The sermon we had at church yesterday was quite challenging. Once again, it was taken from the book of 1 Peter, chapter three, and the topic was forgiving others when they have treated you badly. Now this is not easy to do….our natural inclination is to hit back and to show the person a thing or two! But this is not the way that Peter is talking about here, and it certainly wasn’t the way that Jesus Christ taught His disciples to behave. If we treat bad behaviour with kindness, we never know what the end result will be. It reminded me of a true story I heard once…..
One time we visiting some folk in an area we hadn’t been to before, and they took us for a sightseeing drive around the place. As we drove along, our driver pointed out a house across the paddock. It was an old place, but he said it had once belonged to his uncle and aunt. They were Christian folk and went to church regularly, and their neighbours next door weren’t, and didn’t. The man neighbour was really nasty to them, just because he didn’t like Christians and had no use for this church going business. He would do all sorts of things to annoy them, like throwing mud and stones on their roof, and everything else he could think about, short of them having to get the police onto him.
The ladies of both these households were expecting a baby each about the same time, and eventually had them. The Christian family’s baby did very well, it had plenty of mother’s milk, and it grew happy and contented. But the nasty neighbour’s wife didn’t have much milk for her baby, and it was fretful and cried a lot, and didn’t grow at all. The parents were very worried, and of course in those days there was nothing they could buy that would suit a new born baby like mother’s milk. So in the end the worried father went to his Christian neighbour, and apologised for the way he had behaved, and asked if there was any chance of them being able to get some milk from the lady with the good baby.
The Christian man talked it over with his wife, and they came up with a plan. He went to his neighbour, and said, yes, his wife had enough milk to feed two babies, and that they would help them out on one condition. If the non-Christian family was prepared to come and live with them, they would feed the weak baby as well as their own. But they had to come and live in, and sit through morning and night Bible readings around the table. The neighbour was getting desperate by this time as his baby was always crying because it was hungry, and no-one was getting any rest. So they moved in with their neighbours, and the Christian lady fed both babies. The more the babies drank, the more milk she made. It wasn’t long before the sickly baby was looking nice and plump, and didn’t cry incessantly as it had before.
By this time, the non-Christian neighbour was getting used to the Bible readings each day, and in fact, he even began to get interested to see what was going to happen next when it came to the story parts. By the time the sickly baby was good enough to not need mother’s milk so much and able to drink cows milk, its father and mother had started to go to church regularly with the Christian couple. The man who had been so mean to his neighbour all those years before, was now a changed man, and became one of the staunchest men in the church. All because the Christian neighbour decided to not pay him back for what he had done to them. He was now able to have a good conscience before God, and the friendship of his neighbour who had tried to annoy him so much before!
We are never the losers for following the ways that God has set out in His Word, the Bible.