“We deny Jesus every time we disregard His truth and put ourselves down. That hurts us. We deny Him every time we fail to see our value in Him. That hurts us. We deny Him every time we continue to hang on to our self-condemning thoughts and lies. That hurts us too. And then, it’s as if Jesus turns and looks straight at us with His eyes of love and compassion, and something dawns on us. We have, in a sense, denied our Lord Jesus, and I wonder if that hurts Him.” by Marilyn Hontz Shame Lifter
Remember back in the good old days of Peter just before Jesus was arrested. Strong and firm he told Jesus he would never deny the Christ but Jesus knew better. It had to of hurt. We read that story and strongly and firmly we shake our religiously minded heads and make a sound like a broken record, “Peter, Peter, Peter…..I would never do what he did. He flat out denied Christ plain and simple, nope not me, not me ever.” But Jesus knows better and it must hurt.
I don’t think we realize just how similar we are to Peter. Truth beknown, if we looked closely at our own actions we would probably find where we denied Christ a hundred times more than Peter ever did. We deny Christ every time we disregard His truth about us and put ourselves down on a regular basis failing to see our value in Him. How preposterous is that to hang on to our self-condemning thoughts and lies rather than exchange it for the truth in Christ that tells us how special we are to Him.
We become our worse critic and think in our feeble minds that the only person we are hurting is ourselves. Wrong! We are hurting Christ as well as we basically call Him a liar by contradicting what He has to say about us. Think about it, God said we were special enough for Christ to die for us. We say, “I’m not worth the air I breath.” God says, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.” We say, “I’m not important enough to stick around for.” God says, “All things will work out for the good of those who love the Lord.” We say, “My love evidently isn’t good enough for God because nothing in my life seems to be working out.” God says, “I have chosen you.” We say, “There’s no way in the world we could ever make the team” and the list goes on and on.
It’s almost a slap in the faith to Jesus telling Him we’re not significant enough for the blood He shed for us. That it was just a squander of the time and nails it took to fasten Him to the cross bleeding for such a lost cause. Obviously we seem to think our judgement and concept of ourselves is much more accurate than what God’s view is.
We need to stop denying Christ and start to believe in what He has to say. His words are words that pertain to all those who are willing to listen. We have our bad qualities but we have our good ones too and that is what Christ is after. I was guilty once, okay maybe more than once, of putting myself down. I’ll always remember the time I did it in front of the wrong witness. Well maybe she was the right witness I needed at the time as I got myself a lecture. “Don’t talk about my sister in Christ like that!” she said to me very firm and strong. Oh dear, she wasn’t falling for my self-pity what was I going to do now!
Well, what we need to do now is get off the “pity me” wagon and jump on board with Jesus. It’s time to find the proper balance in our attitude. Playing the extreme cards and going too far to the right or left in our thinking will never do. We can’t be so full of ourselves that we never look for areas of improvement but we can’t be so down on ourselves we are worthless to ourselves and Christ. That’s not being humble its being destructive. Don’t kid yourselves; it’s got to hurt Christ to see us behaving in such a manner.
This last Sunday as my 8 year old granddaughter got dressed for church I told her she looked very pretty. Her reply to me was, “I don’t either I look ugly.” I asked her, “Who are you going to believe, me or you? The choice is yours.” The choice is ours, we can either believe what Jesus says or we can believe what we are saying.
In all reality the choice needs to be Jesus and that selection needs to be demonstrated in our attitude towards ourselves as well as others. No more denying, no more downgrade. It’s all upgrade from here with Christ.
God says, “I love you.” We say, “I know you do, I can tell. I love you too.”
© 2009 Karen J. Gillett @ Pencil Marks and Recipes Publishing
3 comments:
Amen. We need to stop denying what He says and believe him. Thanks for sharing.
And ((hugs)) to your grandaughter as she learns to accept the truth spoken over her.
Hey, Karen, great post! I think the key to why we deny Jesus is this: "We need to stop denying Christ and start to believe in what He has to say." First we have to know what he says. To do that we have to read His words. When we make the Scripture a priority in our lives, we have something to pull out and support us when Satan whispers into our ears words of recrimination.
So true Patricia, so true. We have to get into His word and read what He has said and deposit it in our hearts. I wrote a prayer once that says, "Lord meet us in Your Word to teach us what we need to be taught, to feed us what we need to eat, and to show us what we need to see." What a better place to meet God than in His Word! Praise the Lord.
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