Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God,
by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.
Let all bitterness and wrath
and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you,
along with all malice.
Be kind to one another, tender-hearted,
forgiving each other,
just as God in Christ also has forgiven you.
Ephesians 4:30-32
I’ve been watching Kay Arthur in the mornings… I have been sick for over a week and it usually takes me a good thirty minutes to get enough snot blowed out of my head to be able to think straight… so the past couple of weeks I have chosen to come down the stairs and grab my coffee and my Bible and pile back up on the couch under a blanket and be spoon fed the Word.
Now over a week into this routine… I think God allowed this sickness so that I could be fed for a while.
For the first time in a long while I feel almost refreshed… renewed… revived… yes, renewed and revived.
I realized today that I had been going a while in my own strength and grit. I had poured out almost all that I had and the gas hand was at the warning light… but just like in my car… I ignored it and figured I could get just a little farther on… but God said nope, honey, sickness is visiting to put you down where I can talk to you and you listen. You can’t pour into others what you don’t have… and if you are pouring something that is of you and not of Me then you are not helping anyone nor are you serving Me.
So I am in a time of renewal… and I am thankful.
I am thankful for my God and I am thankful for His grace and I am thankful for His teachers and I am thankful for His Word.
As I watched Kay this morning she took me into the book of Ephesians… I love Ephesians.
I suppose its the fact that the stomach flu has been running rampant through our church or the fact that I am sick myself or just because it was such an accurate picture… but what Kay shared with me this morning really struck a cord in my desire to learn to respond rather than react.
As we dug into Ephesians 4 Kay broke down the Greek translations of bitterness, wrath, and anger and she spoke of clamor and slander and malice… all hitting cords with me as she spoke and I realized how many times I have gotten sucked into reacting to the emotional turmoil of another person instead of responding to God in obedience to His Spirit within me.
As she moved on to talk about what it means to be tender-hearted she spoke of it in response to the anger of another… I had never really considered it in this way. She shared how when someone comes at us or just speaks with us in anger, slander, clamor, or with bitterness or if we are the one’s speaking with it, it’s like vomiting.
When we spew out our anger all over someone we are vomiting up our ickness on them…
I have cleaned up a lot of vomit in my day… When my children or any one else’s children have been sick and have vomited all over themselves or all in the floor… I have grabbed them up and tended to their need, cleaned them up, and then gotten down on the floor and cleaned up their mess. I have done it with tenderness and with concern for the health of the one who was vomiting… I did not respond to their vomit with vomit of my own… because well, if I did it would have just left me to clean up my own vomit along with theirs… or it would have caused another person to be a part of the whole mess.
God commands us in Ephesians to be tender-hearted.
This is the way we are to respond when someone vomits up their anger… it’s like a heart flu.
Bitterness, wrath, anger, slander, clamor, and malice are like a nasty virus that gets inside of us and the only thing we can do is kill it with medicine or spew it out or it will only grow worse within us… and if we are not careful we will spread them to others who come in contact with us… they are terribly contagious.
If we recognize the symptoms quick enough we can kill it with the Balm of Gilead from the Great Physician… but if we ignore the symptoms eventually we will spew them out on someone… the lady blocking the isle at Wal-Mart, the guy who pulled out in front of you at the Red Light, your husband who said the wrong thing, your kids that left their shoes in the floor and you tripped over them, etc. When you vomit your heart flu germs all over them… sadly many times, they in turn vomit all over someone else…
Yes, this heart flu is indeed nasty stuff.
I want to be better about recognizing the symptoms of this mess so that I can head straight to the One who can administer healing to me immediately so that I am not a part of the spreading of this heart flu. And I want to get better about how I respond when someone else vomits up their bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, slander, or malice up on me. I want to choose to put on my Jesus and His armor of grace and clean it up for them instead of taking a big wiff of their mess and then vomiting myself. I want to reach down deep, take a deep breath of mercy, pray for God’s strength, and lay myself on the altar of obedience. I want to be tender-hearted.
This is my resolution… my own desire.
One person’s vomit is nasty enough… but when it sets off a chain reaction… ugh… yeh… let us not go there.
*Here’s one of Kay’s lessons from Ephesians 4…
Walk in Love, Even as Christ Walked in Love