We criticise others instead of loving them as they are. We love to pass verdicts on others, as though we were judges. Judging others is not our task. Our debt of love compels us to lay aside our premature judgments, which keeps agape love from flowing out of us. We become unconditional lovers. The Lord spoke to me once and said: “You don’t have to appear for jury duty.”
People will call for corporate repentance but rarely include themselves in that call. If we are to see revival, personal repentance is key. Realigning our hearts with the Holy Spirit is what the church desperately needs. We have taken our cues for how to handle disagreement from the world rather than from God or His word.
The trouble with most Christians today is that they would rather be on the judgment seat than on the witness stand.
We need to stop thinking that our primary duty toward our fellow believers is to critique them. It’s not. Our primary duty is to love them
Some people need to belong before they believe. Rather than judge people outside the church, we love, serve, and speak life to them, hoping that they will soon embrace the truth of Father’s love.\
A very specific ministry has been entrusted to us. Not one of condemnation. Not one of being in the spotlight. Not one of judgment. Not one of personal kingdom building. The ministry we have been given is the same ministry that Jesus had while He walked the earth. He was on a mission to reconcile humankind back to the Father,
People who succeed in life do not go around setting scores; they do not even keep scores. They run up the score by doing good to others, even when the others don’t deserve it. They give them better than they are given. And as a result, they often bring the other person up to their level, instead of being brought down to the level of the other.
When you say that a situation or a person is hopeless, you are slamming the door in the face of God.
When your heart is ablaze with the love of God, when you love other people – especially the ripsnorting sinners – so much that you dare to tell them about Jesus with no apologies, then never fear, there will be results.
We would like God’s ways to be like our ways, his judgments to be like our judgments. It is hard for us to understand that he lavishly gives enormous talents to people we would consider unworthy, that he chooses his artists with as calm a disregard of surface moral qualifications as he chooses his saints. Often we forget that he has a special gift for each one of us, because we tend to weigh and measure such gifts with the coin of the world’s marketplace. The widow’s mite was worth more than all the rich men’s gold because it represented the focus of her life. Her poverty was rich because all she had belonged to the living Lord.
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