1-19-2017

Good Morning All,

            Mark 3:5; “And he (Jesus) looked around at them with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart, and said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and his hand was restored.”

    When my sons were in high school, there was a foreign exchange student in the senior class.  Everyone really got a charge out of him.  He was very likable and good natured about just about everything.  He tried to play football and on one play where he was going to make a touchdown, his only chance, a teammate was called for a penalty.  The penalty was away from the play and should not have happened.  When everyone got home from the football game, I asked them how he took it, they just started to laugh.  He told them that, “He was so mawd (mad) at the player who had the penalty”.  Ever since then, in our house, you are “so mawd” not just mad.

     We all get “mawd” sometimes.  If the newspaper comes late; if the mail isn’t delivered; if the guy in front of us is going just under the speed limit and balling up traffic; or it is being in the checkout line when the guy in front of you really fouls the checkout up; something gets us “mawd.”  Yet there are times when we should not be mad, we should, like Jesus, look around in anger and be grieved by the hardness of the heart.  We need to feel and express God’s holy anger.

    Far too often, we sit back as Christians.  We fail to take up the cause of the poor, the widows and orphans and the alien in the land.  These are the classes of people whom God continually lists when He addresses the sins of Israel in the Old Testament.  God looks to how the Israelites treated those who were unable to fend for themselves or were able to do anything for the Israelites.  God told the Israelites, “You were once aliens and slaves in a foreign land”; thus they were expected to have compassion on these people and to share God’s compassion with them.

    So why do we sit back and watch?  What do we fear?  We have God’s blessings.  He has redeemed us from sin and death.  He has called us out of the world to be his holy (separate) people.  He is OUR God; we can call upon him whenever we want and he wants us to live the good life in the good land.  We are like Israel in that we had nothing but God gives us everything.  We don’t earn any of it; everything is a gift from God; so why are we slow to share? 

     God wants us to burn with anger at the injustice in the world and be grieved by the hardness of the heart of sinful man.  We can begin by praying that God would end this tragedy.  We can pray for courage to speak and to act.  God calls us to be different from the world.  If the world exploits the underprivileged, what must we do to be different?

Dear Jesus, You were angry at the hardness of the Pharisee’s heart.  Move us to soften ours and to grieve over the hardness of man’s heart.  Move us by you Spirit to act, to speak, and to have compassion to make a difference.  In your precious name we pray, amen.

God’s Peace,

Pastor Bret