Tag: Relationships

Morning Musing: Exodus 33:1-6

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“The Lord spoke to Moses: ‘Go up from here, you and the people you brought up from the land of Egypt, to the land I promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, saying: I will give it to your offspring. I will send an angel ahead of you and will drive out the Canaanites, Amorites, Hethites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites. Go up to a land flowing with milk and honey. But I will not go up with you because you are a stiff-necked people; otherwise, I might destroy you on the way.’ When the people heard this bad news, they mourned and didn’t put on their jewelry. For the Lord said to Moses, ‘Tell the Israelites: You are a stiff-necked people. If I went up with you for a single moment, I would destroy you. Now take off your jewelry, and I will decide what to do with you.’ So the Israelites remained stripped of their jewelry from Mount Horeb onward.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Have you ever wounded a relationship? The odds are pretty good that you have. We all seem to possess a remarkable ability to hurt the people around us even when we don’t mean to. In such situations, being forgiven is a wonderfully freeing thing. That extension of God’s grace is incredible to experience. But forgiveness is no the same as restoring the relationship. That takes something more. That takes repentance. And while forgiveness is a very good thing, an invitation into repentance is even better. Let’s talk about what we see happening in this next part of our story.

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You Can’t Always Get What You Want

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You’ve experienced the moment before: Someone got something you didn’t get, and you wanted it for yourself. In that moment, what you were experiencing was jealousy. Maybe you worked through your jealousy and moved on with your life. Maybe, though, you got stuck on it and it became something that began impacting that relationship. Jealousy can make a mess in our relationships. As we get to the end of our teaching series, Stormy Waters, we are talking about one last potent contributor to our family conflicts. Let’s talk about jealousy, what it is, and how to avoid it.

You Can’t Always Get What You Want

Have you ever been around people who are just…content. They have things, but those things don’t have them. They never seem to be affected by what the people around them have…or what the people around them acquire. Hard circumstances might trouble them, but they don’t seem to overly burden them. There are certainly things they value, but they seem to be able to see a value in those things that goes beyond the things themselves such that if they suddenly didn’t have those things for some reason, they aren’t going to come unraveled over that. Now, on the one hand, these kinds of folks can be really hard to be around because they sometimes serve as a magnifying glass on all the places where we aren’t like that. We don’t like standing in front of mirrors that highlight our known flaws. At the same time, though, these are the kinds of people we want to be around because they carry with them a kind of promise that we can be better than we are. They give us an enacted vision of who we could be. They show us that a life free from the burdens and worries that so often drag us down really is a possibility. The truth is, though, that contentment like that is a hard mark to hit. 

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Redemption Is the Goal

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As we come to the third part of our series, Leverage, this week and next we are going to explore a couple of very specific examples from Jesus on what leveraging our resources for the sake of those around us can look like. This first one takes the form of a passage that is used to talk about a whole bunch of other things including church discipline. But the often-missed heart of the passage falls right in line with what we have been talking about this entire time. Let’s talk about sin, relationships, and God’s preference for redemption.

Redemption Is the Goal

I grew up as the older sibling. When you are the older sibling, sometimes you might occasionally do something to cause injury to your younger siblings. Of course, the whole thing is totally their fault, and they have it coming. But the injury occurs nonetheless. The trouble with injuring younger siblings is that your parents don’t always see the absolute justification you had in your actions. Or, they can’t understand that it was totally an accident. You didn’t plan for him to run into your fist at the precise moment you swung it forward, it just happened that way. It could have happened to anybody. The universe acts in strange ways sometimes. It was an honest mistake. 

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Digging in Deeper: Exodus 18:13-18

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“The next day Moses sat down to judge the people, and they stood around Moses from morning until evening. When Moses’ father-in-law saw everything he was doing for them he asked, ‘What is this you’re doing for the people? Why are you alone sitting as judge, while all the people stand around you from morning until evening?’ Moses replied to his father-in-law, ‘Because the people come to me to inquire of God. Whenever they have a dispute, it comes to me, and I make a decision between one man and another. I teach them God’s statutes and laws.’ ‘What you’re doing is not good,’ Moses’s father-in-law said to him. ‘You will certainly wear out both yourself and these people who are with you, because the task is too heavy for you. You can’t do it alone.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Have you ever had someone tell you that you were wrong? Let me be more specific. Have you ever had someone tell you that you were wrong who was in such a position in your life that you were willing to trust their counsel, listen to their perspective, and genuinely consider making changes in light of their observations? One of those life truths that we know is true, but don’t care all that much to think about its being true, and which we certainly don’t want to hear from someone else that it is true is that we don’t do everything right all the time. Because of this, we need people in our lives willing to tell us. Let’s talk today about Moses’ experience with this and how it went.

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Digging in Deeper: Genesis 2:18

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“Then the Lord God said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper corresponding to him.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

I have been eagerly watching the latest season of Disney’s Loki series. The latest installment of the misadventures of the fan-favorite villain-turned-hero has, in my opinion, been even better than the last season. Reportedly, its viewership is down some from last season, but Disney viewership in general is down because the company keeps doing things and producing media to trumpet their woke bonafides which just keeps pushing more and more people away. That’s a conversation for another time. So is a full review of the latest (and, honestly, probably last) Loki season as I haven’t yet watched the finale. But a bit of dialogue in the penultimate episode did reveal what has been driving Loki and point to what will probably be the big theme of the season, and possibly Loki’s entire character arc. He’s trying to save the world because he’s lonely. That seems pretty basic as far as motivations go, but it struck me as a whole lot more significant than people might think. Let’s talk about why.

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