As I indicated in my last post, if you make something common enough and subject people to it with an annoying frequency, they will become desensitized to it. Whatever the object that we’re making common happens to be, it will lose its power over people in one way, or another. Consider the whole notion of alcohol tolerance; I can get drunk really fast on that liquor that I don’t drink now, compared to when I was hitting the bottle a lot (before Jesus, people).
It’s times like this that I worry about my making everyone comfortable around gratuitous violence, because I need my emotions and what I wanted to do to be meaningful for once. Tonight, God revealed what His righteous indignation is like, to me. I kid all the time about being annoyed and all that, but I hope that people understand that I don’t get really mad, very often at all.
I’ve had a couple of kids who were in my high school small group for years. They’re great kids, but just like the rest of us, they need God to do a work in their lives. Well, they’ve both been angry and bitter at pretty much anyone they could be for about a month, and it kind of boiled over tonight. Mostly in me. They were doing and saying things that made me red in the face, but for once, I wasn’t really imagining beating the daylights out of them, (well, maybe I did imagine it just once) but rather, I was pissed because they weren’t getting it, and I knew that other things were getting in the way.
I’ve always imagined that God got mad at our sin. I never fully understood this whole notion of His anger when we jack things up, I just figured he would be like a playground attendant who was there to keep rules and got mad when those dumb kids did it again (simplified version, I understand that God is so much more than that, but I maintained that His anger was provoked due to rule-breaking) But I finally understood that God gets mad because He cares.
He wants us to get it, He doesn’t like it when we make ridiculous decisions, the poor, stupid wretches that we are, but it isn’t directed at us. God loves us so much, but He hates sin. He hates the things that cause us to sin, like the devil or that stupid adamic nature. God wants to make it better so that He doesn’t have to be mad anymore.
I wanted to make it better for those kids tonight. I couldn’t do it, so I actually had the brains to remember to pray to Jesus for His help, love and insight, and I think that we all took a big step toward healing tonight, which made me feel good. It was mostly Jesus, I just got to do the talking. Anyways, it was a wonderful night to be at church, because God demonstrated something to me, and even used me to work in two different peoples’ lives. That’s huge!
