The
Right Spirit
A
man’s spirit sustains him in sickness, but a crushed spirit who can bear? (Proverbs 18:14
NIV)
Of the many tasks a church
may have, certainly high up on the list is making certain none of its members
have a crushed spirit. There are
countless ways a spirit can be crushed but never should it be a Christian who
does it. Jesus rebuked and sometimes fiercely. His admonishment of Peter for insisting that
Jesus would not suffer death was astonishingly stern and yet we can tell it did
not crush Peter’s spirit nor was it intended to do so. When our pride is struck a blow, our
self-interest threatened or our greed throttled, viciously we go after the
spirit of another and with the force of a hammer come down upon it with all we
have. We must pierce our own sin with
the same tenacity of a surgeon going after infection but it is not ours to go
after the sins of another. We are too
prone to cut off the arm when we find a sliver in the hand which we would never
do about our own slivers. The tender generosity we have toward ourselves is not
what we show toward the sinners we have grown to dislike. We can tell just how far we have come by the
way we view the atrocities of family members with whom we have grown
weary. A husband or wife or parent or
sibling is our best barometer of real spiritual pluck. If we give in to the temptation to try and
batter the spirit of those closest to us for “making us” not like them, we know
just where we are. We have lost our
mooring and strayed far from the Spirit’s shore. It is hard to pray for one you dislike but it
is the beginning point for regaining the love of Christ and the happy Christian
life. Certainly, if you cannot pray for
the beast, then keep your mouth shut and stop being the beast. Give yourself a chance to be the one those
closest to you love to think about and find when they are with you gain renewed
strength to rise above the sickness that comes upon us all. 
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