This man had a dream and in this dream he was a pastor of a
church and there were drug addicts, prostitutes, and all other types of “bad”
people in the church. They were all doing drugs, having sex in the pews, and
doing all of this bad stuff, basically doing everything wrong that they could.
The “pastor” then yelled out, “if you are going to dishonor the house of God
like this then GET OUT!” Which is what
most pastors in the church would say to a congregation like that, but then he
heard God say “you asked me for the lost, I have given them to you, and all I
ask you to do is LOVE these people. You don’t have to change them, just love
them and I will change them.”
This pastor said that this dream changed his idea of
ministry and theology over night, which is insane because that sounds like
eternity to me, when I admit that in just the 5 minutes it took him to tell
this dream, it changed mine.
I grew up in a church/religion where everything was about
how well you followed these guidelines and rules and if someone wasn’t
following these guidelines and rules then they were shunned. There was no love
for the prostitutes, no love for the drunkards and druggies, no love for the
men who cheat on their wives, no love for the people who steal, no love for
witches, no love for the murders, and definitely no love for the people who
wore shorts above the knee or went out dancing on Friday nights. The problem is
the gospel is only love. God has called us to love.
What if we stopped seeing other people’s sin and started
seeing people for who they really are? What if we started acting like our sin
was a 2 by 4 sticking out of our eye and our brother’s sin was a speck of dust.
Wouldn’t it change the way we judged and loved each other? What if we truly started to see people for
who they are in Christ and not by their actions? Isn’t that an insane way to
think? I will love someone because they are a son or daughter of the most high
God, not because they deserve love or because they have loved me first. No
requirements, just straight, genuine love.
Even Paul says in the Bible that the love of Christ compels
him to go to places that he wouldn’t normally go and to love people that he
wouldn’t normally love. Isn’t that insane? The love of Christ compels us to
love everyone and to go places we wouldn’t normally. Which is honestly how I
feel. I have been on this trip for 9 months now and I have been in an orphanage
in the Swazi mountains with AIDS children, in the valleys of Nepal with Hindu’s,
in the capitol of the sex trade industry inside bars in Thailand with prostitutes
and lady boys, and God has now called me to lead 5 other girls around the world, when He
knows, I struggled with loving women in my past.
I never in a million years would have thought that I would
have been in any of those places. But when you experience the over flowing love
from God and you realize that you don’t deserve it at all, it makes it
impossible to not love everyone around you.
