Dear Friends,

I have a tongue-in-cheek saying that I sometimes said when one of my kids used to ask me how my day had been.  I would quip, “It was great, except for the people!”  For those of you who know me, you know that, while I value and enjoy relationships, God made me to be an introvert; often the “people problems” that life presents feel especially heavy to me. However God made all of us for relationship – with Him and with others.  When He created us in His Own image, He made us to be relational, just as He is in relationship within the Trinity. 

 

Our key relationship is our relationship with the Lord.  As the story of the Gibeonites in Joshua 9 reveals, we need to continually seek God’s wisdom – not only to know His will, but also to discern what might be hidden our relationships.  The Israelites knew that God’s will was for them to completely destroy the inhabitants of the Promised Land.  However, they also needed the God’s discernment in order to know that the Gibeonites were being deceptive in their manner and dress in order to avoid God’s judgment on them.  The Israelite leaders were not negligent in following God’s will, but they were negligent in seeking His counsel in their relationship with these new people, the Gibeonites, and so they ended up in a position of compromise. If the leaders of Israel had been more relationally in tune with God, they would have had better discernment and judgment in their human relationships.

The second relational aspect of the story reveals the importance of trust within a human relationship.  Keeping our word in an agreement is related to taking responsibility for our actions, even when those actions have unintended consequences.  I recently read an article by Dr. Ken Boa in which he pointed out that, during the fall, Adam’s actions were driven by his unwillingness to take responsibility for what had happened. (Genesis 3:12) When we don’t bear the weight of our word in a human relationship, we open the door to sin, mistrust, and a ripple effect of consequences in our lives.  May we be men and women who imitate God as covenant-keeper by keeping our word in our relationships!

I pray that the Lord uses the people in your life today to cause you to turn to Him for counsel and to strengthen your heart as you keep your word.

Blessings,

Ron