There are three things about us which in a very practical way will determine whether we are more of an asset or a liability, more of a blessing than a burden. What are they? Our attitude, our anger and our anticipation for tomorrow.
Attitude Can I ask you, do you enjoy being around people who are grumpy and upset all the time? Do you enjoy being part of a team where everyone’s downcast, when no one is at all positive about anything going on in their lives? None of us do, do we? It’s horrible when that happens.
I mean I remember being part of a sporting team once as a young man and we didn’t win a single game in the season. It got to the point where we’d go out onto the field believing, just knowing that we were going to lose and time and time again we would fulfil our expectation. No, it wasn’t a lot of fun at all.
Some people are a blessing and others are more of a burden. Some people are assets and others are more of a liability. Some people are problem solvers and others, well they’re just part of the problem and if you and I want to live the sort of life that’s this amazing life, the life that God’s planned for us, we need to be on the plus side of that equation not on the minus side. Would you agree?
So let me ask you, are you a glass half full kind of person or do you have a glass half empty perspective on life? Because perspective or the word that most people use, our attitude, has a lot to do with the sort of life we’re going to live. I love what it says in the Old Testament Book of Proverbs chapter 17, verse 22. It says:
A cheerful heart is good medicine but a down cast spirit dries up the bones.
I like being around cheerful people. Cheerful people have a sense of contentment and joy, they’re not always looking for the problems that might be just around the next corner. Cheerful people are the people who have their faith and their trust in the Lord Jesus Christ. They’re the sort of people that we love to be around.
I once worked with a man, he was a good few years older than me and he was always looking forward to the next thing, he was always anticipating something good. Okay sometimes good things would happen and sometimes they didn’t happen and sometimes days were lousy but that didn’t seem to deter him. He was always looking for the next good thing.
This guy was definitely a glass half full sort of person, he was realistic, he was practical but he was very cheerful. I learnt a lot from working with him, in fact he has had more of an impact on my life than almost anyone else. We worked together for a good twenty years as business partners, friends and him as my mentor, teaching me not only his skills but his outlook on life. What a great guy to be around.
Conversely there was another man in our company, also a few years my senior, who never saw any good in anything and I think the second part of that Proverb I just read out to you is totally about this guy. Have a listen to it again:
A cheerful heart is good medicine but a down cast spirit dries up the bones.
Is there anything more desolate, more life draining, than the picture of dry bones? It speaks of a complete absence of life. Not even the birds come to pick off the flesh off the dry bones because there’s none left – nothing of sustenance, no life.
People like that drain the life out of themselves and out of the people around them. The problem is some people and you may well be one of them, do have that sort of outlook on life, seeing that the glass is always half empty instead of noticing that it’s half full. It’s kind of a way of life for them. Those people are more of a liability than an asset. I’m just being direct and honest.
We all go through negativity at times so whether it’s a now or then thing or a whole way of life for you I want to encourage you today to change your outlook. I used to be quite a negative person because things never satisfied me. One of my biggest things that impacted my life is working closely with that business partner of mine that I mentioned earlier and picking up his experience and his positive outlook and perspectives on life.
Even on the difficult things we travelled through together. See being happy, being contented, looking for the good in every circumstance and every situation isn’t some goal that we should aspire to, being cheerful and positive most of the time actually works, it makes for a much better life. Listen:
A cheerful heart is good medicine but a down cast spirit dries up the bones.
See it’s that blessing or burden, asset or liability, problem solver or problem thing again. Is you countenance, you outlook, your heart attitude good medicine to the people around you? Or do you dry up their bones? Do you sap the life out them?
It’s time to take a good hard look in the mirror and if you don’t like what you’re seeing then it’s time to do something about it. And allow me to let you in on a little secret here because the contentment that I feel, the cheerfulness that I have in my heart which is I guess most of the time, 80%, 90% of the time, isn’t something I’m able to rustle up on my own on a daily basis because my circumstances don’t always give me call for celebration.
Some days, quite frankly, are really tough. The source of my cheerfulness is God Himself through His mighty promise that Jesus made to His disciples, John chapter 16, verse 33. Listen to this. The disciples were afraid, Jesus was about to be crucified, the whole world for them was falling apart, listen to what Jesus says to those men at that point in time.
