Devos Catch Up - Love Keeps No Record of Wrongs, it Does Not Delight In Evil

We had two really great devos led by Keira and Carolyn yesterday! Just wanted to share a but of their thoughts as we continue our study on Love from 1 Corinthians 13. 

Love Keeps No Record of Wrongs - Keira

Keira shared Psalms 130:3-4 which says, “If you, Lord, kept a record of sins, Lord, who could stand? But with you there is forgiveness, so that we can, with reverence, serve you.” Keira mentioned, if God kept a list of all of our wrongs, we wouldn’t be able to stand. He offers us grace and forgiveness, so we need to offer the same to others. It’s easy to get caught up in what people do to us, but we are called to forgive others as He forgives us. She mentioned the story of the Prodigal son. The father in the story forgives the son immediately, no questions asked, he didn’t keep a record of the wrongs the son had done. But then there was the older brother who wasn’t happy and held his wrongs over him - we are called to be more like the Father - forgiving people and welcoming them back. Keira also mentioned that we need to do the same for ourselves - we can’t keep a record of wrongs against ourselves! Many of us have messed up and sometimes can feel guilt and continue to punish ourselves for it, but if God forgave us, we need to forgive ourselves too. If we don’t it’s like we’re saying his sacrifice at the cross wasn’t enough.

We also talked through the difference between keeping boundaries and constant forgiveness. While we are called to forgive, that doesn’t mean we need to leave an open door to people in our life if they continually wrong us. It is okay to have boundaries. 

Hannah added that the verse says, “Keep no record of WRONGS”, not “keep no record of SINS”. Her point was that it is okay from believer to believer to hold each other accountable when it comes to sin, but we can’t hold wrongs against one another - examples would be things that just annoy us, different ways of doing things, breakups, etc. Is that sin? Or is that a wrong? Clausen added that she and Dyer constantly talk about Conviction vs Commandment. We can’t hold other people to our personal convictions (things like clothing choices/modesty, movie/music boundaries), but we can uphold commandments (Not lie, steal, murder, lust, envy, etc.). Once again we were reminded that this isn’t a natural reaction, we aren’t quick to forgive, so we have to learn to lean on the Holy Spirit to help us forgive ourselves and forgive others and not keep that record of wrongs. 

Love Does Not Delight In Evil - Carolyn

Carolyn shared several verses in our talk on “Love does not delight in evil”, listed below:

• Psalm 45:7 - “You love righteousness and you hate wickedness; therefore God, your God has set you above your companions by anointing you with the oil of joy.”
• Psalm 145:20 - “The LORD watches over all who love him, but all the wicked he will destroy.
• 1 John 1:5-7 - “But if we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his son, purifies us all from sin.”
• Romans 12:9 - “Love must be sincere, hate what is evil, cling to what is good.” 
• 1 John 2:15 - “Do not love the world or anything of the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them.”
• Jude 1:17-23 - …. “keep yourselves in God’s love as you wait for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to bring you to eternal life.” 

Carolyn shared through these verses that God loves righteousness and hates wickedness - that wickedness that is in us separates us from God. If God does not delight in evil, we shouldn’t either. She shared the example that if anything is 99% pure is still 1% impure, which makes the whole thing impure. We are not supposed to love the things of this world. The world may love evil things, but as believers we shouldn’t love evil things. Like every other attribute, she mentioned that following our sinful nature is natural - we are drawn to evil things. We are prone to wander. But we’re called to have an eternal perspective and to focus on what is preparing us for eternity. If we are filling our lives with evil things are we preparing for eternity? As a group we talked about some of the evil things that people their age deal with and some of those were the love of money, blasphemy, lust, putting others down, gossip, and love of self. Señora Harrison mentioned needing to pray through the things we spend our time in/on to see how God feels about those things. What are we watching? Listening to? Spending time on? Is it pleasing to God? If it’s not, we need to cut it out of our lives! Hannah brought in the idea that she and Carolyn have been talking about this week which is, we need to GET FOREVER RIGHT. Even if that is only for one person we come in contact with or one person on this trip, we need to talk to others about getting forever in eternity right and that probably means getting rid of some evil things that we love. 

This was a very powerful day of devotions and led to some deep conversation and reflection. I’m so thankful to our students for taking the time to prepare their devotions, the courage to share in front of their peers, and the willingness to challenge themselves to live different in response to the truth they are hearing.