“Do not harden your heart because it appears that I have forgotten you. Do not become cynical when you see others living without heavy pressures and you can hardly take a breath without pain. I hold you in your need. When you have completed this refining fire, I want you to understand the pain I feel for those who are so lost that they feel they have no need of Me. I want you to notice the dangerous position they are in and care as Jesus cares for them.
“You are being trained to have compassion for others who have forgotten their need of Me and learning to delight in My will being done in their lives. Don’t give up! Press in to Me. I am with you!”
Romans 8:9-17 NIV
9) You, however, are controlled not by the sinful nature but by the Spirit, if the Spirit of God lives in you. And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Christ.
10) But if Christ is in you, your body is dead because of sin, yet your spirit is alive because of righteousness.
11) And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit, who lives in you.
12) Therefore, brothers, we have an obligation—but it is not to the sinful nature, to live according to it.
13) For if you live according to the sinful nature, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live,
14) because those who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God.
15) For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the Spirit of sonship. And by him we cry, “Abba, Father.”
16) The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children.
17) Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.
2 Cor. 1:8-9 NIV
8) We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about the hardships we suffered in the province of Asia. We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired even of life.
9) Indeed, in our hearts we felt the sentence of death. But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead.
We forget that after we come to Christ, we are being formed to allow the life of Jesus to be lived through us. When Jesus walked on this earth, He was showing us all how to live. He had the ardent desire and the God-inherited freedom to be deeply in love with His Father and with everyday, ordinary people. Most of those whom He loved freely, and therefore touched the deepest, didn’t have a clue as to who He really was at first. They only knew deep down in their hearts that this special man who lived in their midst somehow loved them in a way that they had never been loved before. It was a love that contained a mysterious kind of power and they wanted to find out what that power was.
Seeing His bright-eyed, mouth-open kind of happiness when they were healed or delivered, people knew He had something special to give them and that He was probably worth following, at least long enough to learn more about Him. When He put His hands on and embraced the outcast, or when He intimately contacted the lonely, chastised leper - something that just wasn’t done in His society - He was viewed as being noticeably different. When He laughed and bear hugged in the wonder of the healing moment with that same lower element of society, He broke their stony hearts and planted a new kind of hope in their souls.”
Teach me Your ways, Lord,
Jim Corbett
