Friend1: The amazing thing about Jesus is that he never talked to a prostitute.
Friend2: Oh yeah he did. And I started whipping my Bible open.
Friend1: No Jesus never talked to a prostitute because he never saw a prostitute. He saw a child who he was madly in love with.
I can imagine some number of reasons why a person would state this. Some of the reasons I like and some I reject. On the positive, we too often forget to see others as God sees them. Sadly we then interact with each other out of our short-sighted perspectives.
Just as bad, we also often forget to see ourselves as God sees us.
“Not to abide in Jesus’ love would mean that we stop believing that we are loved by Jesus. We look at our circumstances - perhaps persecution or disease or abandonment - and we conclude that we are not loved by Jesus anymore. That’s the opposite of abiding in the love of Jesus. So abiding in his love means continuing to believe, moment by moment, that we are loved.”
- John Piper, What Jesus Demands from the World (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2006), 64-65.
HT:JH
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