Thanksgiving Lesson

Thanksgiving Lesson

 

After Thanksgiving my daughter wanted to take my wife and I to a new up and coming popular breakfast restaurant.  I would have rather stayed home and just had a couple of fried eggs and toast, but I obliged her.

 

While waiting in line I saw all these young couples pulling up in luxury SUV’s, with designer shades, clothes and purses, their kids tucked into strollers that were engineering feats of comfort and protection.  

 

Eaves dropping, I listened to their conversations centered on trivial topics with no eternal consequences.  I thought to myself – these young people live these sheltered suburban lives with shallow worldly values and concerns that don’t amount to anything significant and could care less about hurting, poor, struggling people around them or around the world.  I was kind of disgusted with the whole scene.

 

Later I was in the Word, in 1 John 1 which is all about love.  Here there are two ways described one knows they are “in God”.  One is if they acknowledge Jesus is the Son of God (1 Jn4:15).  I got that one so I’m good.  

 

The other is: “if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.”  

And the way we know God is not in us is in 1 Jn 4: 20 “Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen.” These two versus created a full-length mirror ganging up on me to display a completely loveless man.  Ouch! 

 

I really had to examine myself and repent of my judgmental spirit and condemnation of these people who I didn’t even know.  It made me really confident in my dire need for a savior.  I thought how much it hurt the Lord that one of his children was hating on another one of his masterpieces.  Whew…. I guess I’m not as good as I thought I was!

 

So one of my Thanksgiving thanks was to thank God that he doesn’t just zap me when I so beautify display the state of my humanity, and the reason that he came.  And I have a new appreciation for my ability to stray from – and a need toremember and apply his command to love one another.  Thank you Jesus for your grace and for being a patient teacher and savior.

(Transferred for J. Kwon)

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