Coping with Criticism by Jamie Buckingham

Author:Jamie Buckingham
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf
Published: 2014-05-10T03:00:00+00:00

Never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God…if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him drink…do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good…bless those who persecute you, bless and do not curse them (Rom. 12:19-21, 14 RSV).

“And what good will it do if I love them,” she said. “Will it bring back my brother from the dead? Will it cause the Russians to release my father? Will it change them if I love them?”

They were hard questions. Honest questions. The kind that each of us needs to ask — without fear.

“Love doesn’t necessarily change things,” I said as honestly as I knew. “But it changes you for things. In being obedient to God’s Word, you have opened the door for God to directly intervene. You have the power, as a child of God, to bind and loose. Your hate not only binds you — twisting you into emotional and physical knots and bringing sickness and maybe even death — but it binds your enemies. You do not want to bind them, you want to loose them so God can work in their lives. The only way to loose someone else — friend or enemy — is to love them. Therefore in projecting love to them, you set yourself free from the bondage of hate and bitterness, and you set them free to receive the love of God — which changes even the most wicked people into instruments of good.”

She had dropped her head while I was speaking. Raising it she looked me once again in the face. Speaking slowly, so her interpreter could translate, she said, “If that word was merely from you, a strange American in our midst, I would spit on you. But I know it is from God. Therefore I accept it.” She paused, then reached over, squeezed my hand, and smiled. “And I accept you also, God’s messenger.”

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