Cherish part 2
Our key verse for this Rant series is Ephesians 5:29, "For no man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as the Lord the church." So before we really get into it today I want to discuss the beginning and the end (the Alpha and Omega) of this verse. Because the first time I read it I said to myself, "That's not right. People hate themselves. In fact, it seems to me that more people hate themselves then love themselves." You know, self destructive people who really don't care about themselves. People who are slowly killing themselves, or people who literally kill themselves. But that actually brings us to the end of the verse. It, like everything else in the Bible, is about the Lord and the church. About Jesus and us. He died so we could die, right? And all of that self-condemnation, all of that self-loathing, and self-hatred died with Him. All of that "self." So we could stop being self-centered, and start being Christ-centered. So we could STOP hating and start nourishing and cherishing. I think people hate because they've lost hope. I think hope springs eternal, otherwise it wouldn't be hope. But I also know that hope deferred makes the heart sick. Hoping and hoping and hoping and never seeing what you hope for is about the worst thing there is. That's why faith is the SUBSTANCE of things hoped for. Jesus isn't our blessed hope, He's our blessed assurance. Because it is finished. And everything we were hoping for, deep in our heart of hearts, has come to fruition. All we ever wanted was to be like God. To be accepted, and loved. To be nourished, and cherished. And that's what we got when God poured out His Spirit on all flesh. That's what we got when He gave us His Spirit, the love receptor. And, again, it wasn't that He all of a sudden loved us. He always loved us. It was that all of a sudden we could receive and release (receive BY releasing) His love. All of a sudden we knew HIM, and we knew OURSELVES. We knew Him as heavenly Father and ourselves as His beloved Son in whom He is well pleased. All of sudden we knew ourselves--ALL of us--as the body of Christ. When the old man died, the new man came forth. One new man. One new body. And now instead of being self-centered, we are Christ-centered. And that means we are people centered. Remember Jesus said whatever you've done unto the least of them you've done unto Him? We love God by loving people. When we nourish and cherish each other we are nourishing and cherishing God. We are nourishing and cherishing ourselves. Because the best way to feel love is to give love. To share what we've got. Now look at what the word, "cherisheth" means: It is number 2282 in Strong's Greek Concordance and it means, "to warm; to brood, that is, (figuratively) to foster." It's a mean, cold world out there. And what we do--what we CAN do because of the love of God that He filled us with--is warm each other up. We can foster each other. Help each other. Edify each other. We can lay down our lives for our friends because we are loving them with the love that we are loved with. We can stop looking at faults. Stop looking at differences. We can stop seeing "us vs them" and we can start to love ourselves. Love each other. We're all members of the same body. The same brood. We're all in this together. We don't hate ourselves, or each other. We love... even as the Lord and the church!