Return of the Eagles

In prayer, I began to pray for “those in authority” or “in high positions” both within the Body and without. When I pray for leaders, I ask God to “bend those who ask for His will, and break those who fight against His will.”

And this morning as I prayed for a particular leader who holds an extremely high position, since I have observed his decision-making for years now and deemed it to be mostly ungodly, I automatically positioned him in the latter category (“LORD, if he won’t bend to your will, then break him for the sake of your people”).

Suddenly, I heard, “he may be doing more with the understanding he has than you are doing with what you understand.”

The Holy Spirit doesn’t mince words. He wasn’t saying He was pleased with all that this person was doing.

No.

He was talking about ME now and reminding me that just because I might be in the “second grade” I have no right to look down my nose at a “6-year-old-first-grader”, especially when I may be 16 years old and still held back in God's second grade!

At that moment I had a flashback to something I had read some years ago. I am not going to name names because I feel sure I won’t get all the details exactly right, but it went something like this:

The man told of how he would pass a homeless fellow on a regular basis as he went to work. And he told how he thought to himself how “this was another case of someone who didn’t rise to fulfill their God-given potential, to accomplish all that they could have in God. If he just had more self-control and discipline over his emotions…” (words to that effect.)

Then God allowed him to see the homeless man walking down the sidewalk one day, obviously depressed with his situation, angry at life, hatred spilling over at everybody and everything. And as he fumed, he came upon a dog laying in his way on the sidewalk. He pulled his leg back to swing it at the animal with all that pent up anger, and just before he lets loose, he stops in mid-swing, looks down at the dog, walks around it, and continues on down the sidewalk.

And in this vision/dream that God is giving the man telling this story, God says to him, “This man you have been watching and judging for not living up to his potential…When he walked up to that creature and wanted to unleash all the anguish inside him at all life had given him, it took far more self-control for him to refrain from kicking that dog than what you have ever exhibited in your own life. Yet you have compared him to yourself and judged yourself superior.”

You know, it is completely fine to make judgements of others.

Just as long as you are qualified.

But remember this: “Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you. 

We found those Words important enough to give them the “lipstick-on-the-mirror” treatment at my house...