From God to Us to Others
Dr. Ray Prichard, President of Keep Believing Ministries (keepbelievingministries.com) was one of our keynote speakers for our Memorial Day Weekend Conference. Ray’s Bible teaching is practical and easy to wrap your head around. This is an article from his website that is so powerful. If you’d like to order the messages of the weekend, you can download from our website or watch the archived video: www.americaskeswick.org
Those things must go … and be replaced with something much better. “Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you” (v. 32).
Kindness speaks of gentleness in the face of provocation. It reaches out to the unworthy and withholds punishment even when it is deserved. Kindness is daring and dangerous because some mistake it for weakness. It is “the oil that lubricates the machinery of life.”
Compassionate comes from a word that means “good intestines” because the ancients thought the intestines and the bowels were the seat of the emotions. We mean something similar when we speak of a belly laugh. Compassion says, “I will care for you and I will not shut you out.”
The key to forgiveness is the middle syllable—give. Forgiveness is a gift we give to those who don’t deserve it. Note that verse 32 starts with us and ends with God. We are kind, compassionate and forgiving to others because that’s how God has treated us.
From God … to us … to others.
We do for others what God has done for us. We have been forgiven; we know what it is like. Now do the same for others. We are not left to wonder what it means to forgive those who have hurt us.
You cannot understand God’s love unless you go to the cross.
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| Dr. Ray Prichard Keepbelievingministries.com |
You cannot understand the cross unless you see in it God’s love.
His death became a sacrifice that was a sweet aroma to the Father (Ephesians 5:1-2). Man’s murder became God’s sacrifice. A heinous crime paid an impossible debt. Through the death of an innocent man, we the guilty go free. If we had been there, the stench of death would have overwhelmed us, but the cross smelled good to the Father. The work of salvation was finally done:
See, from his hands, his feet, his head
Sorrow and love flow mingled down!
Did e’er such love or sorrow meet,
Or thorns compose so rich a crown?
This text ties the most practical spiritual duties with the loftiest spiritual truths:
No more trash talk.
No more bitterness.
No more wrath.
No more anger.
No more clamor.
No more slander.
No more malice.
No more making the Spirit weep within you.
Powerful truth for you and me. Thanks, Ray! – Bill Welte is President and CEO of America’s Keswick
Compass Pointers: Keep your life so constant in its contact with God that His surprising power may break out on the right hand and on the left. Always be in a state of expectancy, and see that you leave room for God to come in as He likes. – Oswald Chambers
Anchored to the Rock: To give prayer the secondary place is to make God secondary in life’s affairs. E. M. Bounds
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