I'm Not Sorry For Hurting Your Feelings

Suggested Reading: 2 Corinthians 7:8-13

We don't watch it as much anymore, but once upon a time, my wife and I loved to watch American Idol.  For me, though, the first few weeks of auditions were almost painful to watch. Sure, all of the people who actually made it to Hollywood came through the auditions, but there were also plenty of people who simply could not sing if their life depended on it. These horrible singers would come before the judges and wail something unintelligible and unrecognizable and then the judges would have to tell them that they simply weren't cut out for music. Part of the reason it was painful for me to watch, though, was that many of these people honestly thought they were excellent singers. Some of these singers were simply deluded. Others, however, thought they could sing because people all around them continually told them that they were good. People who meant well, who didn't want to hurt their feelings, who didn't want them to be embarrassed...who allowed them to go before a national television audience to discover the truth.  I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm all about following your dreams. But if I am going to go make a fool of myself on national television, I would rather people hurt my feelings a little by telling me the truth before I embarrass myself in front of, literally,  the whole world.

In 2 Corinthians, Paul discussed an instance where he hurt the Corinthians' feelings. He had written something to them that made them sad, that hurt their feelings, but that needed to be said. In 2 Corinthians 7:8-9, Paul wrote, "Even if I caused you sorrow by my letter, I do not regret it. Though I did regret it-- I see that my letter hurt you, but only for a little while--yet now I am happy, not because you were made sorry, but because your sorrow led you to repentance. For you became sorrowful as God intended, and so were not harmed in any way by us" (NIV). The Corinthians had been engaging in some kind of sinful activity, and Paul had addressed it. His correspondence had made them sad and hurt their feelings, but their feelings had needed hurting, at least enough to get them to change their ways.

We live in a world where, not only do we never ever want to hurt anybody's feelings, but we never want anybody to hurt our feelings. We expect people to only tell us things that make us feel good about ourselves. And in the process, when all we ever hear is how good we are, we end up hurting ourselves far more than the truth ever would have. Sometimes, we need people to hurt our feelings, not because hurting our feelings is good, but because we need to hear the truth and hurting our feelings is unavoidable. We never like to hear that we are wrong. We never like to hear that our behavior or our attitude has been less than perfect. But sometimes, those painful words are exactly what we need.

The author of Proverbs said it this way: "Wounds from a friend can be trusted, but an enemy multiplies kisses" (Proverbs 27:6, NIV). Sometimes, people can be cruel. But, sometimes, they are just trying to tell us the truth and the truth ends up hurting. Sometimes, we need someone to hurt our feelings so we don't make fools of ourselves on national television or, worse, get ourselves into real trouble.

When people hurt our feelings, do we immediately brush aside what they have to say because we don't like it? Or do we examine what they had to say to see if we needed to hear it? Sometimes, people are just mean. But sometimes, hurting our feelings is the best thing a friend can do for us. 

Waiting on the Urim and the Thumim

Suggested Reading: Ezra 2:1,55-63, or Ezra 2:1-63

So, I was reading through one of those passages. You know, one of those passages where the entire chapter (or entire group of chapters) is a list of names. "So and so begat so and so" or "The leaders of the people were So On and So Forth and So Good and So Keep Going." The kind of passage where you are tempted to skip it and instead sit back and start moving through the list hoping something worthwhile jumps out at you but knowing you are likely to be too bored to see it if it does. Please tell me I'm not alone on those passages.

Anyway, the passage I was reading was from Ezra and it was an account of all of the Israelites that King Cyrus sent back from captivity so that they could rebuild the house of God. In this passage, the priests encounter an interesting problem. Some of the returning priests could not find documentation that they actually belonged to the family of priests, and so "The governor ordered them not to eat the most holy things until there was a priest who could consult the Urim and the Thumim." (Ezra 2:63 HCSB)

The Urim and the Thumim were a way that God had given the Israelites to ask God yes/no questions. They were, most likely, a pair of stones which were both black on one side and white on the other, and the priest would ask God the question and drop or toss the stones. If they both came up one color the answer was "yes," if they both came up the other color, the answer was "no," and if they came up mixed it was God's way of saying that He wasn't going to answer the question. We think. (Most of that is educated speculation). But the Urim and Thumim aren't really important in this passage.  What is important is that these priests had to wait to eat from the sacrificial food until God could be consulted to confirm their status as priests.

See, we live in a world where we never want to hurt anyone's feelings and we go out of our way to include everyone in everything. But God had set up the priesthood as something different, as something holy, as something that was supposed to be set apart. Not just anyone could be a priest. A priest could only be a Levite and he could only be a Levite from a particular lineage. For someone outside the tribe or outside that lineage to serve as a priest would invalidate and defile the sacrifices being brought. The people who returned to Jerusalem from their time in exile were not taking any chances that they could lose the blessing of God in their lives because of uncertainty about whether these people should actually be serving as priests. They wanted to make certain that their acts of worship were absolutely pure.

The ethic of these returning peoples stands in stark contrast to our worship ethic today. How often is our worship less than pure because we don't want to take the time to do things right? How often do we miss out on the blessing of God because we don't make sure that what we offer is what God actually wants from us? How often do we treat the worship of God as less than an act of pure and holy devotion because of our impatience? We skimp on prayer time because we could be off doing other things. We stop paying attention in church because the hands on the clock are ticking past noon. We skip over having a time of worship on Christmas day in order to gratify our desire to open presents as quickly as possible. We miss out on entire chapters during our quiet time because we are too busy thinking about all we have to do, and our eyes skim over the words of scripture without ever absorbing them.

Today, let's make sure that we take the worship of a holy God seriously enough to get things right. Let's not do things the wrong way just because we are afraid someone might be offended. Let's not rush through things we should pray through thoroughly just because it is more convenient. Like those returning to Jerusalem, let's do things the right way, no matter how inconvenient or how great the risk is to our feelings.