All these things I’ve been telling you in this time of fear, Jesus said, I’ve said to you so that you might have peace because in this world you are going to have tribulation, that’s a promise but be of good cheer for I have overcome the world.
Jesus, more than any man who has ever walked this earth, understands trial and sorrow. Back in the Book of Isaiah it describes Him as a man of suffering, a man acquainted with infirmity, a man from whom others would hide their face, a man who is despised, a man who people held of no account, Isaiah chapter 53, verse 3.
And yet Jesus overcame the world, He died for my sin and yours, He rose again so that you and I could have a fresh and new and awesome and abundant life here on this earth and for all eternity. That’s the big picture, that’s the reality, that’s the powerful mighty truth that these days, informs my whole perspective on life.
Jesus rose again, that’s awesome! Yes, He did overcome this world and He did it for you, He did it for me. That’s what brings peace amidst the turmoil. That’s what brings good cheer amidst the tribulation. Not something I conjure up, not self-motivation, not self-help, not self-hype. Jesus plain and simple has overcome the world and given me a new start in life if I put my trust in Him and Jesus, plain and simple, has overcome the world for you to give you a new life if you put your trust in Him.
And I don’t care what comes against me, I don’t care how much people criticise me, I don’t care how much I stumble or fail, Jesus hasn’t fallen off His twig, Jesus promises haven’t failed. If we put our trust in Jesus Christ as our Lord, as our saviour, as our king, as our friend, as our guide, as our comforter, He will never ever fail us.
I’ve searched far and wide, I’ve left no stone unturned but I have never found that good cheer that Jesus spoke about, that joy in the face of pressure and trial and tribulation anywhere else. Yes, God used other people like my business partner in my life to show it to me, but He and He alone is the source of that joy, He and He alone is the one who gives me a cheerful heart and that cheerful heart is good medicine indeed. It’s good medicine for me and its good medicine for the people around me. Come on the answer is Jesus Christ.
Anger If you’ve ever been bullied, you’ll know what an awful feeling it is. In fact, it’s not something confined to the school yard, bullying happens amongst adults too. I’ve seen husbands bullying their wives, wives bullying their husbands, bosses bullying their employees, workers bullying their co-workers.
Have you ever been on the wrong end of the bullying equation? It isn’t a lot of fun. Some personality types like mine for instance are more prone to be bullies than others but we all have a bit of it in us. The idea of rolling over the top of other people to get to where we’re going, to get what we want out of a situation.
So far in this series we’ve been chatting about what it means to be more of a blessing than a burden, more of an asset than a liability, more of a problem solver than part of the problem and I guess the way we’ve been tackling that is through some of the awesome wisdom, God’s wisdom in the Old Testament Book of Proverbs.
When it comes to this whole bullying thing there’s a great one, there’s a great Proverb, it’s so plain and simple and obvious, have a listen, God says:
Do not quarrel with anyone without cause, when no harm has been done to you.
In fact, it’s so plain and so simple and so blindingly glimpsingly obvious you have to ask yourself, hang on what bit about this don’t we get? Why is it that we have to try and pick fights with people? You know someone says something or does something that we don’t quite like or perhaps they look at us the wrong way and we’re off, off we go, we just have to say something, we just have to pick a fight.
You know this is really, really easy to do in a marriage. If one of you is meticulously tidy and organised which is me in our marriage, and the other’s more relaxed and easy going, that’s my wife, it can be on for young and old.
See the meticulous tidy people simply cannot begin to understand how someone could possibly leave something lying out of place and speaking from experience here what you really want to do is you want to say something, why did you leave that out? Why didn’t you put it away?
Well that’s okay the first couple of times in a marriage but when you’ve been married for twenty years it kind of grates on the other person, do you think? And here’s the really crazy thing, I’m using myself as a bad example here, see no mans a total loss, you can always use him as a bad example.
When you decide you just have to say something about this thing that they left out of place you think to yourself, ‘I’m totally justified, this isn’t some irrelevant quarrel without any cause, it’s justified because she didn’t put the knife back in the drawer.
