Sunday Message: The Flip

One of the many ways God teaches me in the last few years is a 'game' of sorts I call, "Flip it"- where a hardened preconceived way of looking at something is flipped to God's way of seeing it.  The 'game', for lack of a better way to put it, is that God doesn't always make the 'flip' apparent to me.

One such time came very recently.  To give all the details would involve the temptation to glorify myself, so let me explain without explaining.  Something occurred which involved me believing I was in the right about something, the consequences of the action, and my own feeling bad afterwards, not because of my being wrong, but because of the consequence- a consequence I had no control over, recourse to change, or desire to see happen.  It just was.

And in feeling bad about it, I knew that something hadn't gone quite right about the whole thing- but I wasn't sure what.  I couldn't get past the issue of whether I was right or not, and even though I kept feeling God was saying, "Flip it", I couldn't figure out the flip.

One day last week, I was listening to a pastor quoting someone else.  This time you can chalk up the lack of details to situation (at work) and my poor memory, but what I heard basically went like this:

"You can use all the gifts God has given you, but if you don't coat them in love, they are useless."

Immediately, a voice says, "There's your flip."

I don't know that my turn of phrase in the incident would have actually made a difference.  I have had other conversations before and since where it did not.  However, the problem wasn't my right-or-wrong-ness:  That was just PRIDE trying to win the battle.  The problem was in my way of going about what I did.  I acted emotionally, without coating it in love.  And as right as I might have been, it was useless in the way I did it.  This was the whole purpose of Paul writing 1 Corinthians 13 where he did- right in the middle of 2 chapters explaining gifts.  If you think your god is gifting you a hammer, you might want to look into worshiping Thor.  If you believe your god is giving you a sword, you'd have made a great conquistador.  Our God's gifts are tools of love.