How to you handle spite directed at you?
I’m not worried about people who disagree with me. They have been present from the first day I began blogging back around 2000. Some within community disagree with some of what I say. It’s not a big deal. The whole point of being a community elder is not that you buy into every word I say, but that you are willing to tolerate me. I’m sure there’s plenty that will surprise me on Judgment Day when all things are revealed.
Again, it’s not about the content, but the obedience to God’s way of doing things. How do you handle disagreement? It starts with the fundamental law code of the Covenant of Christ: Love each other sacrificially, the way Christ does. That does not compel agreement in thinking, but agreement in service.
And then there is a small handful of folks who actively hate me, and they say so. A few have tried to do it here in the comments, but unless they have something substantive to say about the topic at hand, then verbal abuse is off-topic. But there are those who simply snipe from a distance. They abuse me textually; some of you have spotted it out there.
If God is for us, who can be against us? My Father does not need human approval to use me.
Let them chatter. I don’t need anyone rushing to my defense. Christ’s teachings are clear enough on this; if possible, we repay with kindness. Sometimes that isn’t possible, so we at least pray for them. I’m not being singled out; one fellow in particular is that way with just about everyone who thinks differently from him. The scary part is that he claims to be a Christian.
He needs prayer more than most, because his verbal abuse defiles his life. Unless he repents, awful things will happen, and it will fall on anyone close to him. Keep in mind what we have said about covering and uncovering; the spiritual situation is going to polarize. The Lord will mark his own for protection and send plagues on the rest.
Let’s pray that the Lord’s Elect are drawn closer and become more obedient to the Covenant. Let’s pray they are taken out of harm’s way. But let His wrath fall on us first so that we are cleansed of defiling sins. It will destroy those whose lives are empty.
I am so sorry you have to deal with this kind of thing, even though it is expected. You are a man of God, a true elder who deserves respect, but the paradox always seems to be that the good must suffer to help them grow ever more into the likeness of Christ who was the best and look what they did to him!
I will just leave this little quote because I came across it again recently and your posts keep bringing it to mind, although it is admittedly a sort of negative affirmation:
“The essentially religious author is always polemical, and hence he suffers under or suffers from the opposition which corresponds to whatever in his age must be regarded as the specific evil…. When anyone asks him on what he bases the claim that he is right and that it is the truth he utters, his answer is: I prove it by the fact that I am persecuted; this is the truth, and I can prove it by the fact that I am derided.”
That’s almost funny, John. The quote sounds like the fellow in question; he complains that everyone is attacking him, but he’s the one spewing acid everywhere.