Devotional Reading Plan

DAY FOUR | COME HOME

Part II

Scripture: 1 Corinthians 13

Surrounded by confusion

You just want to know

The why behind the doing

And they treat you like

A question and intrusion

I love the church. I’ve also been wounded by church people—everything from being simply misunderstood to facing racial discrimination. If you’ve been hurt, I know the feeling! But when I think about it, I’ve been hurt to some degree by just about everyone I’ve ever really loved. Hurt happens, especially in situations in which we allow ourselves to connect with others at a certain level of depth and vulnerability. (Please hear me say this: abuse of any kind should never be tolerated in the name of love.)

You may have been abused, manipulated, or rejected in some way by those claiming to be spiritual. Maybe you grew up in a home that pretended to be one thing on Sundays but during the rest of the week showed no signs of the hope, love, and peace you learned about in Sunday School. Maybe you’ve seen leaders that you loved and admired make mistakes, and that all too common narrative has caused you to doubt the authenticity and integrity of anyone claiming to be a spiritual leader. Maybe the way you were raised was so strict and rigid that your idea of God has been ruined by legalism. Maybe you’ve dared to ask questions only to be ignored, brushed off, or made to feel incompetent. Maybe you’ve attended faith gatherings that were so sensationalized that you could feel the insincerity in the room as if it were tangible. Conversely, perhaps your religious experience was so stale and empty that you wondered what the point of it all was. There are so many possible reasons that we gravitate toward being skeptical, cynical, and critical. A lot of those reasons are valid. The wounds created by hypocrisy run deep.

I sometimes find myself trending in the direction of cynicism until certain questions began to rise to the surface of my heart. What if the people who hurt others were hurt themselves? What if they were living from their wounds, their fears, and their ignorance with no way of seeing their blind spots? Rejecting a good God because of bad things people have done only deepens our pain. Rejecting Jesus doesn’t answer our questions. It creates more. It doesn’t leave the door open for hope. It closes it. It doesn’t make our wounds go away. It infects them. It only leaves us trying to make sense of it all without him. Rejecting God after being hurt by people leaves us trying to heal without the Healer.

One of the great defining qualities of God is that, through the person of Jesus, He became human. He became human because of his desperate love for sinful, broken people. He became human so that He could identify with what we experience in a broken world. Jesus knows the evil that can exist within religion firsthand. Psalm 118 says that Jesus was “the stone the builders rejected.” The first chapter of John tells us, “He came to his own and his own received him not.” The religious zealots and experts in the New Testament rejected the Messiah; that lets us know that people can have religion and not have Jesus. They criticized and undermined Him. His friends betrayed Him when He needed them the most. Ultimately, He surrendered His life and endured death at the hands of the people He came to save.

Jesus knows what it’s like to be left for dead by church folks. Yet, at the pinnacle of betrayal and rejection, the crucifixion, He demonstrated for us that we must continue to love and trust God even when His people hurt and disappoint us. In His final moments, gasping for His last breath, He gathers all of his strength to force these words through His lips: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

It’s my prayer for you and me today that we will see where we find ourselves in the midst of this reality. I’m asking God to show me my blind spots. God, am I a person that believes only what I want to believe and then tries to find passages of Scripture to justify myself, or am I willing to let your Word challenge my own notions? Have I been someone that has intentionally or unintentionally wounded others with my words or actions? If so, Lord show me. It’s my prayer today that God gives us a grace that makes room for the wrongs committed by those we believe should have known better and enables us to forgive them even if they did. It’s my prayer today that we would be able to look beyond those who committed offenses against us and see Jesus, the One who loves us endlessly. God, help us to move toward one another, see one another, hear one another, and love one another.

You can bring your doubts

You can think out loud

Love will hear you out

Come home