Love Like a Champion

We certainly need to use discernment in our relationships and encounters with people. But it’s supposed to be a partner with wisdom, not with punishment. The cost of seeing people outside God’s grace to condemn them is high. It forces you to install perception filters of self–pity, bitterness, and self–righteousness, so you can view others with enough hate and fear to justify destroying them.

Those filters are powerful, and cloud not just how you see one person, but everyone else, including yourself. When you look in the mirror, that darkness obscures who you really are in Christ, and all you can see is the negative. In that joyless, exhausting, hopeless world, you often end up doing your own version of the same things which you condemned in someone else’s life.

I don’t believe God intends for us to judge the failures of someone’s life, but what’s missing from it. He’s given us the ability to see someone for who they really are, and recognize what’s missing from their relationship with God. It’s not so we can feel superior to them, and separate ourselves from their sin, but so we can intelligently pray, and intentionally bless. When God said he’s looking for someone to stand in the gap, that includes speaking life into the empty space between who someone is right now, and who he or she is capable of becoming in Christ.

If you’ve been struggling to stop seeing everyone and everything negatively, start by speaking life over yourself. Recognize all the blessings in your life, and let those displace any negatives you’ve been labeled with. Listen for what God is saying he wants to be for you today, and agree with what he says about you. Rather than filling the gaps in your life with anxiety, self-condemnation, or blaming others, let his love for you and enthusiasm for what’s possible overflow every space.

The word for “champion” in Hebrew is “benayim.” It means, “one who stands in the gap between armies.” Jesus is the ultimate champion, but he loves to invite us onto the field to fight alongside him, setting people free from the lies that have bound them, and making the enemy run in terror. Love like a champion today.