Dysfunctional Dependability
Revelation 3:15-19 Amplified Bible (AMP)
15 I know your [record of] works and what you are doing; you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were cold or hot! 16 So, because you are lukewarm and neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of My mouth! 17 For you say, I am rich; I have prospered and grown wealthy, and I am in need of nothing; and you do not realize and understand that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. 18 Therefore I counsel you to purchase from Me gold refined and tested by fire, that you may be [truly] wealthy, and white clothes to clothe you and to keep the shame of your nudity from being seen, and salve to put on your eyes, that you may see. 19 Those whom I [dearly and tenderly] love, I tell their faults and convict and convince and reprove and chasten [I discipline and instruct them]. So be enthusiastic and in earnest and burning with zeal and repent [changing your mind and attitude].
I received a phone call from one of my best friends yesterday. I missed the call but made it my business to call her back. She recently moved away and we don’t talk as much as I would like because we are in two different time zones and our schedules often conflict. But as soon as I heard her voice I wanted to cry, it gave me a sense of warmth and dependability that I have always shared with her. As we talked and our conversation turned to reminiscing about how we meet and the evolution of our friendship; we laughed as she reminded me that when we first met she was not a Christian and I was and anytime I brought up, being celibate, church, tithing or anything concerning holiness, she didn’t want to hear it, but as she also reminded me she kept coming back to me, and talking to me, seeking me out. I laughed, and remembered the same. I was not dysfunctional in my dependability because she rejected my words but I still was there each time she came to talk. I knew what I believed and I was not backing down to gain a friend or to make her feel better about what I knew the Word of God encouraged us to do and not to do. She respected that about me and the prayers and consistency was what won her to Christ.
Many of us are a like Peter we are with the Savior as long as things aren’t tough and we are well accepted and the miracles are going on, but when we are faced with having to stand in our conviction and not bend, or fall apart, we deny we even know him, or we compromise our behaviors and conversation to be accepted and well liked. God wants to be able to depend upon us and He can’t because we haven’t chosen a side, or some of us have chosen the “softer side” to only profess or live as God wants us to when it seems acceptable in people’s sight. There are others of us that want the gospel to suit what we want to do. We manipulate it so it is okay to say and do certain things because after all we are only human, or God understands. We cut people off because they act out of the realm of our comfortability if they hold us accountable for the things we say and how we act. We blame hormones, bad days, and people working our nerves, and any other excuse, to step out of holiness and into compromise, or exhibit unfaithfulness and dysfunctional dependability towards God.
God wants to be able to depend on us in season and out of season; on days of sunshine and rain, when we have full understanding and when we don’t, when people accept Him in and through us and when they don’t. Is your dependability something that God needs to be concerned about or is it steadfast unmovable ever abounding in the work and purpose that God has placed upon your life? We all have dysfunction in our lives, this may be true, but it should never be an excuse to continue to be unstable, wishy washy and neither hot or cold with God and about who He is in our life. Don’t allow your dependability to be dysfunctional, Can God really count on you, He wants to know?
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