Apathy

I have been studying the love of God recently. I just a read sermon by John MacArthur regarding our apathy towards God in relationship with him, relationships, and society. Apathy is the tolerance and indifference to the act of a situation or circumstance in good and bad. In reality we are to think of our love towards him as a complete sacrifice of ourselves to him no matter how it affects our relationships, or the world. If we can’t do that then we really can’t love another the way he wants us to.

"Love" has been redefined as a broad tolerance that overlooks sin and embraces good and evil alike. That's not love; it's apathy. God's love is not at all like that. Remember, the supreme manifestation of God's love is the cross, where Christ "loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God" (v. 2). Thus Scripture explains the love of God in terms of sacrifice, atonement for sin, and propitiation: "In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins" (1 John 4:10). In other words Christ made Himself a sacrifice to turn away the wrath of an offended deity. Far from dismissing our sins with a benign tolerance, God gave His Son as an offering for sin, to satisfy His own wrath and justice in the salvation of sinners.” John MacArthur, The Love You Don’t Need - www.gty.org

We are starting advent now. We are waiting for something great to happen. Christ will be born. We are supposed slow down during this time, but none of us really will because society has made Christmas just another holiday where we have so many other things to take care of. We think these things matter, but they don‘t. I just had the best thanksgiving ever since I was a kid. We went to my dad’s, and we pretty much just spent the day together doing nothing. My boys ate when they were ready to, and we didn’t force them to sit at the table. They were having too much fun playing at paw paw’s house. It was great. Over the weekend I let them decorate the tree this year and it is not how I would do it, but it looks beautiful. Ornaments were broken, but they are just ornaments; just objects. The memory of this tree will be in my heart forever. I chose not to control this and let them do it. I chose not to get upset or angry about the ornaments. A year ago that would not have happened.

During my last attack last December I had a friend tell me that. She flat out said “you don’t have to do that.” “He is telling you to stop doing that out of love, and what my idea of what love was.” That is the reason I haven’t been sick. I started to discern the motive behind the acts of giving and loving. I am still learning it, and it is awesome! I am trying to discern and see what my acts are now. I am trying to tame my tongue. The reason why is because they can not be taken a way once they are done.

I have an issue with time and control. I want to control certain things that don’t matter in the long run. I don’t use time wisely. I rush around all the time. My husband doesn’t do that, and I think he should. Neither one of us has balance regarding time. I try to do everything in one day and I am at home all week. I am so tired by the end the day I can barely move. It drives my husband crazy.

When I asked God to break me he did, and now he is trying to bring me back with every action and every emotion. I love him for it. I can’t praise him enough for it. It appears that I am going to cry now in almost every sermon that our pastor gives. Every time I go now I break down about what else I need to do for God. There is so much hurt going on this country and with so many people we know. It just breaks my heart. It just doesn’t make sense anymore. God let men brutally kill his son, and we show apathy towards that; we take it for granted and most of us don‘t even know we do it.
We are so tolerate of evil that we don’t know what evil is. We have allowed the government to take care of our families. We have allowed them to feed our neighbors when we could do it for them ourselves if we need to. We have allowed mass genocide of babies, because of circumstance or that a woman didn’t want to have to care for that child. We have allowed them to take more from our military; the very men and women that protect us. They have lost so much for us, and we treat them horribly when we take what they need to care for their families, and defend this nation. We have individuals showing greed with taking up more resources of cities that can’t afford it. We never look at the consequence of what we are doing.
I don’t understand and I wish someone would explain it to me. I really do. We fight more about money, and how the money is to be spent other than saying the things we need to say out of fear and judgment. The funny thing is about judgment of another is when we say we aren’t doing it we are doing it. We are so afraid of saying to another that they are wrong, and that is not right what they are doing because we don‘t want them. Most of the things we say we aren’t doing to another we are doing.

See, I don’t like someone controlling my life, but I don’t want to face the fact that God has control over my life. I want to make the choices, not him. This doesn’t mean that we have the right to go out and break laws, disobey an employer or that my kids are not accountable to their teachers this just means that we have to accept the authority of those things. We are their parents, so we have a job to train them not do those things to the authorities and God. They have to understand that, because life is hard and there are consequences to doing the wrong thing or saying it.

We talked about the discipline of guidance yesterday. There are some people that you can’t do this with. We can have the spirit in us, but we can’t go around doing this to people. I have 4 individuals in my life that I go to that I am not scared to say anything to, or they aren’t either. One of them is my husband, and this was hard with him to do with me because he didn’t want to hurt me. He can’t do that anymore, because we have to talk to each other. The other three are the only others I trust with my heart, and they are not my parents. I only go to them for certain things, and they tell me the truth.

I used to give my heart to all individuals, and I don’t do that anymore. I am very cautious about it. I have hurt people and they have hurt me because of it. They just weren’t the ones that he wanted for me to do that with, and vice versus so I stopped.
We are a naïve’ nation to think he isn‘t showing us his wrath now. So many Christians are naïve’ in thinking that he is not angry with them. Think about our trials or problems we have that are happening right now to us. What is in us that we aren’t getting. He is giving us choice to either defeat the issue through him, or ignore it. When we look at another and we show judgment about it what are we really saying when we do that. That is the verse “look at the log in your own eye before you look at the speck in your brothers.” The story of the adulterous woman is us; we just do it too him and others. No one can cast a stone.

I remember now that I am worthy for him to love, and that he does love me. I am trying to discern what anxiety I feel when a trial comes up or problem. I want to know what is in me that I am missing that he is trying to show me. Yesterday my husband and I were sitting at lunch, and I looked him and said I had forgotten for almost 9 years that I wasn’t worthy enough for him. That’s why I got sick last year. That’s why he broke me. I am worthy for him, and I knew that before we got married. The guilt and shame of having this disease, and the burden he has had to carry was too much for me. I never wanted that for him. The reality is that he knew that if I got too sick he couldn’t make it better, and his wife would physically and emotionally be gone to him. My husband told me to stop thinking that, because when he married me he knew I was the other half his heart, and I was worthy.

I allowed that to happen to myself. I thought those things about myself. I forgot that he married me knowing that I was sick. That he chose to do that after finding out a month before our wedding. Right at that moment I forgot who I was. I was willing to never let my husband have that burden, and it broke my heart. My parents and my brother told me that they didn’t understand why I had forgotten that I was good enough for him, and that I was worthy. They just couldn’t grasp, or accept in their minds what I was doing. They knew this was not the woman they love. Thank God they did that. Those individuals that I pour my heart out to said the very same thing.

We’ve had a beautiful year of healing. The trials aren’t as overwhelming anymore. I accept it when God wakes me up in the middle of the night to come to him and write. I accept that he wants something else from me to give up. Christians remember your apathy towards him, because I fear that so many of us think that he is not an angry or wrathful God. Remember what he gave us to save us. Remember the birth of his son, and the brutal murder of his son for us. He will have to break us first to bring us back.