How Can I Make It Right?

How many times have you hurt someone's feelings?
You react selfishly to a comment. You make a sarcastic remark that cuts to the other’s heart. You don’t think before you speak and your words are insensitive and mean spirited. Now what?

Paul has much to say about feelings.

In I Corinthians 13 Paul talks about this.

"Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal."

Many people read this passage, especially around Valentine’s Day, and usually read past these first three verses to get to the “charity” verses. But let’s take a look at these. The first verse says, “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels”. In other words, even if I am fluent in multiple languages including those even of angels, so that my words are beautiful, fitting and heavenly, they fall on listening ears as a harsh, crashing horn sound, or a deciding non-musical beating of a pot or basin. Think of the sound that two stock pots banged together make.
So, the most heavenly words without true, love from the heart, are harsh, hurtful, and of no value.
Have you spoken words to those you say you love, and then immediately know that those words wounded your loved one? Of course you have, we all have. We are constantly fooled by the flesh. The flesh includes our mind, which God, through Jeremiah the prophet tells us about in Jeremiah 17 verse 9 and 10.

” The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? I the LORD search the heart, I try the reins, even to give every man according to his ways, and according to the fruit of his doings.”

So, what do we do. Paul provides the answer in later verses of chapter 13, as well as in letters to other churches. First let’s look at some of the other letters. In the letter to the Colossians in chapter 3 verse 13 we read:

”Forbearing one another, and forgiving one another, if any man have a quarrel against any: even as Christ forgave you, so also do ye.”

This might read better if we said, “bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other…” So the answer starts with forgiveness, from each side. Both the wronged party and the one commiting the wrong must forgive. None of us is without fault. We all, through outright words or through body language, selfish will and actions, or simple lack of understanding due to our fallen, sinful nature, fail to measure up to the standard of agape love. Therefore, each one must ask forgiveness and come back to each other with a spirit of humility, knowing we are but dust; fallible, sinful creatures bound to this earth by the chains of the flesh.
In another passage to the Corinthians, in his second letter, chapter 2 Paul speaks again about forgiveness for harsh words, even though in this case the words were needed, Paul realizes that because we are in this flesh, the words can cause pain and be taken as to hard.

”But I determined this with myself, that I would not come again to you in heaviness. For if I make you sorry, who is he then that maketh me glad, but the same which is made sorry by me? And I wrote this same unto you, lest, when I came, I should have sorrow from them of whom I ought to rejoice; having confidence in you all, that my joy is the joy of you all. For out of much affliction and anguish of heart I wrote unto you with many tears; not that ye should be grieved, but that ye might know the love which I have more abundantly unto you.”

Here Paul is referring to the hard words he had to speak to the Corinthians in another letter about their worldly lifestyle. He asks forgiveness that he even had to speak the words and hopes they will realize that the same ones who he admonishes are those that make his heart joyful.
Finally, back to I Corinthians 13 - Verses 4 to 7 say:

“Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.”

Here are all of the proper reactions to the words and actions of others. No matter how we “feel”, or how much pain is caused to our heart and spirit, if we truly have agape love, our reactions should always be a picture of verses 4 to 7.


Mark Tabor