Now, I can say this: You cannot love with the love of God while holding onto your will and your rights; it is not possible because your will and your rights will always interfere with the giving of yourself to Him in total abandonment. You may have, or may have had someone in your life, maybe a parent, maybe a mate, maybe a dear friend that turned bad, and you underwent a very painful relationship with that person, so painful that your heart began to be embittered. You did not want the bitterness and neither did you want the pain that that person slipped in. The way to overcome in a situation like that is the yielding of your will and your rights. If the Lord is calling you to stay in that relationship for a season, He does not want you destroyed by it, He wants you made by it. That relationship may be God’s chiseling of your will, chiseling of your rights, yielding up those things that work in constant intervention to save us from the will of God.

So, difficult times and difficult people chisel us. Maybe it was some person that just could not see that you did anything right; these kinds of things can be very difficult to walk through. Yet, the Lord is saying—has been trying to say—and tonight He is saying, “I am working on these two issues, the issues of your will and your rights.” This person may be interfering with your rights constantly or maybe at one time in your life when you had that difficult person in your life, they seem to constantly interfere with your rights, constantly demean you, constantly think the worst of you in everything that you do, constantly make you think that you cannot make intelligent decisions. Or when they learn you have to exercise your will in a particular area, they want to cause problems, trying to keep you from being able to do that. These are pretty natural experiences; they are not some things only a few people experience. I think it is safe to say that at some point in their lives, the problem is not the person, the problem is how we handle the situation. If we handle it one way, we are going to learn the love of God. If we handle it another way, we are going to learn the lessons of bitterness, unforgiveness, a critical spirit, anger and many other human emotions that are very negative. However, with humility, yielding our will and our rights to God is an easy thing.

On the other hand, without humility we can become resentful, we can become antagonistic, we can become rebellious. If the person that God is using to try to teach us these lessons says, “Turn to the right,” we automatically turn to the left; it takes a lesson. So we will automatically say the opposite because our heart is in a mode of antagonism, our heart is in a mode of maybe even jealousy. Our heart is in a mode of contention; we just always have to be in contention.

The person that we have unforgiveness towards, they can say it is red and we will say that it is blue, just because we are in a spirit of contention concerning them. We feel judged by them at times they may not be judging us. But because we have the rules from the lack of humility in the press, we believe they are judging us—not only they but other people in our lives—when maybe they are just pressing buttons that the first person created, things that we did not resolve at that time. So, we begin to look at other people and other circumstances through the eyes of that damaged vision. The only way to save ourselves from that is to walk in a love that is self-sacrificing, what one might call it, and I think this might be a good term to use: “suffering love.” That is love that is willing to suffer for the object of its affection.

That is what Jesus did for us, isn’t it? He loved us so much, not that we were perfect, not even that we were good or kind, because some people, when they come to the Lord, are anything but kind. Other people have been with the Lord many years but they just developed a bad nature.

Jesus suffers long the Bible says. Love suffers long, the Bible says. So, let’s call it that: “suffering love.” Learning how to walk in suffering love by yielding up our will and our rights: By our rights, we can do thus and so. We have the rights to do that. It is not something that would hurt anybody; we just want to do it and we have the right to do that. However, it may not be the Lord’s will. So then, you have a choice to yield up that right and obey the Lord’s will or retain that right and be embittered by the time you finish consuming it.

To be continued next week…
In Him,
Nita Johnson