How often in your life have you had a stupid quarrel like that without cause and it turns into a full-blown fight? That’s no better than the young kid when I was at school who stalked me for a fight when I was thirteen years old. Was any harm done? No. So there was really no cause was there? Listen to God’s advice again, God’s truth, God’s powerful truth.
Do not quarrel with anyone without cause, when no harm has been done to you.
Imagine you have one of those stupid ridiculous arguments and then your wife heads out the door to pick up one of the children from school and she’s in a car accident and she dies. Now that really puts the stupidity of the argument into perspective doesn’t it?
If we each were to count the number of times we open our mouths to say something that we know is going to inflame the situation in response to something that really, really didn’t cause a problem at all, we might be surprised how often we do that.
Is it a blessing to others when we live our lives proactively picking a fight? No, but it seems we still can’t help ourselves. Did you miss it? Here it is again just in case it didn’t sink in the first few times.
Do not quarrel with anyone without cause, when no harm has been done to you.
And let me say even when there is a valid cause, even when someone does do something that hurts, even then it’s much often easier not to say anything. It takes great wisdom and maturity and strength not to say anything when someone’s wronged us.
I’ve decided I want to be more of a blessing to my wife than a burden so these days, although some days I still struggle I admit, these days I try to keep my mouth shut. There’s another Proverb that I love when it comes to stirring up strife, Proverbs chapter 10, verse 12:
Hatred stirs up strife but love covers all offences.
Love covers a multitude of sins. Sometimes I can be an ass, sometimes I get things wrong but when instead of people arguing with me and criticise me they cut me some slack. They gently guide me and encourage me in the right direction. Hey, those people are a blessing to me and it strikes me, you know what I can do that, I could be a blessing to other people in the same way.
And while I think of it that’s precisely the heart of the true blessing of that grizzly cross that Jesus was nailed to. To get him crucified the religious lynch mob had to shop around to find someone to convict Him. Under Roman rule you couldn’t just go and kill someone, that would be murder.
No some court had to convict Him so the Pharisee’s shopped around which is why Jesus was tried seven times between when He was arrested and when He was crucified. What defence did Jesus offer for Himself? How did He justify and defend Himself? Have a listen, Matthew chapter 27, verses 11 to 13:
Jesus stood before the governor. The governor said, ‘are you the king of the Jews?’ And Jesus said, ‘well you say so’. But when he was accused by the Chief Priests and the elders he didn’t answer. Then Pilate said to him, ‘do you not hear how many accusations they’re making against you?’ But Jesus gave no answer, not even to a single charge so that the governor was greatly amazed.
In this case Jesus was in the right and this wasn’t a trivial thing His life was a stake here. It was either a pardon or a crucifixion. He chose not to defend Himself. He chose not to justify Himself, not to demonstrate as He well could have that He was in the right. Jesus chose to be a blessing and not to quarrel even though He had a great cause and even though the loss was going to cost Him His life.
My friend it’s that example that He’s calling us to follow as we willingly submit our lives to Him. He’s not asking us to do something He wouldn’t do, remember He’s been there and He is a blessing to you and to me.
Anticipation If each one of us in our family or our community or our country was just a little bit more of a blessing to others than we are today, imagine what a different world we’d be living in. It completely boggles the mind. So that’s what this series is all about and today we’re chatting about some of the things that we can do to be a blessing.
And one of the things that we can do is to have hope in our heart. I had a quick look at hope in my dictionary and it defines hope as a feeling or expectation for a particular thing to happen. Now I guess by definition that thing that we’re hoping for is a good thing, none of us hopes for bad things, we’re always hoping for a good thing to happen. That this will get better, that that will get better. We hope it won’t rain tomorrow because it’s washing day.
If we run into someone who’s hopeful about tomorrow by and large those people are great people to be around because their hope is infectious and let’s face it there are lots worse things that you can catch from someone else than their hope – expectation of good for tomorrow.
Now over these last few weeks we’ve been discovering how we can be more of a blessing through the Book in the Old Testament in the Bible called Proverbs, which, far from being a stuffy old irrelevant theological text, is this kind of living breathing vibrant collection of God’s wisdom that is intensely relevant to our lives here and now. So have a listen to this one, Proverbs chapter 12, verse 12. It says:
Hope deferred makes the heart sick but a desire fulfilled is a tree of life.
