Tuesday: You Have Me Doing Everything
WEEK 41
TUESDAY
YOU HAVE ME DOING EVERYTHING
John 21:15-22
In living contact with Jesus the mood of life changes. You find yourself going out in love to everybody. The critical attitude toward life and people is dissolved when we get into living fellowship with Christ. Where there is communion with Christ, there are no critical attitudes toward others. We don’t become blind to their faults, but love sees why the faults are there and pities and longs to help. Love makes you understanding. As “Mary” puts it, “I don’t want to be understood as much as I want to be understanding.” Then she adds to someone who had helped her, “You have been like a catalytic agent to me. You have me doing everything without you doing anything but believing in me.” That last phrase is the secret of helping people: “believing in me.” Those who believe in Christ believe in people, and in believing in them “have [them] doing everything.”
That was the secret of the lack of criticizing people in early Christianity; they believed in people, not for what they were, but for what they could be and would be in Christ. They were thinking, not of where people were, but of where they were going. They loved them into loving, believed them into believing, and lived them into living. They passed on a blood transfusion of faith and love into the withered lives around them. They were people of construction rather than of criticism. No movement can live on the criticism of others. It dies of its own negativism.
This is particularly true of Christian movements. The spirit of criticism in a Christian movement is so alien to that movement that it eats like acid into the souls of those who hold it and soon destroys the movement. The criticizers get criticized; the biters get bit. A girl heard that if you wished a wart off yourself onto others, yours would disappear; so she wished the wart on her hand onto the nose of her sister and found to her dismay that one came out on her own nose! Criticism criticizes the criticizers!
O Jesus, help me to find good in everything and everybody; and where I cannot find it, help me to produce it by my love and faith. May I love love out of the loveless. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: I will look on everybody and everything through the loving eyes of Jesus.