Throwing the baby out with the bath water. What does this mean? It means that for example if you had a friend for 20-years and they did you wrong one time, that you decided to give up on the relationship. I know just writing this sets off all kinds of, “Jesus would never do this” alarms. But we do, and we do it quick and often. We also apply a liberal level of subjection when we do this so as to justify our position. Perhaps the friendship is unprofitable so in your thinking you don’t consider it a great loss to break it off. Maybe the infraction was soooo big that you feel that there is no way to restore the friendship. Perhaps it involved a great deal of theft, or cheating with your wife or husband, or even the death of one of your children. Now I know I am probably leaving out some of your justifications for ending the relationship, but these are pretty serious. Now I will come up a bit, before diving back to the bottom. What if it is not a friend or personal relationship? What if it has to do with another Christian who is an Apostle, Prophet, Evangelist, Pastor or Teacher? I say this because these are positions of authority, and we judge people in positions of authority with a different size ruler than we judge ourselves or others, not in a position of threat or bossing me around, or, oh I see, these are the reasons for thinking this way and not the reasons why I should think this way. Should we not at least consider that authority was given to us by Jesus, and not everyone has the same level of authority when dealing with the human condition, however and for the sake of argument, we all have authority over the demonic and natural world? Well if unforgiveness is your weapon of reason for not allowing those in positions of authority to influence your life then let us remember the story of Peter and John...
