A Call for Repentance - Day 17: Forgive me Lord for jumping to conclusions about other people.

“Who are you to condemn someone else’s servants? Their own master will judge whether they stand or fall. And with the Lord’s help, they will stand and receive his approval.

So why do you condemn another believer? Why do you look down on another believer? Remember, we will all stand before the judgment seat of God.”

‭‭Romans‬ ‭14:4, 10‬ ‭NLT‬‬

Our ability to learn from our experience is a gift to us. Indeed, if when presented with a new situation, we had to start from a position of total ignorance as to how things work, we would get little accomplished.

Yes, the ability to apply knowledge gained in one circumstance, to another circumstance, gives us a running start. Otherwise we would be relegated to the hard slog of constantly reinventing the wheel, before even getting started on the task at hand. After all, even the most menial operations are informed and expedited by our accumulated knowledge base.

However, sometimes the conclusions we form, being tainted with conceptions that were either false to begin with, or not applicable to this situation, prove to be incorrect.

This is how we may easily jump to a wrong conclusion: We see a behavior in someone that has been associated with a certain motivation in the past in someone else, and now assume this person shares the same motivation as other people who exhibited that behavior. And how wrong we can be in doing so!

Let me tell you a little story.

There is a person who regularly checks us out at the grocery store. Now, I always try to reach out to a service person rather than treating them as a part of the fixtures. But I noticed that—repeatedly—this person seemed to be very grumpy, so I assumed that the person must not like me.

Recently, I tried one more time to reach out to this person, asking if they had to work much longer that day. They answered my question, then said, “These two jobs are killing me!” As the person shared further with me, I learned that they are basically working two full-time jobs, made even harder by having some physical challenges. They are just dog tired. Their behavior NEVER had ANYTHING to do with me.

You see, we generally do our grocery shopping late in the day. By that time, this person has already worked a full-time job and now has come to work this job. Now, I never treated this person badly. I never showed a bad attitude. But I felt ashamed for what I had felt in my heart.

Sadly, this wasn’t the first time I jumped to that sort of very wrong conclusion. You see, I have had some people who did intensely dislike me who showed the same behavior this person did. They weren’t just tired; they were tired of me, proving the same by further hostile actions. But this grumpy person was simply tired.

Friend, we must not allow prejudices formed from our life experiences, cause us to mislabel people, or their motivations.

Jumping to conclusions about other people is not pleasing to the Lord. And God forbid that we would allow our prejudgments to keep us from reaching out to others in the Name of the Lord.

Let’s ask the Lord to forgive us for having a hair trigger in terms of our estimations of other people and/or their motivations.

Additionally, let’s listen more closely to the Holy Spirit of God Who can reveal to us the things we need to know.

Peace to you.

Jesus is coming! Get ready for Him!

#callforrepentance

#resolveforhim