You Have Wearied the Lord With Your Words

Malachi 2:17 "How have we wearied Him" you ask? By saying, "All who do evil are good in the eyes of the Lord, and He is pleased with them: or "Where is the God of justice?"

I think God must be very weary of our extremes. On the one hand we will be so tolerant and permissive and make it seem like everything is OK with us and what anybody does is their business (and to a degree it is) but not to the extreme of not addressing sin or turning blind eyes to godlessness and all types of bad behavior. Then, on the other hand we can rant and rave at God for not bringing justice down on all those who sin. Seems to me we can't have it both ways. We must find some kind of balance between being judgmental in a sweeping generalist way and being so tolerant that we appear to affirm sin. We are drawn by extremes. We can be too tough, almost heartless... and we can be too easy, almost overly permissive.

Anything to avoid conflict. We don't want to appear judgmental so we tolerate incredibly aberrant actions. And.... we want to avoid leniency so we jump to judgment before we understand the whole picture. This sends confusing messages and makes us appear to be both conflicted and judgmental. All of this while trying to take the path of least resistance. At the same time we don't want trouble and we don't want to deal with trouble either. Seems to me we in some instances need to be much tougher and at other times we need to have a heart.

I think it is our duplicity and self-contradiction that wears God out. He doesn't want us to make excuses for sin, nor does He want us to throw everybody under the bus, all the time. Not an easy balance to strike. We are both avoidant and flippant. Not a healthy combination. I am capable of being both. I know I can on the one hand cut some people a ton of slack and others I can jump on if they even flinch.

What is worse is when these attitudes lead to a lot of words. God wearies of hearing us go on and on and on ad nausem with either end of the spectrum. Both the self-righteousness and the codependency are equally wearisome. We must call sin, sin and still have compassion for sinners. After all, we fit in our own categories too. We always get ourselves in deeper when we start to put a lot of words with bad ideas. Don't get me wrong. There are issues like abuse, racism and other forms of victimization that we must maintain zero tolerance levels about. On the other hand there are issues about style, culture and expression that we need to not be so harsh about.

At the bottom line each situation must be dealt with individually. Principles, circumstances, people and issues must be carefully and prayerfully considered, especially before saying anything, particularly to anyone else. Let me close today's devotional thought with an interesting twist. Make sure that you don't fall into judging judgers or tolerating toleraters either. So I encourage us all to consider the Lord in everything. What pleases Him, maybe we should do that first before we do too much thinking or speaking about anything or anybody.

In His Spirit, Pastor Fred

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