have seen the brokenness and the pain in people around me and have wanted so badly to help. I want to write something that will help them or I want to pray for them or do pretty much anything that doesn’t cost me very much.
In the parable of the good Samaritan, Jesus tells about how the religious leaders completely ignored the pain and suffering that was in front of them. I think a lot of Sunday school teachers have told this part of the story with a hint of disdain.
What a heartless and evil person who would walk past an emergency. We surely wouldn’t do that!
And yet I kind of wonder if that Pharisee or teacher of the law was late to a church meeting, or busy with a hundred other things that can over-ride our Christ-given feeling of compassion for others.
I have realized in my time in Nicaragua that my hardest problem in the states was not that I didn’t know how to help people, it’s that I never had the time to do so.
Because there is something more effective than praying and teaching and giving money. It’s giving your self in order to love people.
The Samaritan took time out of his day and money out of his pocket to help a man who desperately needed it. He did not do this so he could invite the man to his church. His love wasn’t dependent on the man’s response. The Samaritan lived for others. Out of the three who passed by he was the one who most accurately represented the phrase ‘consider others as more important than yourself’
God has given me so much stuff. He has given me a great family and an awesome missions team to work with. He gives me sunsets and sunrises and granola and avocados. I have a Bluetooth speaker and a bicycle and a guitar. God is a great giver. But out of everything he has given me, I am most stingy with my own time and my own life.
I want to help other people, but not if it’s costly. I yearn to be more like Jesus in this area. I want to give even if it costs me. So how am I supposed to do that?
In order to more easily include others into my life, even if it’s an inconvenience, I need to realize how Christ included me.
Ephesians talks about how I was dead in my sins and separated from God. I was following the ways of this world and indulging in my sinful desires. But because God loved me he completely saved me and made me alive. He raised me up to new life with him. Now, like it says in John 15, Jesus has called me his friend. He has included me on the group text message he has going with his Father. I am not just a servant, I am a friend of God who he loves to confide his plans in.
This is rich stuff, and if I can really understand it then I start to find my actual size. I am a very small man who has been made very important by Jesus. I am called to be an ambassador of him and make much of everyone around me.
This is the basic truth that will set my heart free to love others. This is the epiphany that helps me to see all my time as belonging to Jesus so that he can spend it on other people. This is a daily struggle but I know that as I fix my eyes on Jesus, his character is being formed in me and I will start to look more and more like him in the way I spend my time.
