Learning To Hold On To God's Love, When Others Hurt You

One thing that I’ve been learning through this walk is that there have been a lot of people that I’ve known that have gone bitter or gone cold towards God. The pattern that I keep seeing is they’re not just being hurt my ordinary people, but by the people they’re around in church. I myself can understand that because it happened to be one of the reasons why my heart grew cold towards God for the past two years. I couldn’t understand how or why those who I trusted would hurt me. It was just interesting because it was happening with the people that I was around in church. At times, I was made as though I was not the person they thought I was or I wasn’t walking with God the way they thought I should’ve. At one point, my character and personality was judged and it got to the point where I was just hurt inside. I was so hurt that I didn’t know whether to laugh it out or simply just cry. It really hurt so much that someone I really thought was my friend could do these things and not know what they were doing. When I was driving back tonight, I was thinking about the people that had hurt my friend at church, and it was hard for me to think whether I should be angry at them or try to understand that it happens and we just can’t control things. At one point I was playing a song in my car, and the word “love” just kept repeating in the lyrics and it started to repeat itself over and over in my head. I felt God was speaking to my heart saying, “its my love that matters above all this”, “no matter how hurt you or the people you care about been, its my love that matters above all these things”. It spoke to my heart so strongly, I started to choke up and understand, it really is only about God’s love for us and for the lost around us. Thinking about this, I reminded myself about how Nicky Cruz was also betrayed by the people who published his book Run Baby Run. He stated in his book that he rarely got a royalty check for it and that the majority of the money was going to the publishers and not the writers themselves. It happened to be reprinted and reproduced so many times by so many publishers, and the fact that it sold over couple million he didn’t get the money that was owed to him. But he said it best when he stated that it wasn’t the money he was concerned about. All that mattered to him was that this book was used by God to help change people’s lives so they can know the loving Savior that he has come to know. Even when we look at Jesus, he was betrayed by Peter and most of all Judas. Never once did he forget his sole purpose for walking on this earth. I can imagine his heart broke that those closest to him could hurt him more than those that weren’t, but yet He strived and fulfilled his purpose. Things like this will happen in our walk, but we can’t let it get us bitter and in return make us hate God because that’s the end result of bitterness. Things will happen, people will hurt us, but we need to ask God to help give us the love to forgive those that hurt us. If we don’t do that, we won’t have peace and we may be walking further away from God.