PRAY FOR THOSE WHO HURT YOU!

Readings: 32:7-14; John 5:31-47

When you love someone a lot, and they do not respond to your love, when you do for someone a lot, and they do not show their appreciation, do you get angry? It seems God got angry.

God greatly loved the people Moses led from Egypt. There was nothing he would not do for them. He obtained their release from a life of slavery under the Egyptians, protected them in the desert, fed them, and led them towards a land of milk and honey that he had promised them. Did they appreciate him, respect him, love him back? It seems many of them didn’t. When Moses was up on the mountain getting the ten commandments the people turned to a false god to give their love and allegiance to.

“Go at once,” God told Moses. “They have turned aside from the way I pointed out to them, making for themselves a molten calf and worshiping it, sacrificing to it, and crying out, ‘This is your God, 0 Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt.’” And God got mad. Why?

Was it because he was hurt, because his heart was devastated, because those he gave of his entire self cast him aside? Can God have emotions like that? Whatever he has, he was moved as if with passion to show them his hurt. “Let me alone,” said God to Moses, “that my wrath may blaze up against them to consume them.” But “he relented in the punishment he had threatened to inflict on them.”

When you find yourself angry with those you love and have done so much for, PRAY! God understands just how you feel. He will help you calm those feelings and continue loving in spite of your hurt. God has been wherever you go. There is nothing he hasn’t experienced, nothing he doesn’t know how to deal with favorably. Pray for those, forgive those, try to continue loving those who hurt you. God does - especially when it is us who hurt him ... whenever we sin. .