Get Exercising Part 2

"Let all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamour and evil speaking be put away from you with all malice. And be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another even as God in Christ, forgave you."                                                                                                         Ephesians 4:31-32.  NKJV

Yesterday, we looked at exercising joy and love in order to be able to master these areas. They take time to get on top of and only thorough exercise will we achieve this. Today let us look at rudeness and how we may respond or react to this and whether or not, we are rude to people, ourselves.

Are you rude? Do a little self-evaluation and ask yourself, 'Am I rude to people?' Do you show disrespect to those you meet up with, including family? Are you intolerant with them? Does your patience run out with certain people and when you see them, do you feel like avoiding them because of this. This behaviour fits under the heading of rudeness. 

It takes exercise to be able to overcome this; again, it doesn't come easily. Jesus is never rude with us and boy, must we have tested His patience since we accepted Him as our Lord and Saviour. However, He is tolerant towards us and reacts in a royal manner. Thank goodness!

What about people who are rude and disrespectful to us? Do you react or do you respond? There is a difference here. To react, is to be on guard and ready for action. Someone says something bad to us or really winds us up and, if we're not careful we react in a volatile way.
Yet to respond is different. We are still reacting but it is done with self-control. We are in charge of the situation and thus, act accordingly.

Galatians 2:20 says:

"I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live but Christ lives in me; and the life that I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me."

In other words we have died to Christ. We have surrendered our life to Him in such a way that we live our lives through Him. We are dead and DEAD MEN DON'T REACT. Did you get that? DEAD MEN (OR WOMEN) DON'T REACT. We are dead to reaction, we only respond to things.

Now this is not easy. It takes practise but we do it by faith - we exercise this area until it becomes a natural thing to do. We're in training. We are still under construction and will be until we stand before Jesus. The Apostle Paul wrote: 'being confident of this very thing, that He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of of Jesus Christ.'  (Philippians 1:6). We are in training and God is going to get us there; but it will take exercise on our parts. We have to do our bit. If we don't exercise, we seize up.

We need to exercise ourselves until we are able to read situations better and respond accordingly. Take for instance s person who is incredibly shy and in company is almost introvert, hiding away in the crowd to avoid having to talk. We may class this as being rude but it is not the case, the person is struggling. We need to train ourselves to understand people and situations better. This however, will only come by spending time with our trainer - the Holy Spirit - and exercising our faith.

Copyright 2019 Grahame Howard

dailylifewithjesus@protonmail.com