Well, they also began accusing me of things I did not do because, as it turned
out, they were judging me by themselves. They thought that I must be wanting
to serve the Lord so that I could be seen by men, because that is why they
would want to serve the Lord. And so they quoted a Scripture passage to me
and told me to read it and that I would see what they were talking about. And I
did what they said, but I did not see what they were talking about, because that
wasn’t me they were talking about, but themselves. For I wanted to serve the
Lord because I love Jesus.
Anyway, one of the things they said to me was that I came across too much like
I have it all together. Well, in the process of this whole thing the Lord did deliver
me from a spirit of fear and he did begin a healing process in my heart and life
with regard to the pain and suffering and abuse that I had faced at the hands of
my earthly father. For I had stuffed all that pain inside, for I had been told to just
forget it, and I thought that is what I did, but it wasn’t really gone, just stuffed
inside. So now I was in a healing process.
And then the Lord moved us somewhere else, and at that new local church
fellowship I was accused of not having it all together because now I was going
through this healing process. And what I learned from this has to do with this
passage of Scripture. We are always going to have people who don’t like us and
who will accuse us falsely of things we did not do, sometimes because they are
judging us by themselves. And one group might want us to be one way while
another will want the opposite.
For they are just rendering their earthly and worldly opinions of who they think
we should or should not be based upon their own criteria, and not on the criteria
of the word of God. And so we can drive ourselves crazy if we try to please them
all, because one group will like us and another won’t, and we will be accepted
one place (or not) and then rejected at another location, although we are still
the same person. For other people will have their ideas of what we should be
like that may be contrary to God’s will for our lives.
But if we do not conform to the culture, even the “Christian” culture of a
particular area, we may be rejected and falsely accused of what we did not do
just because we are different, because we are not people pleasers but we are
God pleasers. And today the “Christian” culture is leaning much in the way of
the world and of pleasing humans instead of pleasing God, so if we are God
pleasers above being pleasers of man, we may find that we are rejected and not
accepted because we don’t fit with that culture.
