But I Say To You

I am asking myself to sit with some uncomfortable truths these days. 

To bit-by-bit, dwell in the red-letter justice of the words of Jesus, and the ancient texts written through the very breath of the Spirit. 

I have been told that I act as a disruptor. From a business paradigm this means that I approach situations and organizations with an eye for failing systems. These are processes or practices that cause glut and effectively slow down best level functioning.

In my days acting as a leader in the professional and church realm, I preferred to call myself a restorative manager. Restoration was always my deep and heartfelt goal. To redeem, rebuild, renovate, and cause people and systems to realize the peace of working within the order and beauty of their intended design. 

This restorative process can be exceedingly painful, and often, I was viewed as a pride-filled pot stirrer.

If you walked this path with me, and felt these feelings, believe me I understand! I can remember on many occasions saying, “Trust me. I am here for good, and not for evil.” 

 The working out of the red-letter justice of the words of Jesus is the pinnacle of the restorative process. These red-letter words have the capacity bring us time and again to a heart-deep grappling with uncomfortable truth. 

 Matthew 5:44 reads, “But I say to you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.” 

 The word enemy in the Greek in which it was penned, as well as it is defined today, describes those for whom we feel personal hostility, deep-seated hatred, and irreconcilable differences, or those who may have those same feelings toward us. 

 Jesus doesn’t stop to draw lines of distinction between the two, he lays it out cleanly, with a preamble that reminds that we have learned to hate. 

 It is these simple words that break me, “But I say to you.” 

 I can feel the tender firmness in his voice, as he stirs and stirs, as he disrupts. He is breaking down our excuses, and eliminating our justifications for dividing our worldview along the lines of those we deem enemy, and those we deem worthy of our prayer and love. 

 The transformative truth is this: when we desire the downfall of others and when we want less for them than we do for ourselves, we have created an inward attitude that desires that God be less and smaller than who he is, and we justify this dark-hearted mentality by deeming them enemies of God. 

 When we make our hostility great—we make Jesus small.  

We fail to believe that he can do what he has done for us, for every other human being on earth.

But oh how he can. 

 As Christians we have but one rightly placed enemy, and all of mankind are children of God, made in his image, worthy of the his saving grace. 

 May we pray for our enemies until we can call them friend.