Cut Off Negative People?
“Cut off those negative people!”
“Disconnect yourself from those who bring you down!”
“You’re too important to surround yourself with anyone who doesn’t make you better!”
Boy, I’m sure glad Jesus didn’t do that. Satan even offered Him the world to abandon us, and in all our sin and disappointing failures, He still stretched out His arms, bled, and died for us. On the cross, He was surrounded by legitimately evil people and could have just said the word and had angels descend and destroy everybody there while He removed Himself from the cross in glory...yet He asked the Father to forgive them. He carried out the mission in obedience to the Father as our perfect sacrifice.
If we are being harmed, there is a time to disconnect, but may we RUN from any version of Christianity that puts us up on a pedestal and recommends the excuse of running from the harder to love people that God put in our life to pour into. It’s messy, but our Lord Jesus, eternal God Himself came not to be served, but to serve. As we grow in Christ, may we continue to decrease so that Christ can be exalted.
We can all probably think of a person or two in our lives that is legitimately difficult to genuinely show love toward. A dangerous trend I’ve been seeing a lot of within Christianity though is the idea that you’re just too important to be bothered by vacuous or difficult people. In Philippians, when Paul was in prison, he didn’t look around and think, “my mission is WAY more important than this. I gotta get outta here.” No, he instead found great joy in spreading the gospel through the guards. His mission was wherever he was. Whatever circumstances we’ve been placed in with whatever people, we should strive to obey Christ and love others as we love ourselves. When we’re so consumed with our rights, our destiny, our time, our comfort, and ultimately, our own selfish ideas of what we ought to be doing...we will begin to make spiritual sounding justifications to avoid the people in our lives that we just don’t want there. It’s easy to love those who are easy to love, but unfortunately, there’s nothing virtuous about that.