One of the scariest things that I’ve noticed about myself is that if I lose hope in a particular situation, if I give up on believing that something good is going to happen then what I do is I start behaving as though it won’t happen. And by behaving as though it won’t happen it pretty much becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. I go about thinking and saying and doing things that will stop the good thing that I’m hoping for from happening. I don’t do the things that I need to do to get that good thing to happen. So listen again to this Proverb very, very carefully.
Hope deferred makes the heart sick but a desire fulfilled is a tree of life.
The thing that makes your heart sick according to this Proverb is deferring hope. Another way of saying that is giving up hope. Of course not everything we hope for in life is going to happen. I remember once my daughter who’s a very gifted and skilled beauty therapist was really hoping for a particular job.
She submitted her application, her resume, she so wanted this job. They didn’t even call her back and yet a little while later she landed a much better job. Things don’t always work out the way we want them to but when we give up hope our heart becomes sick.
And let me tell you, a person gripped by hopelessness which is the opposite of hope, is a very sad and sick and sorry person indeed and that person simply is not going to be a blessing to others. On the other hand, the one who’s heart is filled with hope, someone who lives their lives, who thinks and says and does the things that demonstrates the hope that’s within them, that person is very much like a tree of life. It’s as though they give strength and hope and encouragement to the rest of us. Again, Proverbs chapter 23 and verse 18:
Surely there is a future and your hope will not be cut off.
Instead of imagining all the things that can go wrong and imagining they’re going to happen all at the same time, we can choose to hope in good, hope in the future, believe that good is just around the corner, that blessing is coming, the solution to our problems is coming, that everything is going to be okay.
Of course that’s easy for me to say in a nice clinical radio studio, it’s much harder to live out and to do when we’re confronted with some devastating news. There are so many times in my life when the things I’d hoped for didn’t in fact eventuate. In fact, sometimes when I was hoping things went from bad to worse. But I refused to give up hope in my life because when I defer my hope, when I set it aside my heart becomes sick. I’m no good to myself and I’m no good to anyone else.
Given a choice between hoping and not I’ll go with being filled with hope every time, it’s the only way to live life. It’s the only way to be a blessing to those around us and it’s the only way to make it through the dark days and we all have dark days in our lives.
A person filled with hope is an incredible blessing to those around them, really. Of course any talk of hope without talking about who or what we’re putting our hope in is futile. See if there’s no God then life is purely a series of coincidences and coincidence and chance is nothing to hope in.
For me, I don’t know how it is for you but for me hope only makes sense when it’s coupled with a thing called faith. The two go hand in hand. A psalmist once wrote, Psalm 39, verse 7:
And now O Lord for what do I wait for my hope is in you.
And that sums it up for me. My hope isn’t in a chance or in coincidence or how hard I can work or how clever I am, my hope is in God and that’s why I pray because when I do my trust in God grows. As the Apostle Paul wrote more than a thousand years after Solomon wrote all those Proverbs:
Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation and be constant in prayer. (Romans chapter 13, verse 12)
Isn’t that awesome? I’m able to rejoice in hope because my hope is in God and mark this, the word that Paul uses that sits aback of the English word hope doesn’t mean a chance kind of hope, it literally means a certain hope and that certain hope is what keeps my heart patient in tribulation and I know for a fact that it’s only through constant prayer, daily time quietly with God, that I lay hold of that rejoicing, that hope and that patience that God has for me.
And the truly awesome thing about all that is this, God is worthy of our trust and our hoping in Him, God is faithful, whatever He brings He’s faithful to look after us and to hold us close.
Great is your faithfulness Lord unto me. Morning by morning new mercies I see. All I have needed your hand has provided, great is your faithfulness Lord unto me.
That was written by a man who wrote Lamentations, it’s chapter 3 in the Old Testament, looking at the devastation over Israel when something bad happened and he had it right.
Great is your faithfulness Lord unto me.
God is worthy of our faith. Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer and my prayer for you is that you will put your faith, your complete trust in the God who loves you and cares for you and will protect you and guide you and lead you in a way that we can’t even begin to imagine.
