Lost Touch?

Everyone has people that they knew for a long time and have lost touch. We were close to know thier quirks, habits, likes and dislikes. We remember the good and bad times shared together. We were close to those people, but somehow, we just lost touch.

I wonder as Christ-Followers if we have lost touch with our “old-selves” or the person we were before Christ found us. I think it is critical to ”keep in touch”. You may wonder why we should want to remember our “old-selves”. Let me ask you a few questions:

Are you moved to compassion when you hear someone else’s struggles?

Do you feel empathy or disgust when someone shares a weakness you once posessed in your “old life”?

Is your first reaction when someone confesses a hidden sin to you that you are glad “you don’t have that problem”?

When someone asks you for help is the first thing you do is figure out how you can pawn it off on someone else?

Are you emotionally unavailable to those closest to you?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you have lost touch.

What you have gone through, where you have failed, the pain you suffered, the wounds you have received, the wounds you are still healing from, are not a thing of just the past.

God allowed you and I to experience these things for a purpose. Not as things we need to forget, or hide, or as a self-righteous “before and after” picture. Just as we are healed by the wounds Christ bore upon His body, so our wounds are ordained for the healing of others. Our failures should help keep us and others from slipping into self-righteousness. The pain we suffered should move us to compassion to show the love and mercy of Christ. They were not meant to be discarded or concealed.

We are broken people who have been drawn to the arms of love, healing, and mercy. We have the ability, with one decision, to wreck our whole lives! We are not so righteous that we can forget that we have an old nature that is at constant war the nature of Christ that compels us to sin?

We can hide our weaknesses, we can cover our wounds with religion. We can cover those things with a number of things that may seem good, admirable, even righteous, but in doing so, we cut off those things that drove us into His arms to begin with and into the bed of self-righteousness and cold dead religion.